Tag: history

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Post-truth democracies

ANTHONY BUTLER: Popular instinct rises against elite judgment in post-truth world

First published in Business Day

January 23, 2026

US President Donald Trump speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 21 2026. (Picture: DENIS BALIBOUSE/Reuters)

When Donald Trump addressed world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday it felt like the much-heralded “post-truth” world had truly arrived.

The US president strung together a litany of demonstrably false claims, such as that the US “gave Greenland back” to Denmark after World War 2 (it had never become US territory) and that there are no wind farms in China (it generates more wind energy than any other country).

But none of this is entirely new. As the historian Sophia Rosenfeld has observed, democracy has always been about who decides what is true. Representative democracy embodies the promise that citizens, drawing on their lived experience and common sense, can collectively judge what is right and good.

Governing complex societies requires specialised knowledge, such as a mastery of statistics, law and economics, which must be generated and interpreted by experts. Citizens bring values and practical insight to democracy; elites filter information, weigh evidence and transform competing ideas and claims into feasible policies. Democracy does not capitulate to expertise, but it cannot dispense with it either.

For much of the history of Western democracy popular participation grew while states created professional public services, universities trained experts and ostensibly objective methods for justifying policy, such as statistical analysis, acquired the appearance of neutrality.

This settlement always carried the seeds of its own destruction. Whenever knowledge becomes purely technical and self-referential the ability to participate in debate narrows and decisions are taken without popular engagement.

In populist counterreactions, citizens reject the monopolisation of truth by elites and reclaim a place for common sense and ordinary judgment. This can widen participation and break the spell of elite and expert complacency, but it can easily slide into contempt for knowledge, the treatment of evidence as manipulation and the castigation of experts and expertise.

The contemporary “post-truth” moment in the West is therefore not an unprecedented collapse of reason but rather the breakdown of a long-standing and unstable balance. Today’s struggle over what Rosenfeld calls “epistemic authority” — who decides what counts as fact — is worsened by social media’s circulation of information, stripped of context, while algorithms reward novelty, outrage and tribal loyalty.

All democracies, not just Western ones, are vulnerable to “epistemic breakdown”: distrust of institutions, populist suspicion of experts and competing truth claims. Even in the Thembu tribal meetings of Nelson Mandela’s youth, where “all men were to be heard and a decision was taken together as a people”, there was an elite side to the epistemic bargain. The regent would sum up what had been said and form a “consensus” among the diverse opinions. Democracy survives only if truth is filtered, stabilised and institutionalised.

Elites and experts have to accept that knowledge without legitimacy will cause a backlash. Citizens must recognise that popular common sense without evidence and expertise invites manipulation. Democracy fails when either becomes predominant; it survives only when a precarious balance between them is maintained.

The greatest challenge for all democracies — and perhaps especially for newer democracies in middle-income countries such as South Africa — is that the factors that disrupt the uneasy balance between elite judgment and popular instinct are not easy to control or change.

We can in principle regulate social media and contain the potential threats posed by fresh technological developments such as AI. But declining trust in institutions, resentment of elites and the circulation of conspiracies all feed on deeper social divisions, including economic inequality and exclusion from meaningful citizenship.

When material divides widen, institutions lose credibility and become deeply detached from expert knowledge. When citizens inhabit dramatically different material worlds, it becomes impossible to sustain a shared account of reality and expertise starts to look like privilege hiding behind a different name.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Ramaphosa is likely to see out his second full term as state president

ANTHONY BUTLER: Enemies dream, but Ramaphosa is enjoying his presidential role

Few believe his deputy, Paul Mashatile, would improve the ANC’s dire electoral prospects

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

November 21, 2025

Cyril Ramaphosa is unlikely to be forced from office because neither the ANC nor parliament has the will or unity to remove him, and he has multiple avenues to stay in power even if party dynamics shift, says the writer. (Thapelo Morebudi)

Recent weeks have brought another outbreak of wishful thinking among President Cyril Ramaphosa’s enemies. Symptoms include a recurrent and feverish dream in which he is on the verge of resigning, perhaps to spend more time with his cattle. There is also a delirious fantasy that the ANC’s national executive committee will summon the collective will to oust him from office.

