Why South African billionaire Rob Hersov wants the ANC out of power

Rob Hersov, the South African investor who has spent four years campaigning against the African National Congress, has built his public profile around a set of ideas for how the country should be run, and he has kept pressing them this year in open letters, speeches and interviews.

In August, he told an investment conference that South Africa had become uninvestable because of its illicit economy, organized crime and hijacked buildings, even as he said he was backing three new ventures at home: a project on the West Coast, a development in the Cape Town area and a young entrepreneur building what would be the country's first prediction market. In January and again on June 14, he wrote open letters to Mineral and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe accusing the government of squandering the country's mineral wealth.

These are the eight ideas behind his campaign to remove the ANC from power.

1. Entrepreneurs, not politicians, will rebuild the economy

Hersov's central argument is that South Africa's recovery will come from business owners, engineers and investors rather than from government. He says the state has shown it cannot run what it owns and should get out of the way. "The scenario is that the government doesn't know how to run state-owned enterprises," he said in 2022.

He wants a smaller state with fewer rules and less intervention, and he has urged business owners to stop waiting for the government and to pay for solutions themselves where they must, from security to local infrastructure. He told a business audience in Durbanville, outside Cape Town, ahead of the 2024 national election that companies should give money to opposition parties instead of spending it on schools and roads the state had failed to fix.

2. Sell state assets to private operators

Hersov has argued that the government should sell infrastructure it cannot manage. In September 2022, he said he would offer R2 billion ($120 million) to buy six regional airports from the state. "If these are strategic assets, then the government should sell them as quickly as possible," he said. "The safest place for them is in the hands of private operators like us." The government did not sell.

He is now testing the idea with his own money. In 2020 he bought Fisantekraal, a former military airfield on the northern edge of Cape Town, and renamed it Cape Winelands Airport, with plans to make it a second hub for the city. Growthpoint Properties Ltd., the country's largest real estate investment trust, joined as a partner in October 2025, and construction company WBHO was named main contractor that December. The city approved the site's rezoning in June, and the national government has given it status as a strategic infrastructure project. The first phase, including a 3.5-kilometer runway, is estimated to cost about R8 billion ($482 million), and the airport is scheduled to open in early 2028.

3. Scrap Black Economic Empowerment and expropriation

Hersov wants South Africa's Black Economic Empowerment rules and plans for expropriation of land without compensation abolished. He argues that they scare off investors and act as a tax on doing business. "Repeal BBEE. It's a massive tariff," he said in a 2025 interview. In 2021 he said, "Black empowerment is theft. Expropriation without compensation is theft."

Supporters of the policies say they are needed to correct the economic exclusion of Black South Africans under apartheid, and the government has defended them as central to its transformation agenda.

4. Unite the opposition and remove the ANC

Hersov became a political figure in 2022, when a speech at an investment conference in which he told the ANC, in Afrikaans slang, to get lost spread widely on social media. He has called the party "composed of gangsters" and said that year that President Cyril Ramaphosa "is a disgrace" and "should resign immediately."

His answer has been a "coalition of the good," in which pro-business opposition parties work together to defeat the ANC. He has been openly supportive of the Democratic Alliance. "Our best chance in the next election is if the DA can get 51% of the votes," he told the Durbanville audience. He has said he gave money to the DA, ActionSA, lobby group AfriForum and the Institute of Race Relations. ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba said in 2022 that the only money his party received from Hersov was a R20,000 fee for a webinar appearance.

The ANC lost its majority in the May 2024 election for the first time since 1994 and now governs in a coalition with the DA and other parties. Hersov has continued to call for the ANC's removal and has pointed to the coming municipal elections as a possible turning point.

5. Bring the missing voters to the polls

Hersov argues that the ANC's opponents can win if they reach people who have stopped voting. "In 2019 a total of 18,7 million people who were registered, did not vote," he said. He proposed a referral-style network to sign up and mobilize voters between the ages of 18 and 28, the group he regards as most likely to back change.

6. Stop wasting the critical minerals boom

In his letters to Mantashe this year, Hersov said South Africa was missing its chance to profit from global demand for platinum group metals, manganese, chrome, vanadium and cobalt. In the June letter, he said exploration investment had collapsed, that new mines were not being built and that jobs were being lost across the Northern Cape, North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. He blamed policy uncertainty, slow licensing and empowerment rules for driving mining capital to other African countries.

Mantashe has said the sector's structural problems predate his time in office and that the government is modernizing the regulatory system.

7. Stay, invest and bring the diaspora home

Hersov has urged wealthy South Africans not to emigrate. "I am privileged and can go live wherever I want, but I am not leaving this country," he has said. He has argued that "a reverse diaspora to South Africa would take the country to the next level," and he moved back to Cape Town with his family about a decade ago after more than 30 years in the UK. He has called that decision "insane," but has also said, "You cannot live as well as I live in Cape Town anywhere else in the world."

8. Use American pressure and new technology

Since early 2025, Hersov has aligned himself with US President Donald Trump's tough stance on Pretoria. He backed Washington's cuts to aid to South Africa in April 2025, called for further sanctions on the ANC and urged the US to work with the DA-run Western Cape province instead of the national government. He described Trump's Oval Office meeting with Ramaphosa in May 2025 as "genius theater" and said, "I'm as MAGA as you can get as a South African."

He also wants South Africans to build outside the state's reach using new technology and media. He is a shareholder in Africa Bitcoin Corp., a Johannesburg-listed company that holds bitcoin as its main reserve asset, with a stake of 6.16% as of February. He co-founded NewSouthAfrica.org, a blockchain initiative aimed at infrastructure and governance problems, and in 2025 launched The Truth Report, a news venture, saying he wanted to build a South African media platform modeled on The Daily Wire, the US conservative outlet.

How he made his money

Hersov, 66, was born in Johannesburg into one of the families that built South Africa's mining industry. His grandfather, Bob Hersov, co-founded Anglovaal with the Menell family, and his father, Basil Hersov, led the group from 1973 until the family sold its controlling interest in the late 1990s. "I was born lucky into a family owing the richest of companies," he has said.

He studied business science at the University of Cape Town and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1989, then worked at Goldman Sachs and for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. In the UK, he founded Marquis Jet Europe in 1998, which sold prepaid hours on private jets, and sold it in 2004 to NetJets, the fractional-jet company owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. He has advised the chairman of private aviation group VistaJet since 2009, founded Invest Africa, a London network that links investors with African businesses, in 2013, and chairs African Capital Investments and the family office Alternative Capital. In 2021 he became chairman of African Gold Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company that raised $360 million in New York to invest in gold mining.

His approach has made him enemies. Mantashe rebuked him in 2022 after Hersov called government ministers "corrupt clowns," pointing to his failed bid for the regional airports and challenging him to work with the state instead of attacking it. Critics have also accused him of speaking for a wealthy minority, and comments he made on race and history on a podcast in 2025 drew a backlash.

Figures were converted at R16.6 to the dollar.