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. 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.
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See alsohere. 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. 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. We will never convince everyone that, asGroundUp reported(using official statistics), “white people are doing very well in democratic South Africa. Most white people (settlers who first arrived in 1652, stayed andaccumulated 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.
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