The president will survive until the December 2027 elective conference of the ANC, the dreamers usually concede. But they insist he will be ejected from office soon afterwards, perhaps as part of a millenarian frenzy that propels deputy president Paul Mashatile into the Union Buildings.

The sad end to the terms of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma is typically brought forward as evidence. Both were forced to resign under the threat of a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly.

Is Ramaphosa really destined for a similar exit? There is no indication that he is willing to step down and he seems to be rather enjoying himself. Mbeki and Zuma have taught us that politicians with the drive to reach the highest office will not easily relinquish power.

Few ANC leaders are convinced that Mashatile would be an effective state president. Fewer still believe he would improve the party’s dire electoral prospects. If he becomes ANC president it will be due to his mastery of internal ANC machinations alone.

The former liberation movement no longer has a majority in the National Assembly and this is the only body that can remove a president through a vote of no confidence. Such a vote would almost certainly be held by secret ballot.

In a landmark 2017 case the Constitutional Court held that the speaker has discretion. The present speaker — for a variety of reasons — will not concede to pressure for an open vote. Who can be confident that a majority of MPs would vote for Ramaphosa’s defenestration in a secret ballot, given that so few have undergone a genuine Pauline conversion?

The ANC would be threatened with a fresh and possibly existential crisis, and Ramaphosa could exercise other options. Mbeki and his cronies created the Congress of the People to pressure the faction that ousted him. Zuma formed the MK party in the same spirit.

While Ramaphosa is unlikely to create a new party, it is quite common for presidents to switch parties — or abandon party affiliation altogether — to protect the “broader national interest” (in other words, their own continuation in office).

Take Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president in 2019-22. He ditched the social democrats, with whom he was long associated, and was elected with the Social Liberal Party. After clashes with the party leadership he left while still president and governed without a party for more than two years, only later joining the Liberal Party.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, from whom Ramaphosa may have acquired his fondness for Ankole cattle and associated sofa beds, originally came to office through the National Resistance Movement, which was not a party at all until it suited Museveni for it to become one.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s leader, was part of the Islamist Welfare Party and then the Virtue Party, both later banned, before co-founding the Justice & Development Party in 2001, only to remain in power for two decades as prime minister and then president.

The fact that presidents can remain in office by switching parties, creating new parties to retain or consolidate power, or rising above all party affiliations does not mean they will do so. However, such a possibility introduces further uncertainty into the calculations of those who might want to oust them.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Elections no longer secure democracy

ANTHONY BUTLER: Trivial elections and decline of electoral democracy

First published in Business Day

October 24, 2025

Anthony Butler

A voter holds a ballot paper during the country's general election at Thyolo District, south of Blantyre, Malawi, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer
A voter holds a ballot paper during the country’s general election at Thyolo District, south of Blantyre, Malawi, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer

The daily news from Donald Trump’s America has alerted people worldwide to the fragility of democratic regimes. The truth is that global democracy was already in sharp retreat.

The democratic ideal, celebrated in 1994 as SA transitioned to freedom, assumed a simple equation: prosperity begets democracy, and elections define democracy.

Yet as we survey the political landscape of 2025 the pillars that supported such optimism are crumbling. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project reveals a dire trend: 72% of the world’s population now live in autocracies, the highest number since 1978.

Countries such as China have become prosperous while remaining steadfastly autocratic, destroying the old confidence that development causes democratisation.

Elections occur more than before, but fewer of them are meaningful. Countries with huge populations such Indonesia and India have slipped into “electoral authoritarianism”: they hold elections, but incumbents rig the outcomes not by simple ballot box stuffing but rather by media capture and censorship, undermining election management bodies, weaponising tax and prosecuting authorities, repressing or banning civil society organisations and using social media to amplify manufactured polarisation.

Elections are historically recent devices that are increasingly unable to deliver government in the interests of the governed.

Ancient Athens, credited in the West as the birthplace of “rule by the people”, deliberately avoided elections for almost all roles, relying instead on random selection, which embodied equality and averted domination by entrenched elites.

