Long read | The elite’s 12-year plan to merge the DA and ANC, and how it went wrong

For over 100 years, trans-Atlantic elites have pursued a certain vision. And just as that vision finally swam into view, it dissipated.

Since the 1990s, the same crowd of people have been running each of the major parties. Zuma and Ramaphosa rule the live pieces of the ANC. Tony Leon, Ryan Coetzee, Helen Zille, and even some lesser names, still dictate the comings and goings of the DA, despite “obstacles” like a party constitution. The VF+ is still led by the same men is was back in the 90s, with no meaningful circulation of leadership either.

And in the private sector, South Africa has a long-running oligarchy which has common bloodlines which span three or more generations. The Oppenheimers and Rothschilds have been around since the first decades of the Union, the Ruperts and other liberal Afrikaners have been around since the rise of the National Party and the mutual funds which backed them, and Motsepe and Ramaphosa’s little crowd have been perched in the canopy with the rest of them since the early 90s.

Newcomers are generally plugged into the same common interests, usually through shared business ventures, often in the mining sector.

The initial layer was formed by the Round Table Group, funded by Nathan Rothschild and Lord Rosebury, which propelled Cecil Rhodes and his contemporaries in the mining sector, as well as British imperialists like Lord Milner, into their ambitions to consolidate South Africa from the end of the 19^th century.

Afrikaners got a start when Hertzog used state funds to get Afrikaners a beachhead in the mining sector through west coast diamond prospects, and with the wealth produced by Sanlam, Santam, Saambou and other mutualist initiatives.

This inclusion into the economic elite provides enormous benefits, and sometimes this is consciously done, as in the case of the Brenthurst Initiative, in which the Brenthurst Foundation, the recently defunct think-tank and lobby group run by the Oppenheimer family, launched a bid to implement what we now call Black Economic Empowerment.

BEE means that the ANC’s elite are knitted into the leading companies, and while it is usually seen in terms of its exclusionary effect on the politically alienated SME layer and its deterrent effect on FDI, its primary effect is the entanglement of the old white elite and the new black elite.

This world can get rather incestuous, and most legacy companies get implicated in one way or another with various financial and political scandals over time.

This means they do not only share commercial interests, but tend to develop a sort of culture of omerta. This is true almost everywhere in the world. But nothing is ever truly hidden, sometimes because it must be advertised, and sometimes because it is too much fun not to.

Blabbing

Rob Hersov is a rather outspoken fellow, and so I poked around to see why he had become so prominent lately. As a third-generation heir to the AngloVaal fortune, he is certainly part of the “club”, so to speak, even if he is a more casual member.

He spent 31 years abroad from 1985, before returning to South Africa in 2017, just as Ramaphosa took over the ANC, and promised a massive shift in direction. But he started to invest in South Africa again in 2013 after several years in Europe, courting high society and taking runs at various luxury markets with varying success.

2013 was a very strange time to get back to investing in South Africa – Magnus Heystek of Brenthurst Wealth was pulling the alarm at the time, concerned about deep cracks forming in the national fiscus, the start of an unsustainable debt chain, and rising trade deficits.

But it was a pivotal time in other ways. Marikana had just happened the previous year, sending shockwaves through the ANC, and cracking its radical credentials. Mandela, who took his last public visitors in July of 2012, had recently died, and Julius Malema had just set up his political party, the EFF.

I stumbled across an interview of Hersov’s from March 2015 (from 06:52), in which he argued that SA was uninvestable (while IA was investing in it), but predicted a split in the ANC was coming. In another interview from June of that year, he speculated that the ANC would not be running the country in 5-6 year’s time – specifically under Mmusi Maimane, whom he took to London to meet with other elites.

I started to pay attention here, because while this would have counted as hubris at the time, it did actually pan out in another form, which meant that someone up there was already thinking seriously about what has come to pass now.

A couple of months later, Hersov arranged a meeting in London with Julius Malema, Floyd Shivambo and Dali Mpofu. Present were Hersov Snr, Brenthurst point-man and Fabian Clem Sunter, and Robin Renwick, a Fabian Socialist and Chatham House member, former British Ambassador, and mediator between SA and UK elites during the handover of power in the 90s.

Hersov and his father who attended the meeting are decidedly not Fabians. Hersov Snr, along with Anton Rupert, was a member of a number of international influence clubs, including the conservationist Club of 1001, but also Le Cercle Pinay, a reactionary club formed by the remnants of the Habsburg dynasty, who had pushed back against communism across the world for decades, with no small degree of adventurism and risk-taking. Basil Hersov was even a member of Botha’s government in an advisory capacity.

Rob Hersov got his start at business through an internship at Morgan Stanley, then an apprenticeship under Rupert Murdoch, before working for the Ruperts. Small world really.

My contact with Hersov has been limited. I was on a list of people to contact for forming his new media company Truth Report, but I was booted for taking a strict pessimistic stance on political reform, and insisting on partition, considering the fixed nature of ethnic voting patterns in South Africa:

He contacted me last week to discuss my recent remarks, and insisted to me that the 2015 meeting was completely innocent. As ridiculous as it sounds, I do kind of believe him (at least as far as his personal capacity is concerned). Hersov wants the DA to merge with the VF+ and the PA. I can’t say I agree with him on the PA exactly, given the particular sort of corruption in that party, but it does make more sense than his previous endorsement of Mmusi Maimane.

