Who's who in the Godfather version of Trump's White House

The never-ending scandals surrounding the Trump administration reached hysterical levels recently with the allegation that in 2016 Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., met with Russians allegedly linked with the Kremlin to secure damaging information against the Clinton campaign.

The media reacted by publishing a series of pieces that compared Trump’s son to another troubled scion of a great family, Fredo Corleone, brilliantly played by John Cazale in the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy.

Separated at birth? Fredo Corleone and Donald Trump Jr.
Boston Globe via Twitter

Fredo is the runt of the Corleone litter – lacking the macho bravado of his elder bother, Sonny, and the ruthless cunning of his younger brother, Michael. But to compare Donald Jr. with Fredo seems something of a lazy comparison – especially in the light of how many alarming parallels there are between the Corleone and Trump clans.

Now, there’s no suggestion that the Trumps leave severed horses’ heads in rivals’ beds, ship drugs and literally “whack” opponents, but closer and more considered review of these families provides not only similar characters but also some potential plotlines that might ensue for The Donald – or, should we say, The Don?

Vito: meet The Don

First and foremost, Donald Trump is the head of the family in the same way that Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone was the head of his clan. Vito was a gangster, a self-made man who dragged himself up from poverty though crime and made himself and his family rich and powerful in the process. Trump is no gangster but certainly likes to put himself forward as a self-made tycoon who is the greatest of dealmakers (neglecting to acknowledge that his wealth was inherited from his father).

But how do the other players in the Trump saga fit the characters from Mario Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s films? Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., actually more closely corresponds to Sonny – played in the film by James Caan. He is headstrong, arrogant – but, above all, dim. He doesn’t see the big picture and is eager to “go to the mattresses” and have a metaphorical gang war instead of being a sly diplomat like his father.

Donald Jr. showed the same hot-headedness in taking the Russians’ bait: “I love it,” he is reported to have replied to an email suggesting that he might be interested in a meeting to hear how Russians had been digging the dirt on Hillary Clinton. This lack of caution has prompted talk of potential felony charges that might well leave his political career, just like Sonny – cut short at a causeway tollbooth.

Ivanka, the most visible of the Trump children, corresponds neatly with Vito’s daughter, Connie (played by Talia Shire, Coppola’s sister). Connie is supposedly the good daughter, not involved in the family business, but is eventually scarred by it. Connie becomes something of a black widow but also enormously influential in the Corleone clan structure. By the third part of the trilogy, she is not only feeding poisoned pasta to rival mobsters but is also the de facto capo bastone (underboss) of the Corleone family (almost unheard of in such a patriarchal organisation). We won’t be seeing Ivanka poisoning her rivals, but, like Connie, she is a power player.

Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, meanwhile, has taken on a public role as Trump’s special adviser or consigliori, a position similar to that filled by Corleone’s Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall).

Will the real Fredo please stand up?

If there is a Trump who is a fit for Corleone’s second son, Fredo, it is Donald’s second son, Eric. Poor Eric is rarely wheeled out to face the media. And he appears to embody many of Fredo’s fictional flaws: he certainly doesn’t come across as the sharpest knife in the drawer.



Another weirdly relevant parallel with Fredo is that, before the US election, Eric was nominally in charge of Trump International Las Vegas. Fredo, of course, was packed off by the family to Las Vegas to look after the Corleone’s casino holdings there.

Keeping it in the family

It’s easy to see metaphorical parallels between the Trump organisation and Puzo’s picture of a Mafia family. As well as a consigliori in Kushner, The Don has surrounded himself with trusted lieutenants – or capos, to quote the Mafia lingo. Prominent among these is Steve Bannon.

In a previous life, Bannon ran the far-right website Breitbart, known for its pugnacious tone. “We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club’. You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy,” he is reported to have said.

While the Corleone capo, Pete Clemenza, encouraged Vito Corleone to the top, Bannon was an early cheerleader for the Trump presidential campaign. In the White House, as Trump’s chief of strategy, he also shares some key Clemenza qualities, most obviously his pugnacious nature. Bannon’s trust has been tested by internal divisions in the troubled White House – but you just know he’d be dangerous when cornered.

But we need to address the one obvious omission. Michael was the Corleone child kept away from the family business so that a clean break could be made from its criminal past. Michael would go legit. However, just when he thought he was out … they pulled him back in. Who might fulfil this role in the Trump dynasty? Step forward Tiffany. She is an unknown quantity but may well be the one to rescue the clan from the mess in which it is now embroiled.