Similarly, former president Nelson Mandela described the Thembu tribal meetings of his youth as “democracy in its purest form”, characterised by deliberation and consensus, where “majority rule was a foreign notion” and all men (if not women) were heard. These earlier systems focused on direct participation in the interest of the governed, not the selection of rulers through the ballot box.

When modern electoral systems did emerge they were driven by the impossibility of direct democracy in large societies. As the franchise expanded from wealthy males to the poor, political elites created safeguards to protect their property from redistribution: indirect elections, judicial review by conservative constitutional courts, independent central banks, and other instruments to frustrate popular agency.

We are seeing the rise of “democracy with Chinese characteristics” as a substitute for today’s shambolic but autonomous collective action. Under this model the state uses pervasive surveillance and data analytics to identify social grievances in real time, responding to them to maintain legitimacy without the cost and noise of democratic protest and campaigning.

While emerging AI technologies initially promised better governance, they are better still at spreading disinformation, manufacturing deepfakes and undermining trust in institutions. These technologies move faster than our capacity to regulate them. AI-powered anticipatory governance could soon harness big data and predictive analytics to prevent crises before they emerge, which risks bypassing public debate entirely.

A fightback for electoral democracy may be a long shot, but it is conceivable. Recent U-turns in countries such as Brazil and Poland demonstrate that autocratisation can be reversed. Key to these successes has been countering orchestrated disinformation, exposing corruption linked to strongman leaders and restoring the institutional infrastructure for meaningful elections.

The African continent faces unprecedented demographic growth alongside an unfolding climate change-induced collapse of livelihoods, which together will bring widespread, poorly planned urbanisation and politically destabilising population movements across borders.

SA is meanwhile seeing a sharp drop in electoral participation, with just four out of every 10 of the eligible voting age population participating in last year’s national elections.

It is a cruel fact that democracy is not an institution granted, but rather requires a constant state of defence and active participation if it is not to be lost just a few decades after it has been found.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Sarupen likely to take Zille’s position

ANTHONY BUTLER: Ashor Sarupen a likely, and good, successor to Zille in DA council

Although strongly associated with Helen Zille, Sarupen cannot easily be painted as her puppet or proxy

First published in Business Day

10 October 2025

Helen Zille’s adoption as the DA’s candidate for the mayorship of Johannesburg has generated a good deal of excitement, but the vacancy she will leave behind in her current position as the party’s federal council chair may be even more consequential. 

In a party constitution apparently designed to generate confusion, the DA federal council is the governing body between meetings of the federal congress — the party’s supreme elective gathering, which is convened every two or three years.

The federal council is a hodgepodge that contains members of the federal executive — the top leadership of the party — provincial chairs, some regional chairs, public representatives from the national, provincial and municipal legislatures, and various other panjandrums.

It takes key decisions between congresses, approves candidate selection regulations and holds the party’s public representatives to account. It is required to meet at least three times a year, but typically does so far more often.

The chair of the federal council is responsible for the administration of the party, running its internal machinery, pushing through implementation and managing co-ordinating structures. Any chair must work closely with the federal leader — for example Mmusi Maimane or John Steenhuisen — who is the public face of the party but may not always seem to be in charge.

James Selfe, who served as federal council chair for two decades under the federal leaderships of Tony Leon, Zille and Maimane, kept a low public profile. In contrast, while Zille has been praised for her organisational skills, she has loudly voiced controversial and sometimes polarising views that have weighed on her party’s efforts to broaden its electoral appeal. 

Her successor, who will be elected at the next federal congress in April next year, is likely to be the 37-year-old Ashor Sarupen, who has been an MP only since 2019. Although strongly associated with Zille — her former chief of staff and leadership campaign manager — he cannot easily be painted as her puppet or proxy.

A rational and classical liberal, like Selfe, he eschews Zille’s eccentric anti-wokeism and her flirtations with neocolonialism. He worked his way steadily up the party ranks as a city councillor in Ekurhuleni, a member of the Gauteng provincial legislature and, since 2020, as a deputy federal council chair. 

Beyond knowing how to keep a low profile, he has two strengths that may recommend him to the party congress. First, he has expertise in economics and corporate strategy, served as DA spokesperson on the finance and appropriations committees, and has by all accounts been a successful deputy finance minister in the government of national unity (GNU). These are crucial skills in a politics dominated by fiscal fantasy. 