But while I do believe that Hersov was doing little more than making introductions on behalf of others, I don’t think the meeting itself was innocent – after all, Renwick and Sunter’s elite connections are far more politically active.

Hersov pointed me in the direction of John Battersby, who called him to set the meeting up. He is a former journalist who moved from the editor’s chair at the Sunday Independent and an Africa correspondent position at the New York Times to the board of the South African Chamber of Commerce UK in July 2012, after serving for five years on the board of the Legal Assistance Trust at Canon Collins. He is also the former UK Manager of Brand South Africa in the UK, from 2004 until 2015, a feel-good party-state propaganda outfit for an audience of overseas investors. Brand South Africa is a public-private partnership between the oligarchs, old and new, subject to a degree of staff rotation under Jacob Zuma’s more factional cadre deployment programme, especially since 2012. It was created under Mbeki to counter the pessimistic stigma Zimbabwe was spreading about Africa as an investment destination, and to lobby for the Soccer World Cup.

Understandably, with Malema having started his party only recently, he was given the treatment one usually sees new dogs in the yard get from the main alphas – he was being sniffed out.

But somebody big did start looking after him and professionalising the party from around 2015, and they received a large amount of funding from an undisclosed source. It is hard to ignore the timing.

Some speculate Natie Kirsch, the leftist billionaire oligarch of Swaziland (the EFF ran point on a rebellion against the monarchy just a couple of years ago). What is known, is that Italian tobacco smuggler Adriano Mazzotti contributed around R1 million to help him settle his SARS debts, but far more money than that was given around that time. Campaign contribution regulations weren’t as transparent then as they are now though.

But what Hersov’s behaviour flagged for me, was that somebody had a plan for South Africa from around 2012-2013, and someone was acting on it, both through the DA and the EFF.

And Helen Zille, as I had seen from at least 2022, sketched it out in broad strokes several times with her famous “triangle”: a monolithic ANC is unassailable, but once the populists are split off, the contest of ideas and interests can begin in earnest, over the centre ground of the ANC.

The long party

As Zille says in a 2023 interview, she sees her party not as being founded in 2000, but in 1977, as the Progressive Federalist Party under Jannie Steytler. But in a sense it is much older.

Its roots are in the old South African Party, which began in 1896 as a Liberal compromise between the Afrikaner nationalism of the Afrikaner Bond, and the imperialism of Cecil Rhodes. The AB was formed in 1878 in reaction to British claims toward the Boer republics, and was the first time the dormant Afrikaner electoral majority had attempted to storm the ballot box to protest imperial expansion.

SAP leader Jan Smuts had joined the late Rhodes’ Round Table Group after the Boer War, and in 1926 penned a work of philosophy which justified world government on the basis of universal cosmic purpose, called Holism and Evolution. He singlehandedly wrote the constitution which lasted until 1961, as well as the constitution of the League of Nations.

The Round Table Group which formed South Africa through agitation, bribery and covert warfare, later became the British Institute of International Affairs, known today as Chatham House. In the mid-1920s, it was taken over predominantly by Fabian Socialists, who still dominate the group today, with Tony Blair being the most prominent. They have also controlled The Economist since around 2015.

The founder of UNESCO was Julian Huxley, another Fabian, whose views were parodied by his brother Aldous in Brave New World. He saw the purpose of the UN and UNESCO in particular as the use of “science” to form a “new world religion”.

Fabianism itself, in brief, is a gradualist movement formed in 1884 from the social circle surrounding Karl Marx, and which now runs the United Kingdom, with the Prime Minister, his cabinet, and half his MPs being member, as was Tony Blair, who shaped the present British constitution. One of its founders, Havelocke Ellis, also founded transgenderism. It’s philosophy is libertine and universalistic, but aims at universal technocratic control of the economy and mass social relations. But it is also imminently pragmatic.

They didn’t believe in violent revolution, but in penetration of existing institutions. They saw the means for realising communism as being the dissolution of the distinctions between public and private sectors, nations and borders, the growth of tertiary institutions like charities, foundations and NGOs, unaccountable civil bodies (QuaNGOs), and international cooperation and policy harmonisation. They see the best way to establish socialism as being to control the private sector rather than abolish it.

The Schreiner family who founded the SAP were well-known Fabians. The SAP absorbed all the regional Afrikaner parties after 1911, but those people mostly split off to form the NP in 1914, in reaction to state policy of monolingual English governance. They gained much ground after Smuts shot white miners striking against black migrant labour, by forming a coalition with the Labour Party, and tried to nationalise the mines, but retreated after the Oppenheimers’ threatened to close them permanently.

Harry Oppenheimer was a decisive figure, as an SAP Member of Parliament, and his undue influence was frequently noted, stoking antisemitic sentiments. His family seized the diamond monopoly through a combination of exceptionally shrewd business practice, foreign capital backing (JP Morgan and Rothschild), and political corruption.