For Tiffany, destiny awaits. That destiny might be to become Capo di tutti capi … The Godmother.

Martin Carter, Principal Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The Mummy: what our obsession with ancient Egypt reveals

Universal

With another version of The Mummy menacing cinemas, the “curse of the pharaohs” is back. Again. Hollywood’s determination to put marauding mummies in our sights suggests we still haven’t reached “peak curse”, almost a century after the sudden death of Lord Carnarvon made headlines.

So why was the idea of ill-fated Egyptology so alluring in the 1920s, when Carnarvon and Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb – and why does it keep returning to haunt us? One answer is that our obsessions are never really about the ancient past. They arise from the perspective people develop at a given moment, as they use the ancient past to express their own anxieties – and aspirations.

The 1920s offers a case in point, as I explore in my new book. At the same time the treasures of Tutankhamun and the curse of the pharaohs caught the imagination of mainstream culture, two modernist movements (Pharaonism in Egypt, the Harlem Renaissance in America) were interpreting ancient Egypt in a very different way. To them, ancient Egypt was an inspiration to take seriously, not turn into a fun, or a fright, show.

King Tut

In November 1922, backed by the Earl of Carnarvon, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. To the British press, it was the first positive news from Egypt in years. (Egypt had been a difficult “veiled protectorate” since 1882, and earlier in 1922 Britain had decided to let Egypt elect its own government while keeping hold of foreign affairs and the Suez Canal.) And so the world went mad for “King Tut”, as he was quickly dubbed.

Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opening the wall to the burial chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamun, February 1923.
Photograph by Harry Burton

In England and America, popular songs, stage shows, and fashion design all celebrated Tutankhamun, as did advertising for everything from biscuits to cigarettes. There were Tut-themed balls in New York, student hi-jinks at Cambridge University, and a life-size recreation of the tomb’s antechamber built for the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 and seen by more than 27m people at Wembley Stadium, which was built for the purpose.

Call it Tut-mania, as many people do, but there was a certain method beneath the madness. The more King Tut could be treated as “one of us”, with “us” being white Euro-Americans, the more it seemed like he belonged to “us”, too, along with the rest of ancient Egypt. What better way to make a claim on culture than commodify it? Even news coverage and photographs of the tomb were for sale: Carnarvon gave The Times (of London) exclusive access to the find in return for a share of its profits. That riled other news outlets – including the thriving Egyptian press, suddenly banned from reporting a discovery in its own back yard.

Other Egypts

But neither Carnarvon nor Carter had thought about how much this rare find – the only royal burial discovered more or less intact – would mean to modern Egyptians. Poets and playwrights lauded the resurrection of Tutankhamun, comparing it to the rebirth of Egypt itself after centuries of slumber. The movement for an independent Egypt went hand-in-hand with an artistic and literary movement known as Pharaonism (Fir‘awniyya). No one could dispute the might of the Egyptian pharaohs. Rulers such as Ramses or Cleopatra, plus symbols such as sphinxes and pyramids, were harnessed to express the ambitions of the new state – and the antiquity of its roots.

Nobel prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who had witnessed street uprisings against Britain in his childhood (and visited the Cairo Museum), used ancient Egyptian themes in his first novels, while the Paris-trained sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar raised public subscriptions for his colossal sculpture “Nahdet Misr”, “Egypt’s Renaissance”. Carved, like the lid of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, out of red granite from Aswan, the sculpture pairs a sphinx and an idealised image of Egyptian womanhood. It now stands outside Cairo University – an institution whose founding the British administration had opposed.

Egypt’s Renaissance, 1919-28, Mahmoud Mukhtar.
Zerida / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

The antiquity and independence of ancient Egypt spoke to other 1920s cultural movements, too – including the group of African-American writers and artists known as the Harlem Renaissance. “Egypt” and “Ethiopia” were both synonymous with an Africa free of European control: Egypt because of its ancient history, and Ethiopia because it had fought off an Italian invasion in 1896.

“Ethiopia Awakening” was the title of an Egyptian-themed statue by Philadelphia-born Meta Warwick Fuller, who had studied with Rodin in Paris. It represents a woman with a beatific expression, black physiognomy, and a pharaonic head-scarf, unwinding herself from the constraints of mummy bandages. Cast in bronze, the statue featured in the “Colored Section” of the America’s Making Exposition in New York in 1921, organised to celebrate immigration. Although African-Americans had been forced migrants in slavery, organiser WEB DuBois saw a chance for the exposition to promote their contribution to the US. Meta Warwick Fuller turned a mummy into a force for good: there is no curse or vengeance in her Ethiopia sculpture, just freedom – or the longing for it.

