Such is the general exhaustion across the country that it seems difficult to imagine that things will get better for South Africa in 2026. I am not as pessimistic in this particular case as I am in general. What seems clear, at least to me, is that some politicians, strengthened by a dedicated intellectual infrastructure, may not want things to get better because they want to be the ones who take credit for anything good about South Africa.
I am obliged to say that that is an opinion and not a verifiable fact that can be checked, and double- and triple-checked. I am also obliged to say that reference to “the intellectual infrastructure” is not novel or even vaguely outlandish. These are institutions and individuals who serve a specific purpose, whether it is the Catholic church or imperial powers.
And anyway, if we have learnt anything from Donald Trump’s handling of Republican lawmakers in the US, they will block anything if they cannot benefit from its passage. Paraphrasing Kamala Harris on Trump, they would rather weaponise an issue than see it resolved. See also here.
In short, opposition politicians hope that things do not improve, if only to confirm all their biases and prejudices. Is the purpose of politics not, then, to secure the failure of enemies and to subordinate and dominate them? In this process, the intellectual infrastructure can be likened to the scaffolding for a “system of fortresses and earthworks”.
As we enter this new year, there is probably no battle that is more retrogressive than the battle against black economic empowerment/affirmative action.
Opposition to black economic empowerment and affirmative action is gaining strength, mainly because of recently acquired senses of persecution; being held accountable is not reverse racism or injustice! We cannot allow accountability to fall by the wayside, as the late archbishop Desmond Tutu reminded us. That applies not just to Africans behaving badly, but also European colonists and settler colonists.
Trump’s power, Musk’s money and the liberal intellectual infrastructure
Over the past several months, and going into the new year, South Africa has been caught in the twin headlights of Trump’s return to “the most powerful office in the world” and the rise of Elon Musk, “the world’s richest man”. Both represent opposition to “DEI” or affirmative action, a position shared mainly by the Democratic Alliance, the Freedom Front Plus (what I refer to as the Old Volksraad Club of the apartheid era) and is reflected in the ideas that emanate from the liberal intellectual infrastructure.
As part of his job, Cyril Ramaphosa is almost bound to be accommodating of Musk and Trump. It’s remarkable what you can achieve with loads of money. As head of the ANC, Ramaphosa has very few credible political leaders in his camp. It does not help that former politicians and state officials who benefited from elite privilege after 1994 have pulled up the ladder, fallen in line with institutions on the Washington-Wall Street Axis, and cannot imagine a different world.
The liberal intellectual infrastructure, which has almost always been loyal to Western politics, state, culture and society, with the Trump-Musk force now driving them, will try to force the abandonment of affirmative action policies – policies which are desperately in need of tweaking, not rejection.
We will never convince everyone that, as GroundUp reported (using official statistics), “white people are doing very well in democratic South Africa. By nearly any measure of wealth and educational attainment, whites are doing better than any of the other apartheid-defined racial groups”.
Most white people (settlers who first arrived in 1652, stayed and accumulated various forms of capital; political, social, cultural, symbolic and economic in what is now vertically segmented privilege) raise spurious claims of “reverse racism”, and to them, accountability is cruelty and injustice.
Especially odious is that elite which is now embedded in the Wall Street-Washington Axis. They are terribly superficial and dishonest in the analysis they present.
Take the case of a professor who, early in December, argued that BEE had to be abandoned. This was built on a rather perversely structured, ahistorical and myopic argument that South Africa had to emulate the “Asian Tigers” because, you know, liberal capitalism is just so damn good.
Singapore and South Korea are the two stand-out examples always offered as evidence of the achievements of the “Asian tigers”.
The evidence is clear that these two countries have gone through more than four decades of dictatorships, military and civilian, distinctly undemocratic repression of workers and the media, and have been propped up by US military and intelligence.
To curry favour with Washington and gain economic opportunities, South Korea joined the US war against the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s. In South Korea, the state had ties to “families” that were thoroughly corrupt. See here.
Between 1960 and 1990, South Korea had several military coups, with periods of martial law. Park Chung-hee (1961-79) is considered to have been an economically successful dictator during an era marked by the centralisation of power, political assassinations, coups and military regimes, imposed constitutional regimes, legislatures that merely “rubber-stamped” policies, and authoritarianism. This was not democracy, and it was not liberal.
Singapore was, similarly, an undemocratic state that began (during the British era) with the erasure of the native cultural landscape and heritage on the island (retaining colonial practices), and elevated Stamford Raffles, the archetype of the British empire, to “father of the nation” status. Imagine elevating Cecil John Rhodes or Jan van Riebeeck to “father of the nation” status and erecting statues of them, and imagining there were no people in southern Africa before the white man came.
Singapore has effectively, and always, been a single-party state with an awful human rights record.
I have followed the Singapore story from the age of 10. (Really!) I have visited the place more than 10 times over 35 years. We have, also, studied these states quite seriously over decades. See the book, Pathways from the Periphery, by Stephen Haggard, published in 1990. I think I have a smidgen of insight.
The state in Singapore (still) directs the narrative of the main media, the Straits Times, in particular, and has responded quite harshly to any criticism through strict control of the media. The government of Singapore decided on how free or open the media and society ought to be. See here, here and here.
What is desperately disappointing, though unsurprising given the role played by intellectuals embedded in liberalism’s intellectual infrastructure, is that a professor would gloss over the illiberalism, lack of democracy, martial law, authoritarian and military dictatorships, just because there was money to be made.
This has echoes of Trumpian capitalist fascism, and of the unique dictatorships of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Park in South Korea. It is summed up in the pithy statement: “Get rid of democracy and impose upon society the market regime”. For a useful general discussion, see Paul Samuelson’s remarks on illiberal capitalist, authoritarian and militarist development.
What is unfortunate is that the good professor (an old friend, as it goes) chose to ignore the vast literature on the illiberalism and undemocratic orders that undergirded “growth” in countries like South Korea and Singapore. Actually, ironically, to the professor and fellow travellers, in both countries “affirmative action” was directed at well-connected Koreans (who had close ties to political leaders), and towards Lee Kuan Yew’s closest friends and family, who became wealthy by holding a steely grip on society, and deciding who might benefit and who should be shut up.
It’s easy to be seduced by the presence of skyscrapers of financial institutions, hotels and tourist traps, and ignore the cruelty and injustices upon which it all was built. South Africa can, indeed, learn from the Asian Tigers, but the most important lesson from the region, which we learnt from the World Bank, of all places, is that the state has a vital role to play. The liberal understanding is as superficial as its insistence upon empiricism and historicity – and that most odious belief that there is a single source of knowledge, and everyone who does not buy into it is necessarily wrong, or worse… DM