The populist victory of 1924 precipitated the commissioning of the Carnegie Report, and the need to contain Afrikaner nationalist sentiment was seen to be tied to economic outcomes. The two parties merged in 1934 to form the UP, and deepened segregation and privilege to contain economic populism and keep the cheap migrant labour flowing.

It lasted with friendly relations to the local and international elites until 1948, when the NP defeated them, and they began to wither as the post-war economic boom buoyed incumbent support, and jerrymandering gave rural districts outsized influence.

Harry Oppenheimer saw the need to influence the NP for favourable economic reforms. After rising unrest with the formation of the PAC in 1959, Helen Suzman and others defected from Smuts’s United Party to form the Progressive Party, at the same time as the Oppenheimers founded the South African Foundation, to try to bring Afrikaner elites back into the fold and assuage business sentiment about instability.

Shortly thereafter, Sharpeville introduced another crisis. Capital flight ensued, but they successfully lobbied for capital controls and business loans as compensation, £30 million by Oppenheimers’ Rand Select Corporation, and £40 million by the state.

Oppenheimer attacked Verwoerd’s pass laws, and called for the abandonment of labour controls. “Eventually, there must be a large preponderance of non-white voters. When do I foresee that happening? I should not like to say, but not at least for twenty-five years.” Not a bad guess.

Watching Congo go bust was instructive, and so the elites wished to make the change as gradual as possible, but the flow of cheap labour was their number one priority.

After Soweto, Kissinger visited Vorster to tell him to begin reforms, while containing Soviet power in the north. Oppenheimer maintained a cordial friendship with Vorster. They commissioned the Wiehan Report, which used the 1973 general strike in KZN as a pretext for loosening labour controls, while Oppenheimer used SADF adventurism in the north to expand his mineral empire.

The reforms hit in 1977, and the colour bar was gradually dismantled. Oppenheimer’s Freight Services agreed to stop supplying Rhodesia, and in exchange, Vorster removed weight controls on road freight, which started the fifty-year trend pushing freight from rail to road, externalising the infrastructure  cost of multimodal transport from the distributor to the taxpayer, who had to shoulder the higher road maintenance costs and diminished rail revenue.

Zach de Beer, who later founded the DP, was a board member of the Oppenheimer influence vehicle the Urban Foundation and a former Ango executive. The Urban Foundation was born out of the reaction to their shares dropping 23 points following the Soweto Uprising massacre, and they had supported the SAP, UP, and PFP beforehand, with tangible connections through their organisations.

Jannie Steytler and others defected from the UP in 77 to join Suzman who was at that point their only MP. In the 1977 split of the UP, the other half formed the New Republic Party. Both factions merged back into the Democratic Party in 1989, and absorbed the remnants of the NP and other parties in 1999 to become the DA we know today, though most NP members left again to join the ANC.

Meanwhile, the Oppenheimers (and Helen Zille, in point of fact) helped bankroll and protect ANC operatives, with Zille even sheltering Tony Yengeni (head of MK) at her house at the height of the People’s War. They financed the NP to keep up reform, and bankrolled the divestment movement abroad, form which they lavishly benefitted, as foreign companies sold their holdings at fire-sale prices. By 1987, they controlled ~80% of the formal economy, either directly or indirectly.

The party comes up short

Today, Helen Zille and Tony Leon (who still has considerable influence over the party) are close friends with the Oppenheimer family, particularly with Mary Slack-Oppenheimer, the wealthiest and most generous political donor in South Africa, and regular meetings are had between many members of the elite which include not only DA figures, but ANC too.

The Oppenheimers went to the same schools and universities as the Rothschilds, and in the last generation even shared classes, so this is indeed a very tightly connected circle of global elites.

The DA today has made the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals the core of its manifesto, and promoted the Climate Change Act, which gives their minister Deon Goerge plenary authority to set any material target for any sector, region or individual company in the entire economy.

Zille is also directly tied to George Soros, for whom she worked for 13 years (not mentioned in her autobiography, btw), and whose Open Society philosophy she has repeatedly championed. Soros’s foundation funds many pro-land-invasion activist groups, which is notable in the context of the following remark from 2023:

“Of course, we have shacks, and we have more and more shacks because people come to Cape Town looking for work. They do, but people who live in shacks have refuse removal, have water, have electricity. We were the first people who gave people living in shacks electricity. They have public transport, they have schools and clinics […] because middle-class people can buy those services in the private sector.”

That initiative was begun immediately upon the DA’s accession to power in the City in 2006, under a joint initiative with the German government called “Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading”. The philosophy is that crime has “root causes” besides law enforcement strength, namely poverty and inequality (therefore, we need socialism). So they build the houses, hand them title needs, and connect them to utilities they seldom pay for.

It hasn’t decreased urban violence, obviously – gang violence has skyrocketed. Instead it has resulted in decades of accelerated land invasions with DA facilitation and incentive, which have nearly destroyed the Cape, and blocked natives from receiving housing, despite waiting on public housing lists for several decades.