Second, he is a professional campaigner. A decade ago he played strategic roles in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng and then national election campaigns. Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday, he emphasised the need for modernisation and an increased digital marketing spend relative to still-essential ground campaigning. Such a mindset is essential if the DA is to have any chance of significantly increasing its vote share given the absence of a national branch footprint. 

In 2022, the ANC elected a professional campaigner, Fikile Mbalula, as its secretary-general, in a position similar to that of DA federal council chair. It seems likely that the DA will follow suit and choose an analytically minded campaign manager who has demonstrated strong tactical successes and understands both traditional and digital campaign tools, to the position of federal council chair. 

Many DA activists feel the party has underperformed under the leadership of Zille and Steenhuisen. There is every chance they will happily dispatch Zille to the battle front in Johannesburg and then choose Sarupen to rebuild party consensus around a less contentious variant of liberalism and recalibrate and modernise campaign strategy. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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A president and a PM, at home and abroad

ANTHONY BUTLER: Ramaphosa excels as president but prime ministerial duties are lacking

While shining at UN General Assembly, at home he fails to address stagnant economy, failing municipalities and dodgy police leaders

First published in Business Day

26 September 2025

An SA president has to be both a president and a prime minister, because the country’s modified parliamentary system merges the roles of head of government and head of state into a single office.

As prime minister Cyril Ramaphosa is the head of the executive branch of government, chosen by and accountable to parliament and required to maintain the “confidence” of the legislature to remain in office. He sits at the apex of a centralised administrative system, controlling cabinet appointments, influencing budget allocations and wielding authority within the governing coalition. He also has to win elections on his party’s ticket.

Simultaneously he is the head of state, a role that in most parliamentary systems is held by a separate, often ceremonial, figure such as a monarch or a figurehead president. As head of state he has to rise above daily partisan politics to represent and speak for the entire nation.

These two roles sit uneasily together. The partisan and inherently divisive nature of a prime minister’s job repeatedly conflicts with the inclusive, unifying responsibilities of a president. A successful leader must navigate these tensions, but no postapartheid president has fully succeeded in this task.

Nelson Mandela was a president but not a prime minister, excelling at the symbolic, unifying presidential role but showing little interest in the administrative machinery of state, delegating those prime ministerial duties to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki was the opposite: a prime minister but not a president. He expertly managed the state apparatus and policy process, but his political style was divisive and factional, and he failed to provide the unifying presidential leadership the country needed.

Jacob Zuma used his prime ministerial power to appoint cabinet members as a tool for patronage, disrupting the state for personal and factional goals. His presidential leadership was limited, appealing mainly to his provincial base and traditional leaders rather than the whole nation.

Ramaphosa has done his best to combine these roles with some dignity, rebuilding state institutions undermined by his predecessors and keeping his party together while also looking to provide unifying and symbolic leadership during crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the tensions in SA’s political system become extreme when overlaid by a second challenge: a president has to lead overseas but also address crises at home. As Ramaphosa addressed the 80th UN General Assembly this week he cut a strikingly presidential figure, laying out his priorities for SA’s foreign policy: global justice, peace, trade, and UN reform.

He strongly condemned what he described as violations of international law in Gaza, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, voiced concern over genocide findings, called for an end to a vindictive embargo on Cuba, and reiterated support for rights to self-determination.

He reminded listeners that climate change is an existential threat, highlighting how Africa, despite contributing little to the causes of climate change, suffers disproportionately from its effects. He sounded the alarm over cutbacks in international development assistance; collapsing health programmes; and weakened maternal, child and adolescent health indicators; and proclaimed that the world must “fight poverty, not wars”.

The strain between foreign commitments and domestic politics troubles leaders in almost all countries. Look at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who can claim some remarkable achievements abroad — re-establishing relations with European partners and keeping the Trump administration onside — while confidence in his leadership has collapsed at home and his party is already scrabbling round to identify a new leader.

