South Africa had become a "vampire State" under the African National Congress (ANC), Western Cape Premier Helen Zille said on Tuesday.

"We have granted a parasitic elite freedom to loot, and freedom from accountability," she said in a Freedom Day debate in the provincial legislature.

Zille, who also leads the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), said that it was crucial for the rest of the country that the Western Cape, under DA control, succeeded in building an open opportunity society.

"We need to establish a living example of our constitution in action for our country as a whole," she said.

"This is all the more urgent as the governing kleptocracies in the rest of the country undermine the letter and spirit of our constitution even as they claim to uphold it."

In a closed, crony society, freedom was limited to a small but powerful elite, which defined that freedom as its capacity to abuse power in its own interests.

This played itself out every day, as elite groups in the ANC slugged it out with each other for access to government tenders.

Zille said that the constitution gave South Africans the power to change this through the ballot.

If they consistently returned to power an elite kleptocracy, then they should be honest and admit it was them, the voters, who were failing the Constitution, and not the other way around.

"If we want the constitution to protect us, we have to protect the constitution.

"And we do that by using our vote to remove from power those who abuse power."