On Biznews in 2022, she explained the purpose of South Africa on the world stage, as an experiment in post-national global governance:

“Far more countries fail than succeed in making a transition to democracy […] prosperous constitutional democracies under the rule of law, not the rule of man, with open market economies, with […] freedom of speech […] are fought for and struggled over centuries. I mean, it’s 800 years since the Magna Carta in Britain. We are trying to shortcut history. We’re trying to get there in three decades, four decades, which has never been done anywhere in the world, let alone in a country as plural as ours is.

[…] the world is going to have to do exactly the same thing. Boundaries and borders mean less and less. The national state, over time, is going to become obsolete. But it’s going to take a long time. People are going to live in plural, complex societies with huge cultural differences, religious differences, and other things. And we have to be able to live together in a context where there’s an overarching set of rules […] trying to achieve that in South Africa is a huge prize, and I think we can get it right, and that’s been my motivating force my whole life.”

Zille recognises that this process of demographic change is not organic. Instead, she sees it as both necessary and, paradoxically, irrelevant to outcomes:

“You don’t win a 74% black municipality unless a hell of a lot of people are being convinced. […] Daar’s ‘n lekker Boervroutjie in Mpumalanga by die naam van Anthea Grobler […] in the ring to stand in a 100% Black ward in Mpumalanga […] she won that ward […] in Ward 25 in Pietermaritzburg, which is one of the strongest DA wards in KwaZulu-Natal. […] And our candidate there is Reggie Khanyile. Now, there were lots of people who wanted to be the candidate there because it’s a slam-dunk ward; you’re going to get elected. […] Reggie is our candidate in, I think, an almost 100% white ward. It’s not entirely 100% white ward, but nearly. Now, there’s no 100% white anything anymore. There are 100% Black places, but not 100% white places, which is a good thing. And long may it be like that and increase like that”

Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that the way in which Anthea Grobler attained support was by allegedly organising land invasions and selling plots for R500, much as the ANC does. The hopes were unfounded, and patronage was in fact the only way to proceed in much of South Africa, as the ANC knows well.

But while she mentions free markets occasionally, she doesn’t really believe in them. In a 2017 interview with Roman Cabanac and Jonathan Witt (see from 23:30), Zille explains that prefers long-term central planning:

“I think there will be a majority black liberal party in South Africa […] The more we govern, the more the DA will become the catalyst for that party, and in fact will become the centre of that party. So, if, for example, you had a contest between A and B – and I don’t want to mention any names specifically – in the ANC for the presidency of the country. It is highly likely, depending on which way the ANC splits, that coalitions, and options for coalitions, will become very very interesting.

Now, I am a Liberal in the sense of believing in the sanctity of the individual, but I am not a liberal in many other ways. I believe the state has a critical role to play in the economy. More and more liberals are accepting that […] it is the state’s job is to join all the dots – which economic centres are showing signs of economic growth, do we have the right pipeline of skills […] a classical liberal view may not be the best answer.”

Why all this backstory? Well, because Helen Zille took an incredibly important interview with Chatham House in 2012.

A plan is hatched

On the 3^rd of October 2012, Chatham House published the text of an interview with Helen Zille, who had recently attended a conference there. As a side-note, then-junior DA star Ryan Coetzee was introduced to his new employers in the Liberal Democrat party in the UK around this time.

In the interview itself, under the title “New Investment Strategies for a Changing World”. I will quote selected sections now (my edits are marked with square brackets):

“…when everybody was celebrating the miracle [of 1994] I was very worried […] that the ANC will become a racial nationalist movement […] if South Africa’s democracy became entrenched in a contest between two different racial nationalist movements we would never have democracy in South Africa[, b]ecause the outcome of elections would always simply be a racial census and we would never be able to change the government through the ballot box. And inevitably race would break down into ethnic groups which would have further negative consequences and so from the point of transition I have really set out with some other people, very small number of us, to try and see if it was possible to build a liberal opposition in Africa.

[…]The curse to an economy is if it becomes dominated by single extractive industry that causes untold wealth but leads to economic decline to everyone except the small elite that can plug into the wells of that wealth […] And so while huge money pours into Mozambique, in the context of the weak institutions with weak distinction between the party and the state, with the risk of state capture by the wealthy elite [lmao]

[…]Now, Marikana in my view is a symptom of what is happening within the ANC and the tripartite alliance [describes the corrupt neo-patrimonialism that binds the ANC, mining houses and unions, and the threshold provisions of the Labour Relations Act] And that suits both the big union very well and the employer very well, because it keeps any other unions out of contestation. It is easier for the employer to negotiate with one union, easier for the union not to have any rivals. And so in the mining industry they have set a particularly high threshold, especially in the platinum, where they do not have coordinate bargaining forum among various employers. 

