The onslaught of the oligarchs: How global influences shape South African governance

President Ramaphosa is currently staring at politics like a deer caught in headlights. Lacking the bravery of a Mandela or a Zelensky, he is once again, in typical fashion, trying to win favour without winning any ground in the war on democracy. 

His African diplomatic sojourn to Ukraine and Russia ended in his embarrassing verbal defeat. His attempts to dress up a delinquent Johannesburg nicely for his foreign visitors are embarrassing. His Bela and Expropriation Bill signing was a political power play that became a PR disaster and caused great harm to the country and economy. He still has been unable to go on any charm offensive to explain himself and defuse debate on the two issues. His call for “people to refrain from partaking or engaging in action that may seem inflammatory and worsen the already volatile diplomatic relationship with the US" at Ebrahim Rasool’s return from the USA will have the exact opposite effect. So too, has he failed to engage the EFF to stop singing the ‘Kill the Boer’ song.

In similar clumsy fashion, he formed a government of national unity without the due mechanisms to manage it properly. Why has Cyril Ramaphosa been so clumsy? The answer is quite simple. Ramaphosa is part of the global oligarchy. His various connections to billionaires worldwide will have given him the same mindset as Donald Trump and Peter Thiel. They govern with impunity. But more than that, they find the systems of traditional governance cumbersome. The destabilisation of traditional government is part of their technological war on the civil service. Oligarchs want three things: tech teams that provide them with yottabytes of information within seconds that cadre deployment can never give them in a decade. They want as little bureaucracy (read ‘people and rules’) as possible and, thirdly, lots of money from the former two. Don't for one moment think that the world's billionaires are not conversing with each other about global dominance. Democracy and a vast civil service are outdated concepts for the new tech empire builders. They can run an entire government from a server room in a garage. 

The civil service as we once knew it is no more. Citizens queuing for months on end to get help from the government no longer move them. They are simply told, 'We are improving or renewing our online systems.’ Under the richest president we’ve ever had, we have seen traditional government departments fail repeatedly. Don’t for one moment think the two are unrelated. While Musk guts government departments in the US, ours are allowed to fail over and over until they are privatised permanently. Globally, political oligarchs are privatising government departments for complete control by technology companies owned by powerful oligarchs. In that world, there is no democracy or human rights. There is only technology and profits, with promises of nirvana and significant savings for delusional taxpayers. The truth is your government is being outsourced to unelected oligarchs who will, in the future, control what you have access to. And here is the biggest danger: they will, like civil servants of old, lose interest in keeping their technology updated and will only have an interest in making more and more money. When their systems fail, millions will be locked out of access to pensions, medications and ID cards. Only this time, there will be no place to queue. You will be alone. 

Your job as a voter is to stop giving away your government to the richest bidder. Not every piece of technology is your friend. Democracies are far too cumbersome and outdated for oligarchs to make more and more money. They prefer their new form of government, the technocracy, where they account to no parliament or public. Only to their technology. If this sounds too dystopian for you and fills you with scepticism, you are exactly the kind of voter they need to ensure their power grab. 

Cape Argus