When you’re caught up in the middle of an election battle, it’s easy to lose sight of what the international media think of our political squabbles.

Our battle for control is something of a three-way; Jacob, Julius and Mmusi the central figures. We’ve seen the first two covered quite extensively in the international media, but I haven’t seen much on Maimane.

TIME sat down with the man for an in-depth interview, but we’ll set the scene with this jarring indictment of our current political mess:

More than anything, though, Maimane laments the decline of a party that was once the pride of Africa, and which has now become its laughingstock. In December, President Jacob Zuma went through three finance ministers in a week, precipitating a dive in the already hurting South African rand. Once the biggest economy in Africa, South Africa slipped to third place behind Nigeria and Egypt.

In February, Zuma’s colleagues accused him of allowing a wealthy Indian family to influence cabinet appointments in exchange for business concessions. In April, the Constitutional Court ruled that Zuma had broken state law by ignoring an order to repay some $16 million in taxpayer monies he spent on refurbishing his private residence. Despite Zuma’s call for government austerity measures to cope with the weak economy, a security official revealed in May that the President had spent more than half a million dollars of government funds to buy official vehicles for his four wives.

“The ANC is no longer the party of Mandela,” says Maimane. “This is a party that’s changed fundamentally in its core, in its fight for human rights, in its advancement of black South Africans’ lives, in building an equal society. The more I see, the more I realize [sic] that the ANC governs as though black lives don’t matter.”

That’s quite a hit list, and you really should read that TIME article in full HERE.

For now here’s the video they put together:

[source:time]