A Manifesto For Social Change is the third of a three-volume series that started seven years ago investigating the causes of our country’s – and the continent’s – development obstacles.

Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (2009) set out to explain what role African elites played in creating and promoting their fellow Africans’ misery. Advocates for Change: How to Overcome Africa’s Challenges (2011) set out to show that there were short-term to medium-term solutions to many of Africa’s and South Africa’s problems, from agriculture to healthcare, if only the powers that be would take note. And now, more than 20 years after the advent of democracy, we have A Manifesto For Social Change: How To Save South Africa, the conclusion in the ‘trilogy’.

This book started its life as Gridlocked, but through the process of research undertaken by Moeletsi and Nobantu it has evolved into a different project, a manifesto that identifies some of South Africa’s key problems and what is required to change the country’s downward trajectory.

In his candid, insightful bestseller, Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing, Moeletsi Mbeki examined why Africans comprise the majority of the world's bottom billion, illustrating concisely how Africa's political elite are to blame. In Advocates for change: How to overcome Africa's challenges, Mbeki brings together experts from across the continent who believe there are solutions to Africa’s challenges in the broad areas of political stability, economic progress as well as social development. This accessible and highly informative collection showcases fields as diverse as agriculture, education, entrepreneurship, politics, reindustrialisation and beyond to reveal in thought-provoking chapters how Africa can once more be set on the road to development.

Of an estimated 1 billion people in the world who are trapped in a cycle of grinding poverty and despair, a disproportionate number live in sub-Saharan Africa. In this account, Moeletsi Mbeki analyses the plight of Africa and concludes that the fault lies not with the mass of its people but with its rulers - the political elites who contrive to keep their fellow citizens poor while enriching themselves.

Concentrating mainly on South Africa, his country of birth, and Zimbabwe, his home when he was in exile, Mbeki tells a tale of lost opportunities and extinguished hopes. Yet Mbeki is no Afro-pessimist. Along with his candid expose of the problems, he poses some suggestions about what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development.