Tag: politics

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Undesirable leaders

ANTHONY BUTLER: No avoiding the glut of putrid political leaders

Does power attract twisted personalities, or does it turn decent people into monsters?

First published in Business Day

January 09, 2026

'Failed politicians never go away. At best they linger and whinge. At worst they re-invent themselves and return to power.'
Power-hungry individuals are certainly drawn to high office, craving status, recognition and control. (123RF/prazis )

As citizens embark on this year’s political journey, they must reckon with the disconcertingly wide array of unappealing political leaders worldwide.

According to contrarian political scientist Brian Klaas, three character traits are widespread among such leaders. The first is Machiavellianism, defined by scheming and interpersonal manipulation.

Machiavellians use deceit, fabrication and inflated credentials to secure positions of authority, and they treat colleagues as pawns rather than human beings.

A second trait is psychopathy — an inability to feel empathy — which is accompanied by impulsivity, recklessness and aggression. Psychopaths can ascend to political office by employing superficial charm: they do not react to the pain of others, but they can mimic empathy to manipulate those they intend to exploit.

Psychopaths’ brains are inactive in regions associated with moral decision-making, allowing them to view people as tools rather than as human beings, facilitating amoral choices, and reducing hesitation when committing monstrous acts.

The third trait, narcissism, is characterised by arrogance and grandiosity. Narcissists are disproportionately drawn to power because they possess an inflated sense of entitlement and seek constant fawning from subordinates. Because they are so confident, they fail to recognise their own incompetence until the system they lead suffers catastrophic failure.

Attracting the corruptible

Why are such traits so widespread among political leaders? Do positions of great power attract twisted personalities, or does political power turn decent people into monsters? As Klaas puts it, does power corrupt, or does it simply attract the corruptible?

Power-hungry individuals are certainly drawn to high office, craving status, recognition and control. They may be unusually effective at navigating party selection processes and political campaigns. Their superficial charm makes them appear likeable and competent, and they are willing to fabricate credentials or lie about their past. They project a sense of certainty easily mistaken for competence.

Humans are hardwired to favour leaders who project strength, masculinity and dominance, which were survival advantages on the prehistoric savanna but can be irrelevant or dangerous today. These archaic biases persist, leading to an irrational preference for physically imposing men — a shirtless Vladimir Putin comes to mind — during perceived security threats, which can be fabricated.

Power also changes incumbents, however humbly their careers may begin. Psychologist Dacher Keltner has shown that gaining power can shift one’s cognitive orientation from cautious to proactive and risk-oriented. Powerful individuals come to believe, wrongly, they can control outcomes, which results in flawed risk assessments and ultimately gambling with people’s lives.

Moreover, as people feel more powerful, they lose social inhibitions, eat impulsively, drive recklessly or engage in sexual affairs, because they no longer worry what others think of them.

Most important of all, even decent political leaders face “dirty hands” problems — moral dilemmas in which they must commit unprincipled acts to achieve a greater moral good.

Machiavellians and narcissists can do wrong easily, untroubled by conscience, but the dilemma has also confronted moral leaders throughout history.

Winston Churchill allowed the HMAS Sydney to be sunk by Nazi forces to protect the secret that the Enigma codes had been cracked, sacrificing lives that could have been saved to help win the wider war.

Abraham Lincoln used bribery to secure the passage of the 13th Amendment, acting dishonestly to end the greater evil of slavery.

Less grandly, and more ubiquitously, politicians everywhere make trades with nefarious funders whose backing is required to win elections. In middle-income countries such as SA, such disturbing moral calculations are routine.

Ultimately, the public expects politicians to be principled, but leaders must perform unprincipled acts to survive and, perhaps, to preserve society.

What appears to be a corrosion of character is frequently just the weight of governing in an inherently immoral situation.

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

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The G20 revealed a shift in South Africa’s foreign policy

ANTHONY BUTLER: Shifting from China focus to balanced foreign policy

Balancing global partnerships is SA’s new foreign strategy

5 December 2025

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s firm handling of his US counterpart during a successful G20 process has modified popular views about his capabilities. He is still a lousy president on domestic matters, the conventional wisdom now goes, but he is rather good at foreign affairs.

However, the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is far from clear-cut. Countries seek agreements with their peers, but any deal must be ratified at home by legislatures, interest groups, citizens and political parties. Negotiators respond to the preferences of their domestic constituents while using pressures at home as leverage in international forums. In practice, the two levels of negotiation are simultaneous and continuous.

South Africa’s foreign policy has long been criticised for insufficiently prioritising economic growth and development at home. Turf wars between trade and foreign affairs officials have made an integrated approach hard, while debates about race and transformation have undermined co-operation between big business and government.