As president Ramaphosa was eloquent in New York. Back at home though, there was no prime minister to talk to the nation about a stagnant economy, municipalities that can no longer provide water and a police service leadership in whom the public has lost almost all residual trust.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Trump may just be the beginning

ANTHONY BUTLER: Maintaining US democracy amid threat of strongman rule

Rise of populism will induce other presidential candidates to embrace authoritarian aims

29 August 2025

First published in Business Day

South Africans like to complain about the feebleness of their president and his seeming inability to get anything done. Yet citizens of the world’s most advanced banana republic have a far worse problem: a leader running roughshod over democratic institutions. 

It is tempting to attribute this crisis to the personality of Donald Trump, to sinister corporate interests linked to the Republican Party, or to the vagaries of the historical moment. But a new book by William Howell and Terry Moe, Trajectory of Power, shows that the underlying drivers of strongman rule in the US will not abate at the end of Trump’s presidential term. 

The US constitution envisages a separation of powers between three branches of government, and a federal system that disperses agency. For much of the 20th century Republican and Democratic presidents alike pursued greater unilateral power. They shared a common motivation to establish legacies as great leaders and to achieve significant accomplishments, which led all presidents to embrace unilateral options to circumvent the normal policy process. 

A factor enabling this expansion was the rise of the “administrative state”, which has provided presidents with vast resources, expertise and personnel to deploy. When public support for presidential activism increased, the Congress and courts delegated substantial discretion, leaving presidents opportunities for unilateral action — executive orders, memoranda and national security directives, but also discretion embedded in legal statutes and the appointment of activist agency leaders to enact change through rule making.

Leaders of both parties, meanwhile, expanded the “institutional presidency”, creating a centralised and politicised White House whose reach was extended by the Office of Management & Budget and the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs. 

Where Republicans and Democrats have differed has been over fundamental objectives. Democrats have sought to regulate business, expand rights and mitigate inequality, poverty and discrimination, generally supporting the administrative state and viewing its agencies as partners in these “liberal” missions.

In contrast, Republican presidents have staunchly opposed much of the administrative state, seeing it as “progressive overreach”. From Ronald Reagan onward they have tried to control, retrench and generally sabotage federal agencies. This approach has been influenced by the unitary executive theory, a Republican legal framework that claims exclusive presidential authority over the entire executive branch, allowing presidents to ignore statutory constraints and aggressively reshape or cut administrative and regulatory interventions.

To maintain democracy, Howell and Moe argue, four steps need to be taken. First, the existential threat posed by the strongman presidency must no longer be denied. A demagogue with authoritarian aspirations really can use the vast unilateral powers vested in the presidency to subvert the basic features of democratic governance. The rise of populism and its support for strongman leadership is a continuing force that will induce other presidential candidates to embrace authoritarian aims. 

Second, the unitary executive theory must be countered because it makes a mockery of the separation of powers, allows presidents to ignore statutory constraints, and encourages them to interpret the constitutionality of statutes themselves. Clear legal boundaries for executive authority must be established and upheld by the courts — a consideration that applies in other countries to “revolutionary” doctrines that purportedly place parties above the state. 

Third, democracy dies when elites brazenly flout democratic norms, practices and rules. Such arrogance should never be accepted, even on the grounds that the leader is responding to crisis or making government more effective. 

Finally, the administrative state is foundational for a healthy democracy, for delivering services, and for solving any society’s problems. Attacks on the rule of law and the impersonal exercise of power by the state are direct threats to democracy.

The grinding work of rebuilding and protecting impersonal state institutions remains a fundamental tenet of benevolent national leadership. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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SA’s human rights crisis

ANTHONY BUTLER: Worsening human rights crisis a reality that cannot be ignored

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have joined the US in painting a depressing picture of SA

First published in Business Day

15 August 2025

A dispassionate assessment may be better than a “national dialogue” even if it is wrong. After all, its findings can be rationally accepted or contested. For example, the department of international relations & co-operation reacted negatively this week to the release of the US state department’s global report on human rights, describing its SA section as “inaccurate and deeply flawed”.

The congressionally mandated annual review has long been a staple reference work for international human rights advocates. This year’s delayed issue follows a shake-up at the department’s bureau for democracy, human rights & labour, which US secretary of state Marco Rubio previously lambasted as a platform for “left-wing activists”. 