[…] I think over the next 5 to 7 years we are going to see a complete realignment of politics in South Africa. Interestingly enough, the divisions that I think are clearly symbolized by Julius Malema on the one hand and the Democratic Alliance on the other hand, is a dividing line that goes right through the middle of the ANC. The National Development Plan which emanates from the president’s office, from minister Trevor Manuel, is an excellent plan and the Democratic Alliance agrees with most of it and indeed it aligns with the Alliance’s plan of 8 per cent jobs growth plan. So all the people who understand the problem in the same way and have agreed on the best way of moving people out of poverty in South Africa should actually be in the same party […] So our job is to bring together all the people who support the National Development Plan into the same political party, at the political centre.

Malema is in a fight to the death with President Zuma. Both of them cannot survive politically. Malema is simply a figurehead of a particular constituency and that constituency is real. That is why we have to [make] it easier for young people to get a foothold in the economy and feel socially [and economically] included […]That is why we strongly support things like the youth wage subsidy and that is why we are implementing it. 

Yes, Malema is a threat, I am not going to pretend that he is not, but I have very little doubt that our strategy will be the victorious one not least because we have so much to lose in South Africa and most people realize our interdependence in the long run. So these catalytic moments like Marikana actually help to drive the points that we are making and help to bring together the middle ground. The 2014 elections need to be the tipping point elections and in 2019 we will have a new government based on this insight.

[…] It will make absolutely no difference whether it is President Zuma or Motlanthe for the National Development Plan. And that is why I have said to President Zuma and to Minister Manuel – let us implement the National Development Plan in the Western Cape – we are committed to doing that and then you can see which bits work and which don’t work.

We believe in opportunity-based redress and we have extraordinary successes in Western Cape with government working with black-led companies. The whole middle-class base of small entrepreneurs has benefitted from this. What we oppose is outcomes-manipulated BEE. [for example, Capitec Bank]* moved into the unsecured loan market very successfully and as their shares started growing the Batho Batho Trust and Coral Lagoon [ANC funds], took money from the Industrial Development Corporation [state investment branch] and bought R.300 mln worth of shares of Capitec Bank. Four years later, in March this year they wanted to sell the shares, but in terms of the BEE part of this shares had to be sold to black buyers. Because there were no such buyers immediately available the Public Investment Corporation bought the shares and warehoused them for the ANC, and the ANC made out of the deal R1 bln.”

Zille isn’t even against BEE here, which explains why the DA did not take advantage of the 2022 ConCourt ruling on the matter to discontinue compliance with racial quotas in public procurement where they govern. She’s just against the use of public money to facilitate it when it funds her rivals.

What this interview sketches is a pincer movement – the DA would have to grow to eat the ANC’s liberal flank, and the EFF would cleave off the radicals. The DA and ANC could then form a new dominant party and govern uninterrupted.

Long walk to Bedlam

In practice, things didn’t go according to plan, as the little bumps in the road of nonracial aspirations have shown.

The DA got a relatively untested but polished public speaker called Mmusi Maimane to push for party leadership, and encouraged him to criticise her as racist in public, so that he would appear authentic.

He convinced Hector Petersen’s (most famous victim of the Soweto shooting) sister to join the DA, pushed for a “BEE that works”, punted “white privilege”, Winnie Mandela, and a whole host of stuff. They got their logo redesigned to look like Obama’s campaign logo, and directly modelled their campaign after his. Lindiwe Mazibuko, the brattish white-sounding UCT graduate was also strongly promoted despite her youth, as was a whole host of other young black hopefuls, most of whom have left the party and vented a spume of anti-white bigotry as they left, sick to the back teeth with liberal condescension.

So now they were trying on a bit of majoritarian populism, and Zille handed the reins to James Selfe’s faction for four years, during which they got slightly carried away, and subjected her to disciplinary processes over her public remarks about Singapore having benefitted from colonialism. She took revenge by having them all purged when they failed to gain votes in 2019.

They flirted with several such models in the past, from Patricia de Lille, to Mamphele Ramphele. Herman Mashabe had a smidge of staying power by drawing out disgruntled members blocked from higher leadership. But each has proved more wedded to their race than to the elite vision.

Maimane lost votes under minorities, as their aggressive, antiwhite, pro-BEE campaigns backfired, and the VF+ grew by 30%. The DA remains a minority party with only 5% of the black population voting for it. That figure comes from analysis done by Leon and Coetzee and Capitec boss Michiel le Roux in 2019, and it hasn’t changed since – calculating the black rate of support by reversing out from the black proportion of DA support in 2024 gets the same figure. Also worth mentioning is that their star white saviour candidate, Chris Pappas of uMngeni municipality in KZN, can have his victory be explained entirely by racial differences in voter turnout in that 22% white ward.

Zille learned from this, and pivoted from trying to split the ANC vote, which it couldn’t hope to do, to hoping the EFF did well enough to destroy the ANC’s majority, so that the DA would be able to force them into reform.

But the EFF never did well enough at all, and stalled at 9%.

In the meantime, Zuma had kicked out the old elite, and excluded them from the gravy train. Corruption, nepotism and graft were fine under Mbeki, because the economy was growing, and the right people were making money. But Zuma had welcomed in lower-class upstarts from India, and was embarrassing South Africa internationally by being, well, somewhat less than progressive.