The major international crises during Ramaphosa’s first term — the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war — created space for a reorientation of Pretoria’s goals and instruments. Behind the smokescreen of a theatrical confrontation with President Donald Trump, the final G20 summit revealed three related shifts in South Africa’s foreign policy.

After a decade of emphasis on a China-dominated Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) forum, a significant rebalancing has taken place. Former president Thabo Mbeki cautioned about the danger of falling into a new “colonial relationship” with China, noting that exporting raw materials while importing Chinese manufactured goods would leave Africa “condemned to underdevelopment” in a replication of European colonialism.

The new, more balanced, approach recognises that South Africa benefits from Chinese markets and financing but that we also need European investment and global standards access, and alternative vehicles for South-South co-operation.

In a second development, the G20 cycle underscored the maturing and pragmatic relationship between South Africa and Europe. European countries remain by far the biggest investors in this country, and the eurozone hugely surpasses China as South Africa’s biggest trading partner.

The G20 summit unveiled a sharper instrumental and pragmatic focus on critical minerals, sustainable energy transition and trade standards, in place of previous performative issues of political alignment and misalignment.

South Africa signalled deepening co-operation on energy transition supply chains, with the critical minerals needed for batteries, wind magnets and hydrogen infrastructure framed as a durable area of strategic alignment. South Africa wants investment in local beneficiation while Europe wants reliable supply.

In a third development on the margins of the G20 process, leaders of the three Ibsa countries — India, Brazil and South Africa — indicated their determination to revitalise the forum as a channel for South-South co-operation outside the broader Brics agenda.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has established a close working relationship with Ramaphosa, while India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was uncharacteristically effusive. Ibsa is the one major trilateral South-South forum that allows South Africa strategic autonomy, avoids being folded into Sino-centric diplomacy, and facilitates co-operation between large democracies (or just-about-democracies in India’s case) that share concerns about norms, institutions, trade and energy transition financing.

Positive signalling about Ibsa takes place while Europe and the US are seeking non-Chinese industrial partners, Brazil is concerned about mineral supply chains and energy transition, India is positioning itself as a hedge power, and South Africa wants South-South development co-operation and beneficiation without sacrificing Western investment. Ibsa provides a platform for these various goals to align without the geopolitical baggage that sometimes surrounds Brics.

The real test of these three shifts in South Africa’s international orientation lies not in their intrinsic elegance and rationality, but rather in their sustainability, and in whether they will deliver the fruits of stability, co-operation and economic development.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. He recently published a book about the post-apartheid presidents, ‘Presidential Power’.

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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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Bifurcated political systems

ANTHONY BUTLER: Does Mamdani have what it takes to deliver change in New York?

First published in Business Day

November 07, 2025

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, in this November 5 2025 file photo. (Kylie Cooper)

Right-wing curmudgeons around the world are eagerly anticipating New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s forthcoming collision with reality. They are certain there is no way a 34-year-old political novice can transition from fronting a campaign to running a huge city such as New York. I’m not so sure.

Mamdani’s operation was close to flawless, propelling him from little-known state assembly member to Democratic Party nominee in months. He secured the right endorsements from prominent figures such as Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez. And he raised large sums from small donors ― the average donation was about $80 ― and so avoided indebtedness to powerful interests.

His campaign focused on the affordability crisis in the city, proposing rent freezes, free transit systems and higher taxes on the wealthy. Such complex issues will not allow for simple solutions. As equally great cities like Paris and London have shown, however, there are plenty of interventions that are both pro-poor and pro-economy.

Mamdani has credited his parents for stimulating his interest in politics, and he may have imbued from his mother, the brilliant filmmaker Mira Nair, an intense sense of appearance. Like the most natural politicians, Mamdani has crafted a persona that appeals to a wide constituency. He engages seemingly effortlessly in a continuous self-narration, an autobiographical performance of that persona embedded in his daily conduct.

He has campaigned on complex and sensitive issues, including the conflict in Gaza, without making mistakes and without simply rehearsing talking notes prepared for him by others. This suggests ― to a degree more and more unusual among professional politicians ― that he understands what he is saying, even when he is traversing a political minefield.

His father, the Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, once wrote a critique of Americans’ framing of Islam and Muslims, pointing out that it was US support for anti-Soviet campaigns in Afghanistan during the 1980s that gave birth to modern militant jihad. This had the merit of being true.

Mahmood senior’s most influential book, however, was Citizen and Subject,published in 1996. Drawing on his research in SA and Uganda, he argued that the legacy of colonialism lived on in a distinct form of state power. Colonial rule in Africa created a dual or “bifurcated” political system that separated people into urban citizens and rural subjects. In cities, colonial governments established a civil legal order resembling European political rights, accessible only to settlers and a narrow African elite. In rural areas, colonisers ruled indirectly through customary authorities — mostly chiefs who were appointed and empowered to enforce “tradition” and control local populations.