The “reoriented” state department assessment cites the signing into law of the Expropriation Bill as a “substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country”, and highlights claimed “antisemitic rhetoric” at high levels of the government. These are tendentious claims and they can be contested.

SA is not the only country whose human rights environment has supposedly worsened in a manner convenient for US foreign policy. For example, this year’s report took aim at Brazilian courts for suppressing the speech of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Favourites of President Donald Trump, such as Israel and Russia, received implausibly positive assessments. The host of US migrant detention centres, El Salvador — castigated only a year ago for arbitrary killings, torture and harsh and life-threatening prison conditions — suddenly smells of roses. 

However, other assessments of the human rights situation in SA also paint a depressing picture of the country, most notably the annual country reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Amnesty points to a worsening situation in several areas: high levels of gender-based violence, with perpetrators enjoying impunity; the judicial system failing to process cases; a high murder rate accompanied by a decline in police capacity to respond; nationwide water shortages attributed to vandalism and ageing infrastructure and a white paper that threatens to erode refugee rights. 

HRW points to anti-immigration rhetoric and xenophobia, increasing violence against women and girls, and a growing scourge of severe child malnutrition, with severe food poverty among 23% of children. It also details unlawful arrests and deportations of asylum seekers. Both reports note excessive force in criminal justice, increasing deaths from police action, and violence against human rights defenders — including killings linked to their work by state actors. 

It is reasonable to question the veracity of the products of the Trump administration, but no doubt we should also read the publications of do-gooder international organisations with a sceptical eye. Such reports exhibit political and cultural biases, the influence of their funders, and often fail to capture the situation on the ground accurately. But when they all suggest there is a deteriorating human rights environment, it is important to sit up and listen: to go beyond reflex rebuttals and take seriously the evidence upon which these claims are based. 

SA is fortunate to have a state president who has viewed human rights not just as legal principles but as core values that should guide governance, promote equality and ensure dignity for all, driven by his understanding of constitutionalism and a belief in inherent human worth. Indeed, Amnesty had a pivotal influence on Cyril Ramaphosa’s life, campaigning for his release during his first detention, funding his family’s legal expenses, and subsequently offering support to make his life after detention more tolerable.

What differentiates the assessments of external organisations from a domestic “national dialogue” is that they allow us to compare change over time and across countries. They are grounded in factual claims that can be contested or accepted. In contrast, the national dialogue will only generate further indeterminacy and ambiguity. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Why we don’t get the leaders we need

ANTHONY BUTLER: Executive credentials would be a boon for presidential candidates

Endeavours of frontrunners Paul Mashatile and Fikile Mbalula have been disappointing

 First published in Business Day

18 July 2025

In his recent study of executive power in pre- and postapartheid SA, Super President, University of Johannesburg academic Bhaso Ndzendze highlights a striking institutional shift. None of the country’s democratic-era presidents has held a ministerial portfolio before assuming the highest office. While most served as deputy presidents, their exposure to the machinery of government was indirect and more ceremonial than substantive. 

As Ndzendze shows, the traits now essential to becoming president, such as media savvy and the ability to build patronage networks, have little to do with the technocratic or administrative demands of governing. This marks a sharp contrast with apartheid and colonial-era predecessors, who almost uniformly passed through cabinet roles, often retaining ministerial authority even while occupying the presidency or prime ministership.

Ndzendze’s claim that national governance would benefit if future presidents were required to hold ministerial posts concurrently will be strongly contested. But there is a strong case for electing a president who has demonstrated executive capability. 

Zweli Mkhize campaigned unsuccessfully for the ANC presidency in 2022. He had been a strikingly effective health minister from May 2019 to August 2021, steering the country through the Covid-19 crisis with a combination of steely efficiency and respect for science.

Few contenders to succeed President Cyril Ramaphosa can boast similar executive credentials. The endeavours of the two front-runners have been disappointing. Deputy president Paul Mashatile was a middling minister of arts & culture, whose main achievement was successful completion of a visit to sample cheese varieties in France. 

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula travelled widely in 2010-17 as minister of recreational activities. Later and more demanding portfolios, dealing with policing and transport, exposed his inability to master complex policy challenges.