Egyptomania

We admire the 1920s as the Jazz Age, an era when what we think of as modern Western mores sprang from the ruins of war. But what looks more sophisticated in retrospect: Britain’s imperial adoption of Egyptology and the Western commercial mania for mummies and King Tut, or the creative output ancient Egypt inspired in Egyptians and African-Americans, in the same decade?

“Ethiopia Awakening” looked to a future based on dignity and equality, as did “Nahdet Misr” – while the British Empire Exhibition, with its Tutankhamun replicas, looked to the rapidly setting sun of British imperialism. Perhaps any curse in Carnarvon’s untimely death wasn’t from what he and Carter discovered, but what they overlooked – that theirs was not the only “ancient Egypt” out there.

It’s a useful caution that we should look for the method that might lie behind any Egyptomania today, whether that entails movie franchises or museum displays. Turning sacred objects (which is what mummies were, to the people who made them) into light entertainment hardly flatters any of us. Nor does imagining the Middle East as an origin-place for horror and a threat to white masculinity, this time in the guise of Tom Cruise. If we are doomed to rehashing The Mummy, in other words, it’s a curse not of Egypt’s making – but ours.

Christina Riggs, Reader in Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Three ways the Charlie Gard case could affect future end-of-life cases globally

Supporters outside the now-abandoned case in the British High Court, rallying for infant Charlie Gard to travel to the US for experimental treatment. Peter Nicholls/Reuters

The tragic case of Charlie Gard, the British infant whose parents have just ended their legal fight to send him to the US for experimental treatment, has captured global attention.

The case is significant for a number of reasons, both in the huge amount of publicity it has attracted, its progression through several courts, and the number of influential commentators who became involved.

Not only does the case highlight the challenges for parents, doctors and judges in making end-of-life decisions about critically impaired infants, it is unique in another respect. It highlights the changing role of the wider public in shaping how decisions about medical treatment are made.

Here are three factors from the Charlie Gard case that could influence future cases around the world.

1. Using social media to mobilise support

More than any case of this kind, advocates for Charlie Gard have been effective in mobilising support using social media and the internet.

Early on, Charlie’s family set up a website (with merchandise available), as well as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts to highlight how they disagreed with doctors about their son’s care. The social media campaign was further bolstered by hashtags #charliesarmy and #charliesfight to keep the topic trending.

The campaign, which brought together supporters under the banner of “Charlie’s Army”, attracted support from US President Donald Trump, and the Pope.

The online campaign also raised awareness of Charlie’s rare genetic condition, mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, which in his case, resulted in muscle weakness and irreversible brain damage.

The social media campaign helped gather support for several protests about Charlie’s care. We’ve also seen criticisms of, and death threats against, Charlie’s treating doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, again fuelled by social media.

Clearly, Charlie’s case has been played out both in the courts of law and the court of public opinion. The courts were asked to decide upon emotional and ethical issues. Yet, in this case, every aspect of Charlie’s life seems to have been played out through social media.

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Further reading: Charlie Gard: who is best placed to decide his fate?

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It’s time to ask ourselves whether matters that ultimately concern life and death, particularly of the most vulnerable and who cannot speak for themselves, be considered more privately. In this light, we may need to reflect on whether a social media campaign really has a place, not only now but in future cases.

In future cases where parents and doctors disagree on treatment decisions, will the Charlie Gard case form a template for how to rally public support? And could a similar approach influence future decisions about broader medical treatment, not just about end-of-life care?

2. Crowdfunding to pay for unauthorised treatment

In a novel move for cases of this kind, Charlie Gard’s supporters had raised £1.3 million via a GoFundMe crowdfunding initiative for him to be able to travel to the US for experimental treatment.

His parents and a handful of medical experts believed nucleoside experimental therapy, while not a cure, could provide a small chance of improving his quality of life. This is a claim Charlie’s treating doctors rejected.

With finite health-care resources, there’s a chance other families of critically ill infants could think of crowdfunding to fund a treatment doctors or the courts consider not in the best interest of the child.

The crowdsourcing campaign raised £1.3 million to send Charlie Gard to the US for experimental treatment.
Screenshot/gofundme

Yet crowdfunding for medical expenses is not as simple as setting up an account or website. There are processing fees, and other tax and legal implications to consider.