Mamdani’s conception of the bifurcated state has travelled beyond African studies, not because of its nuance and accuracy, each of which is questionable, but because of its intrinsic political appeal. Researchers and activists have found parallels in India, where colonial indirect rule through princely states and tribal areas produced enduring differentiated citizenship, for example, through scheduled tribes.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, customary law and “native” political authority ostensibly continue to shape local governance and group rights. In Latin America, colonial authorities have arguably maintained communal land systems and traditional leaders as instruments of rural control.

Bold scholars have even applied the concept to Israel and Palestine, suggesting that the legal differences between citizens and people under military occupation echo the divide between citizen and subject. And in the US, indigenous nations and racially segregated governance carry echoes of a similar bifurcation.

This is a powerful sentiment that the mayor-elect has tapped into. Many people intuitively understand the idea of a contemporary subjecthood, a bifurcated reality in which it is we who are the subordinate population lacking substantive citizenship. The young Mamdani may have inherited a formula for fighting back against right-wing populism.

• 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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A new iteration of BEE is possible

ANTHONY BUTLER: Consensus about BEE policy needs to emerge

First published in Business Day

12 September 2025


The contentious debate about broad-based BEE (BBBEE) has been a real problem for the country. If coalition government between constitutionalist parties is to survive the next decade, some rudimentary consensus about the policy needs to emerge.

Until recently the polarisation has been deepening. BEE’s defenders insist it has created a black capitalist class, black managers and professionals who would otherwise have remained excluded. It has also brought changes in employment equity, skills development and enterprise support.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has always championed the framework he helped create and from which he benefited so handsomely. He has rebutted claims that BEE hinders growth, framing it as an investment in the economy, not a cost. He has strongly backed the Black Industrialists Programme and a proposed R100bn Transformation Fund to bolster black entrepreneurs. Last year he supported legislation to reinforce compliance through enhanced incentives and possible punitive measures such as fines and public “naming and shaming”.

The president’s only real accommodation of critics has been support for the Equity Equivalent Investment Programme, which allows multinationals to invest in skills, innovation and supplier development rather than transferring equity directly.

BEE has meanwhile faced intensifying criticism from opposition parties, businesses and civil society, who argue that the main beneficiaries have been a politically connected, ANC-linked elite rather than ordinary black citizens. It has been a mechanism for patronage, with state contracts channelled to politically connected business people under the guise of empowerment. BBBEE has also been weaponised to justify corrupt procurement practices.

The DA’s hostility has hardened. The party rejects race-based legislation and proposes instead a nonracial economic empowerment framework with a “social impact” approach to integrate sustainable development goals into procurement and other regulatory frameworks, and an “economic empowerment for the disadvantaged” model to target poverty rather than race. An empowerment index for companies would meanwhile measure their social and economic inclusivity to mobilise shareholder activists.

Civil society actors want to replace elite enrichment with broad-based, skills-driven, employment-generating empowerment, by prioritising employee share ownership schemes, community trusts and co-operatives over elite ownership deals, and linking state support and contracts to demonstrable worker and community benefits.

There has also been renewed interest in ordinary citizen investment in stock markets through their pension or investment policies, in carefully designed retirement schemes that encourage saving, in expanded home ownership, and in reducing the barriers to entry that shut out the small, medium and micro enterprises that are the most immediate mechanisms of economic empowerment for most people.

Some of the dwindling band of ANC intellectuals have been influenced by Malaysia’s recent rethink of indigenous empowerment. Its new road map for economic transformation for the bumiputera (sons of the soil) refocuses on upskilling and mentoring of particular individuals, helping smaller enterprises move up the value chain, and giving empowerment agencies dedicated roles as talent developers or “super-scalers” of businesses — with measurable outcome targets, rather than broad objectives or mere compliance metrics.

The ANC’s recently released discussion documents for December’s national general council (NGC) show a flickering — if not yet a significant uptick — of the liberation movement’s formerly flatlining cognitive functioning charts in this area. The NGC “base document” concedes that BEE has primarily incorporated an elite minority of black people, and a few women, into the existing capitalist structure.

It insists that empowerment policies must be “reoriented to benefit more than an just elite few”, and suggests employee ownership trusts and co-operatives, better support for small, black-owned businesses, a public venture capital fund or credit-guarantee scheme, and BEE incentives linked directly to actual job creation.

What is needed is a bit more academic research and an open mind on all sides about potential change. A broad consensus on the way forward might conceivably yet be forged. But don’t bet on it.

  • 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.