State capture wasn’t new, and in fact much of the permanent elite benefitted directly or indirectly from Mbeki’s corruption. But Mbeki was a Fabian, who pushed the Blairite “Third Way” model also adopted by Bill Clinton, and was cutting the fiscal deficit to zero, even as he eroded checks on power and crime.

Zuma was not playing ball. He stole foreign aid, flouted social norms and basic morality, and boosted traditional authorities. He undermined and made a mockery of everything he touched.

And so, elites poured billions into Ramaphosa’s pockets for the 2017 ANC leadership conference, and Johann Rupert has been singing his praises ever since. This victory triggered an insane spike in targeted assassinations, carried out by ANC proxies in taxi and trucking cartels at the local level. One of Ramaphosa’s biggest enforcers was Senzo Mchunu, whom he later promoted to Minister of Police, despite (or perhaps because of) heading up what amounted to factional death squads in KZN.

The EFF meanwhile, had gotten directly involved in farm murders, and when the investigative journalism show Carte Blanche tried to cover a connection directly to Malema, their producer was assassinated. No serious investigation has been done.

But Ramaphosa won, and to broker peace, had Mchunu stand down to keep the KZN branch from splitting. Zuma would be removed quietly, and Ramaphosa came to power, on a wave of public and professional media adulation, promising a new golden age (“Ramaphoria”). Everyone believed in the rainbow nation again.

With Zuma’s rebellion in 2021 and his subsequent formation of the MK party, he finally gave the progressives what they wanted – a divided ANC. Hardly any voters crossed over from the majoritarian bloc to the minoritarian one, and the sum of the parts of the ANC is as big as ever.

In a secretly recorded conversation with the DA’s former Johannesburg caucus leader Funzela Ngobeni in 2019 at the craft beer pub at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport, leaked in 2021 (likely to test public opinion; you can listen here), Helen Zille is heard to push for the coalition in more concrete strategic terms:

“we need to consolidate the DA around 20% of the vote. It’s a bloody strong percentage. And we mustn’t try and be populist, we must get people who understand it, intelligent people, to understand the complexity of the argument. Black, brown, Indian, white, whatever. We would get together [inaudible] in the context of coalitions, 20% is big – it’s not a one-seat party or a two-seat party, it’s a big bloc. And then the ANC falls to, let’s say 40%. I’d rather make tough demands on Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC and forced to fight under them, and make strict conditions on them, than go into coalition with anyone else. And that, I think, should be our aim in the next elections [2021 …] we mustn’t try and be a 30% party, we want to be a 20% party. And remember there’s only 8% white voters. Between 15% and 20% gives us a strong, strong consolidated block in coalitions.”

And so they switched to a containment policy, replacing a black puppet with a white one, in the form of the jovial but insubstantial John Steenhuisen, who could reassure minority voters that they weren’t going to go back to the disaster of Maimane.

Meanwhile, the oligarchs and the old Mbekiite crowd set up the Rivonia Circle, which ended up backing lame duck corporate candidates like Mmusi Maimane, Songezo Zibi and the failed tenderpreneur vehicle Change Starts Now under Roger Jardone.

From the Q&A session from the 2022 Biznews interview, we get an explanation of the coalition strategy:

“In the next election, let’s say the ANC gets 48 percent. That’s what the buffoon of the final model projects. I’m hoping it’ll get much lower, 46, like it got in this last election, but the ANC always does better in national elections than in local elections, so their prediction is 48. Let’s say they get 45, 46. Then we’re in a much stronger position. They’re going to have to look around for coalition partners because they need above 50 to govern. Then the choice is: do they go with the EFF, or do they go with us, or the host of smaller parties? I think it would be a massive diversion and a waste of a whole election cycle if they went with tiny little parties to make up the 50 percent, like all these small little parties that don’t know what they stand for. We need to push the ANC low enough to have the leverage that we need. Give me a lever and a fulcrum, and I’ll move the world. We need it low enough so that we can move it. When Cyril comes to us, like he looked at Jordan and said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor,” when they come to us, we have to say our conditions are this: non-racialism, remove race laws from the statute books, open market economy, no expropriation without compensation, separation between party and state, and cadre deployment. Those are our conditions.”

The arrogance is difficult to hear without wincing.

In order to head off public jitters, the DA were forced to campaign as if they really believed they could win, and formed the “moonshot pact”, comprised of all anti-ANC parties to the “right” of the big tent, who of course were outraged when they betrayed them by leaping into bed with the ANC. And most amusingly, they were nervous enough about this plan becoming common knowledge that they took Sunday World to the ombudsman just a week before election day because they suggested that the DA might be thinking about it.

It was vital that no minority voters caught the jitters and thought about voting for something crazy like Cape independence. But the DA played well, and took back the votes they lost in the previous election, bouyed by a higher white turnout and a false air of hope not too dissimilar from the days of Ramaphoria.

But in the end, dealing with Ramaphosa turned out not to be such a cakewalk.

Sly, and recalcitrant

Ramaphosa is not regarded as much of a leader now, but this is at least a little unfair. Objectively he has gotten very far in life, and has achieved a darnsight more than his predecessors in the service of his movement’s ends. One merely has to look at pace of legislative reforms and racial transformation under his watch to realise that unlike his predecessors, he is fairly serious about the revolution, even if that’s a bad thing.