Some of Ramaphosa’s recent ministerial appointees have performed with distinction, but few are plausible candidates for the presidency. A few are in the wrong party. Others are demographically challenged by virtue of being white; or, if black, nonetheless too white. 

Candidates associated with KwaZulu-Natal are in demand, because only an anticipated collapse of the Jacob Zuma cult keeps alive the mirage of ANC renewal. National Assembly speaker Thoko Didiza, a superb former minister, would make an excellent president but her gender identity — and her honesty — are career limiting. 

This means Senzo Mchunu — an exceptional minister with strong support in the ANC — has been a frontrunner. He is ageing, but prominent global icons — one thinks of Noam Chomsky, Clint Eastwood, David Attenborough, Jane Fonda, Jürgen Habermas, Olusegun Obasanjo, the Dalai Lama and columnist Peter Bruce — have continued to perform at the highest level despite their advancing years. 

Unfortunately, when the highest office beckons a leader such as Mchunu is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny from the media and the financial intelligence agencies. At the same time, they need to acquire resources for their bid. How do you build a campaign machine and secure the half-a-billion rand you need to compete, much of it in cash, when under such enhanced scrutiny? 

Some are business tycoons with magical cash dispensers in their sofas. Others try to divert state resources to pay for their campaign vibes. A few are sponsored by parastatal supply chain barons, or magnates who control illicit tobacco, alcohol, or construction mafias. Still others ingratiate themselves with international sponsors from countries that specialise in internet manipulation and are happy to stuff banknotes into their diplomatic bags. 

The crooks are specialists at covering their tracks, and they tend to succeed in this game. Capable ministers, who also need cash and a communications machine, find that acquiring these necessary campaign tools brings about their ruin. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Commissions of Inquiry Predictably Impede Prosecutions

ANTHONY BUTLER: Zuma likely to share blame for collapse of state capture prosecutions

Rather than chiding the NPA’s head, the focus should be on former president’s decision about the timing of commission of inquiry

First published in Business Day and BUsinessLive

20 June 2025

SA citizens like to blame the national director of public prosecutions for the collapse of state capture prosecutions. They should rather take on the politicians who deliberately brought about this predictable outcome. 

Critics stridently insist National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Shamila Batohi must stop making excuses and immediately prosecute potential miscreants flagged by the Zondo state capture commission. On Tuesday she even had to listen to demands for her resignation from an MK MP, Sibonelo Nomvalo, who called her “incompetent” at a parliamentary justice committee meeting. 

This comes on top of a Centre for Development & Enterprise (CDE) report last week that called for a new NPA appointment mechanism. The CDE’s executive director, Ann Bernstein, pointedly observed that “without the right appointment process … the country risks repeating past mistakes”. 

But rather than castigating the NPA’s head it might be more instructive to focus, as the British media have done this week, on political leaders’ decisions about the timing of statutory commissions of inquiry.

Immediately after scandals involving “grooming gangs” — groups of men who targeted vulnerable children for sexual abuse in Rotherham and other English towns a decade ago — there was a circumscribed independent inquiry (the Alexis Jay Report).

Authorities were concerned that a judicial inquiry would interfere with outstanding or possible prosecutions. Only this week did Prime Minister Keir Starmer — himself a former prosecuting agency head — institute a full public inquiry into the scandal. 

In contrast, former president Jacob Zuma set up a commission to proceed in parallel with ongoing investigations, in full knowledge that statutory inquiries have legal powers that sit uncomfortably with criminal law. Zondo witnesses often received “Section 3(4)” undertakings under the Commissions Act, meaning they could claim privilege against self-incrimination during their testimony. Their compelled answers were generally inadmissible against them in a later criminal trial. 

Zondo’s final report predictably created headaches for prosecutors around what lawyers call derivative use of evidence and tainted investigations. Defence lawyers can argue that prosecutors only discovered evidence because the accused was compelled to testify, which can be challenged as a violation of the constitutional right to a fair trial.

They can also argue that evidence was gathered in a process that would not have satisfied the requirements for criminal investigations, potentially opening the door to constitutional challenges. The Constitutional Court has not yet had an opportunity to clarify when derivative use of inquiry evidence is permissible and under what conditions compelled evidence contaminates a criminal case.

