The WEF Party

What Atlantic agents want for a new dispensation in South Africa

2024 is now universally seen as a watershed moment. With the ANC on their way out, the smaller parties are salivating as the chance of sinking their teeth into Pretoria. This happens at a rather crucial juncture for international politics too.

With a recession looming, Russian minerals off the international market, and South Africa holding some of the largest mineral deposits on earth, eyes are turning here. It doesn’t hurt that we are also a favourite tourist destination for the Western mega-wealthy. And as the ANC leadership competition starts to heat up, the question will be whether South Africa pivots away from the West towards Russia and China as trade partners.

And so of course, the World Economic Forum has an interest. The WEF (as most of you no doubt are aware) is not an apolitical business forum. Rather, it is an instrument of American foreign policy which aims to foster public-private cooperation on global governance strategies on behalf of the trans-Atlantic establishment (with a sort of Club of Rome Malthusian transhumanist ideological flavour), and was set up in cooperation with Henry Kissinger and the CIA.

Given certain of their desired policies - open borders, MMT (basically slow-motion global Mugabenomics) universal basic income, ESG (basically global BEE with a Green component) and the retirement of the vast majority of the workforce (“the useless class”, as one of their lead thinkers puts it), South Africa offers a massive testing ground for policy in a high-unemployment, high welfare, multiracial society.

Their primary means of influence is to nurture young talent through mentorship programs, and ensure the promotion of loyalists in every state in the world, so that when they wish to see a global-level policy reform, they can subvert hesitant governments from within.

And Lindiwe Mazibuko has been the leader selected to run this program in South Africa, under the umbrella of an organisation called “Apolitical”. Their main mechanism is providing scholarships and spurious awards for friends in the civil service to pad their CVs with, like they did for the City of Cape Town’s COVID response, which they declared the best in the world.

I can appreciate CoCT were thoroughgoing conformists on COVID policy, but to claim theirs was the best response in the world beggars belief, especially compared to South Korea and Taiwan (at least by establishment standards).

Mazibuko has boasted of looking for recruits from the ANC as well, though what she hopes to find there is anybody’s guess. At least she has Tito Mboweni, who came to teach a class for her at Harvard at her request. But his primary inspirations for monetary policy, as he so often makes known, is Karl Marx and cannabis. Sounds promising (lol).

Lindiwe Mazibuko does not appear to have turned to foreign backing for deeply principled reasons. It is much more plausible that she is driven by her career, and a grudge against the DA, who refused to endorse her for leadership, and continue to endorse nonracialism, while she believes that the racial discrimination South Africa is now famous for is a good thing.

Saying the DA has been “captured” by “a certain faction”, and should head towards more ANC-like policies, is rather strong language coming from one in her position. The reason for the black exodus is a simple one, actually – the DA have finally gotten on back on board with nonracialism, and Mashaba, Maimane, Mazibuko and Ntuli insist racial discrimination must be preserved, whether for electoral reasons or personal.

Her main obsession – political gatekeeping – is precisely what her organisation was constructed to do – keep out opponents of global governance. But they offered her a ladder.

And now she is using that ladder to climb into parliament. Together with Mbali Ntuli, and Songezo Zibi. The notable thing about the former DA crowd is their narcissism. None of what they discuss in public is about policy, it is all about identity and career advancement. These are seedy and corrupt people. They consider their primary allegiance to be to themselves, and secondarily, foreign agencies.

Lindiwe is quoted as preferring the style of politics conducted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes. But for those outside the progressive bubble, AOC is known for hysterical public theatrics, cynical accusations of bigotry, insincerity and wildly unrealistic policy positions, endorsement of partisan political violence and the persecution of political opponents. No bueno.

More interesting is the proposed presidential candidate, Songezo Zibi. Zibi is an Open Society Foundation man, an ally of the Oppenheimers’ Brenthurst Foundation, and a former ABSA bank man who headed up the Rivonia Circle think tank, an organisation that stands for the replication of the same value and policy framework which has dominated South Africa for the past 30 years, just with new faces.

His book Manifesto is mainly focused on constitutional reform, but is light on long term policy or grand strategy beyond “promoting skilled professionals” and “increasing political participation”. Zibi insists that it has to be more than a political party, it has to be a “movement”, to give people a sense of ownership. But the ANC was also a movement driven by mass participation. Popular participation can easily be contained to providing legitimacy for policies formed among elites.

It can also be a hole in the ground for the funds of hapless oligarchs, like Rob Hersov’s millions sunk into Mmusi Maimane’s stone-dead project for coordinating independent political candidates.

The means Zibi offers to achieve his ends is to rewrite the constitution through referenda. Some of his suggestions are imminently sensible – constituency-bound MPs who can be held accountable. But in context with other reforms like the abolition of the provincial sphere, his suggestions bear some resemblance to Gaddafi’s Libyan constitution – a two-level state comprised of a powerful national government, and hundreds of powerless micro-level constituencies. MPs would rule small districts in multiparty committees (yikes).

This offers engagement on local issues, but practically speaking, this sort of arrangement ensures the country will be wracked by coalition politics at every level. This divisive weakness only deepens the unstable coalition system we can look forward to under the current constitution, which hands the opportunity for influence to power brokers in the national executive, the civil service, the private sector giants and foreign-funded NGOs.

What this collection of people are best defined by, is what they avoid discussing – foreign lobbyists, permanent oligarchs, BEE, welfare, public debt, and economic policy. None of these seem to them to need changing.

The idea of the national centre which is being offered, is the Mandela-era compromise between white supremacy and black national-socialism – ever-growing state largess, majoritarian racial discrimination, deficit spending, increasing foreign ownership of the economy, and preservation of the 100-year mining oligarchy. Blaming the Zuma presidency, calling illegal immigration a non-issue, insisting on “national unity”, fulfilling the promises of 1994. Its vapid and insubstantial. “Apolitical” indeed.

It is fundamentally a status-quo party, aiming to preserve all the current features of the political landscape, only hoping to do so without any of the costs, a technocratic approach to a crisis of meaning, beholden to foreign agenda-setters.

It is almost certain to be another tiny sliver of a party, and all the WEF resources will fall soundlessly into that pit of despair that is SA party politics. At least I hope so.