In the first year of his presidency, he made two interesting speeches. First, pledging to initiate the Second Phase of the party’s radical race-Marxist programme, the National Democratic Revolution. And second, a praise of Dingane at what was supposed to be Reconciliation Day.

His programme today includes nationalising the health sector (after he baited elites into thinking they would be allowed to run a permanent state-funded monopoly contract), centralising infrastructure planning (eliminating municipal autonomy through integrating the three constitutional spheres), ratcheting up racial quotas to over-representative levels (including the uncircumventable Third Wave license-based policies), and creating a framework for expropriating land.

The latter point includes a particularly malicious piece of law, which is already passed, but not promulgated – the Land Courts Act, which creates a new court system with no procedural or evidentiary rules, and gives judges complete legal immunity under all circumstances (except from domestic abuse charges). It has the purpose and power to seize any property from anyone on behalf of anyone. This is a suicide vest.

Zille did not see this coming, and has been stymied. Ryan Coetzee embarrassed himself by negotiating the worst coalition deal in South African history, and was soon let go.

Ramaphosa refuses to fix problems with the United states, and is constantly blamed by commentators for weak leadership. But I can’t help but think of this conversation from my former professor Antony Butler’s biography of the President:

“Cyril remarked to the old man on how difficult life was for people in Soweto. Oppenheimer replied: ‘That is fascinating, Mr Ramaphosa.’ Cyril complained that he had to pay more for each unit of electricity he consumed in Soweto than Oppenheimer had to pay at Brenthurst. ‘That is very fascinating, Mr Ramaphosa.’ Finally Ramaphosa exploded, and launched one of his trademark tirades against big business, culminating in a threat: ‘We’re going to nationalise all of your mines!’ ‘That is very fascinating, Mr Ramaphosa, and that may be true,’ the old man responded coolly. ‘But a gold mine is only a hole in the ground.’”

In 1996, he found himself in a black-owned investment company pitching for mining companies and the like. In bidding for control of former Anglo holding company Johnnic, he was outmanoeuvred by Johnny Copeland of HCI, the investment wing of a rival workers union, and his opinion of BEE solidified – it was only real if it was taken by force:

“It was never real empowerment. You never really owned the equity because the equity in the end relied on whether the shares appreciated sufficiently […] The banks were empowered, the advisers were empowered, the merchant bankers, the lawyers and the accountants were all empowered, [whereas] the very people who were meant to be empowered were not empowered … they ended up walking away with zero.”

And so it proved – he only got truly wealthy only once BEE was made more or less legally mandatory. In this context, the boiling frog remarks take on a certain steely clarity. Attempts to steer him toward a liberal economic model don’t really make sense at all.

Ramaphosa has been close to the Oppenheimers for a long time, longer than most realise. He was raised in Soweto, a town built with money loaned to the state by Ernest Oppenheimer.

At 25, he was placed on the board of Harry Oppenheimer’s post-Soweto reform-and-containment vehicle, the Urban Foundation. He was brought in by Clive Menell, whose family started AngloVaal with old Bob Hersov in 1933. His wife Irene was a leading member of the Progressive Party. The Menells invited Ramaphosa to take part in extended talk shops and social events with powerful liberal elites pushing on the open door of reform, and so he got to know them intimately. According to Ramaphosa, he had no fear of being labelled a collaborator, because he had managed his reputation so well.

At these events, the Ruperts, the Menells and the Oppenheimers were calling for a fearless embrace of black majoritarian government in 1976 already, with the inescapable knowledge that America had decided it was inevitable already.

“Turning to the practical implications of his analysis, Rupert observed that ‘We cannot survive unless we have a free market economy, a stable black middle class with the necessary security of tenure, personal security and a feeling of hope for betterment in the heart of all our peoples.’ He then spelt out the seven dimensions of the practical challenge: job creation, training, a living wage, greater commercial opportunities, extended home ownership, improved housing, and the provision of sporting and other amenities. The way forward, he concluded, was ‘to establish an urban development foundation to accommodate and coordinate, on an ongoing basis, the private sector’s endeavours at improving the quality of life in the urban black townships … to encourage and assist as a catalyst the transformation of South Africa’s urban black communities into stable, essentially middle-class societies subscribing to the values of a free enterprise society and having a vested interest in their own survival.’ These inspirational ideas were met with acclaim, and the Urban Foundation was born.”

In other words, protect our necks, and we will tax the middle classes to feed your voters. That’s the bargain.

Ramaphosa was very young, and was immediately picked out as a young leader, invited to participate in town planning and development strategy sessions. They provided him with studying accommodation for his legal degree, and was invited to complete his articles with the Foundation’s legal representatives, EFK Tucker. Yet he failed the entrance exam, and never tried again.

He soon left the UF to embrace a more combative approach through the MUN.