Judicial inquiries can certainly run alongside criminal investigations in a well-resourced justice system. Police and prosecution teams can be embedded alongside commissions, actively involved in separating out evidence safe to use in court. But the NPA had no resources or capacity to do this. 

This means the NPA has to reconstruct criminal cases. Gathering fresh evidence independently of the commission’s work depends on new witness interviews, independent forensic audits, fresh financial records, and lawfully obtained search and seizure material, all of which requires human and financial resources the NPA still lacks.

This all illustrates a well-known “sequencing” finding from comparative law and politics: public inquiries, without strong prosecutorial institutions working in parallel from the start, make successful criminal prosecution harder rather than easier. This is why countries typically avoid running full public inquiries in parallel with criminal investigations.

When Zuma appointed the Zondo commission — albeit under heavy legal and political constraints over its terms of reference — we can assume he was fully aware how events would unfold. After all, he had the best possible legal advice — we were paying for it.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Vulindlela Phase 2

ANTHONY BUTLER: Operation Vulindlela will have to remain lean and mean

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

09 May 2025

The fanfare that surrounded Wednesday’s launch of the second phase of the hitherto low-key Operation Vulindlela shows how central the project has become to the credibility of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s otherwise faltering reform programme.

Vulindlela was born out of crisis, established in October 2020 as a joint initiative of the presidency and National Treasury to fast-track the delivery of reform in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had long been recognised that structural change was crucial to addressing the underlying causes of low economic growth, but Covid-19 broke down political and institutional barriers to change. 

Initially focused on a narrow list of priorities with the greatest impact on growth and employment, Vulindlela aimed to “modernise and transform” — in truth to salvage — network industries including electricity, water, transport and digital communications, and to remake the visa regime to attract skills and promote tourism growth.

While departments and state-owned entities would still implement structural reforms, a dedicated unit bridging the presidency and the Treasury was created to monitor progress, provide “technical support” and generate clear recommendations for political principals to endorse. 

The first phase went pretty well, though slowly, with reforms to enable private operators to access the freight network and participate in container terminal operations, a re-engineered water-use licence application system, auctioned high-demand spectrum, streamlined telecommunications infrastructure regulations and an updated visa system. All this resulted in somewhat cheaper data and fewer needlessly excluded skills, and unlocked investment in several sectors. 

The government’s review of the first phase observed last year that there was “still a long way to go” in the performance of ports and the rail system, an assessment that applies across most of Operation Vulindlela’s areas of focus. Vulindlela will have to drive its existing initiatives — and prevent backsliding — as it moves on to fresh problems in a second phase that presents four key challenges.

  • The issues Ramaphosa has now placed on its plate include broad digital transformation, a technical quagmire that has defeated the most capable reformers in other countries.
  • Operation Vulindlela’s success has always hinged on private capital mobilisation. Without credible, predictable delivery frameworks — and faster impact timelines — economic benefits will remain limited. Sceptics believe bureaucratic delays will continue to undermine investor confidence in sectors like rail, ports, energy and digitalisation.
  • Operation Vulindlela can only be a supportive partner, and it will continue to be hampered by the lack of technical and managerial capacity in the wider civil service, conservative state-owned enterprises, water boards and other government agencies.
  • Finally, the politics will only get rougher as Operation Vulindlela’s scope of activities embraces local government and it becomes generally more politically exposed. Reform threatens entrenched interests and so brings pushback from unions, opposition parties and monopolistic entities resisting competition. Vulindlela may not be able to depend on political protection from the incoming president — or from their senior ministers — after December 2027. 

Fiscal constraints, slow growth and a rising debt burden will continue to hamper Operation Vulindlela. Reforms requiring public financing or major contingent liabilities, including infrastructure investments, water system development and a local government reboot, will be delayed or downscaled.

Politics precludes any major shift from consumption to investment spending, but SA desperately needs to invest in the future. As is so often the case, crisis has made reform possible, but it has denied reformers the resources they need to realise their goals. This means Vulindlela will remain lean and mean, and we should salute its foot soldiers as they venture across new political minefields. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.