Butler: “When the post-war boom [ended with the oil crisis, the] newly powerful black workers confronted businesses that were looking to cut employment and costs. The outcome was […] unprecedented series of strikes in Durban in 1973. Business leaders, moreover, saw black labour as a potential ally in the battle against white unions […] companies lobbied government to dismantle job reservation mechanisms that excluded black workers. By recognising black labour and removing job reservation for whites, business could hope to see both a more orderly process of negotiation of working conditions and wages, and a sharp downward pressure on the wages of skilled white workers, who had been insulated against competition from their black peers”

This is the conclusion of the Wiehan Report, commissioned by the Vorster government after Kissinger rapped them on the knuckles. And it is in this environment that Ramaphosa was groomed.

Ramaphosa and his men soon embraced lethal violence to suppress scabs and counter-strikers as they started to gain the upper hand by 1987. They lost a key strike, and 50 000 workers.

Despite his apparent current lack of decision, this is a man who climbed the ranks of the ANC despite beginning as an outsider, first by becoming first among unionists, and second by befriending all the main party leadership, taking funding from Swedish labour unions, and eventually from the heart of the establishment via Frankel Pollak (Joel Pollak’s father). He was later the man who went with Jacob Zuma to meet the representatives of state intelligence in Switzerland in 1989 to open formal negotiations.

Why did Zille think he could be pushed off his perch so easily?

A poor philosophy

The elite’s dogmatic insistence on an outdated fad idea of universal human fungibility has led them to ignore the importance of identity, culture, and race. These are the interest groups of the poor and the middle class – the means by which we lobby for change and security in the world. It is our capital, our currency.

It is the thing that lets us know that one day will be much like the next, in a way that makes sense to us, and that not every aspect of our lives will be subject to the whims of economic planners.

It is the basis of trust, the basis of home, of place, and the reason ideas and policies align along these different cleavages. Different communities genuinely do have different values.

When black South Africa stands up and says “we want ANC, and MK and EFF”, and only a tiny sliver of them differ, it is because those parties have something in common that they truly support – free stuff, and racial privilege, sure – but also the promise that they will live in a place that belongs to them. That others will not be dictating the limits of their aspirations.

The same counts for us, but we are just as foolish, and should not trick ourselves into thinking that because we support better managerial staff that our collective bargaining rights are secure. The end game is to strip us of these collective bargaining rights entirely, and make our status in the world as much as nameless swine in an infinite battery farm.

From at least 2012, Helen Zille and her allies in the local and foreign economic elite had a rather brilliant plan, to use centrifugal forces to tear the ANC apart by backing black radicals and containing minority dissidents.

But this had the overall effect of pushing the entire polity leftward, and it took so long that the state is now on the brink of fiscal collapse. The ANC are now already preparing for the endgame, but the DA has played minority containment so effectively that they have no exit route.

American sanctions will find our country defenceless, and communities will have to seek their own security and self-determination as greater portions of the country are taken up by crime and looting. Once the centre fails, the DA will have no reason to exist, and will be forced to hold onto the Cape alone, with no philosophy to justify further ambitions.

But then again, as Zille said, it’s Pretoria or bust – she would rather see the entire state collapse and drag the southern half of the continent down with it than risk partition. Reason being, South Africa serves as an empirical test of the ideological presuppositions behind post-national global governance.

If it fails in the wrong way, that is, that a counterexample can be produced in the same laboratory (Cape, Zulu, or Afrikaner self-determination), then it will spell the end for the entire mission for which South Africa was intended to serve as proof: that kinship, culture, and territory do not matter, only the cold command of an unassailable technocratic machine, and the fungible flesh tokens drifting in its universal embrace.

I think I know which idea I prefer.

The Oppenheimers, who designed the BEE policies in 2003, divested their mineral empire in 2012. They shut their think-tank, the Brenthurst Foundation, just this month, and are now more interested in central Africa than Pretoria. But even as they abandon their kingdom, they still sing the praises of the idea that killed its people’s future – the idea of South Africa itself.

Let me leave you now with a passage from RW Johnson, about the heyday of the Rainbow Nation:

“The scale and even the nature of this capital and personal flight was largely hidden. No newspaper wrote about it, for it hardly chimed with the compulsory euphoria about the new South Africa. Few noticed that Kerzner had not put a cent of his own into the Lost City; he hardly wanted to invest just as he left. One of South Africa’s five richest men, he had quietly disposed of his hotels and casinos, indeed everything except a house in the Cape. Many other businessmen sweated their assets, running their factories into the ground while they extracted the last penny from their operations. Central Johannesburg was plagued for years by landlords who adopted the same attitude to their properties, taking whatever rents they could and, as maintenance problems became overwhelming, simply walked away from them. By the time the municipality wanted to discuss the fact that their buildings were condemned, overcrowded and teeming with rats, the owners had long since settled abroad.

There were a hundred ways of managing such exits. One day a businessman might be happily hobnobbing with the new ANC elite, then suddenly and without fanfare or announcement, the bird had flown. One would hear only months later that he was just not around any more. In many cases such émigrés would keep emitting pro-ANC noises all the way to the airport, though most began to keep their distance from the ANC as soon as their asset transfers had gone through.”