Beyond that, we need to ask ourselves what happens when crowdfunding money runs out and how people choose which campaign to donate to. We also need to consider not only how crowdfunding affects issues of privacy, but also how it affects the wider issues of fair and appropriate access to medical treatment.

3. Fuelling anti-establishment sentiment

End-of-life decisions for critically ill infants have traditionally been made privately, in collaboration between doctors and parents. Typically these decisions require an evaluation, among other factors, of the child’s best interests and quality of life. Parents generally tend to listen to and follow the advice of the medical professionals.

In this case, some may see the attempts of Charlie’s parents to overrule the courts, hospital and medical advice as a departure from the traditional paternalistic doctor-patient relationship (sometimes known as “doctor knows best”).

Unlike many others in this situation, Charlie’s parents had rejected not only the advice of the treating medical team, but have also repeatedly rejected the decisions of the courts, who are assumed to be fulfilling an independent and objective role.

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Further reading: When parents disagree with doctors on a child’s treatment, who should have the final say?

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Future cases will demonstrate whether the Charlie Gard case can be regarded as an indicator of a trend away from the medico-legal establishment. But, as some have indicated, “doctor knows best” is shifting to “parent knows best”.

Questions of “best interests” and “quality of life” are nuanced and difficult, but to Charlie’s vocal supporters in the court of public opinion, this case has been one of “us” and “them”.

We don’t yet know how this power shift will play out in future cases. But so far, public debates have been less about Charlie and his individual best interests, and more about the interests of others – be they political, “sticking it” to the establishment or being heard on social media.

Perhaps, in the future, the courts may want to regain some control in end-of-life cases by enforcing suppression orders (limiting what’s made public about a case) to avoid such a media circus.

Where to from here?

It is likely that this will become a seminal case for some of the above reasons. The case will also be discussed to some degree in both Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth jurisdictions, as evidenced by US President Trump’s involvement.

In the meantime, it might be prudent to pause and reflect. Amid all the noise of clicks, hashtags, likes, tweets and protests, we need to go back to the essentials. At the heart of this frenzy is a very ill 11-month-old infant, who was unable to express his wishes. Yet there were millions who thought they could do just that.

Neera Bhatia, Senior Lecturer in Law, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa's main opposition party can't cure its foot-in-mouth syndrome

Controversial: Helen Zille. EPA/Nic Bothma

South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has been on a steep upward climb since 2004. It has increased its share of the vote in every national poll to reach 22.23% in 2014; it has also greatly expanded its support at the municipal level, where in 2016 it secured 26.9% of the vote and ousted the ANC from control of major urban centres, such as Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth.

The DA has also broadened its support beyond its traditional Western Cape stronghold to build a national presence; a victory in the province of Gauteng, home to Johannesburg and South Africa’s economic hub, now looks far from inconceivable in 2019.

This was all made possible by the DA’s impressive progress under the leadership of Helen Zille, former mayor of Cape Town and now premier of the Western Cape. She stood down in 2014, partly in recognition of the fact that a society where politics is still defined by race would only have so much room for a party with a white leader. Her successor, Mmusi Maimane, the party’s first black leader, is trying to win support from previously indifferent or hostile black communities. He seeks to reposition the DA as a party not merely at ease with the new South Africa, but genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Maimane claims the DA has jettisoned the historical baggage which caused it to be viewed as the party of privileged white suburbia. Given that black Africans make up 80% of South Africa’s population, the toxicity of that image is self-evident. The DA’s campaign to build black support may still be in its infancy, but the 2016 elections showed that progress has indeed been made, particularly among the urban black population.

Still, the challenge remains formidable – and Zille, who once seemed to understand what the DA needed to do to win, has suddenly made it much harder.

Don’t go there

Having made way for Maimane several years ago, Zille crashed back into the debate recently with a now-infamous spurt of tweets in which she suggested that people bear in mind that colonialism left some positive legacies. Coming from a senior member of a party with a racially narrow electoral base in a still racially fractured society, this was at best idle self-indulgence, and at worst self-destructive small-mindedness.

In the space of a few minutes, Zille undid years of work. She reinforced the entrenched suspicion about the DA: that, at heart, it is nostalgic for the days of white minority rule, and is unable to comprehend how it is received in the black communities which endured settler colonialism, empire and apartheid. Her idle tweets lend credence to the idea that the DA simply does not or cannot feel black South Africans’ pain, and that it instead caters to the narrow prejudices of wealthy whites. It takes a wrecking ball to the edifice maintained by Maimane – and indeed, by Zille herself.



When challenged, Zille bafflingly kept it up. Yes, she was technically correct when she insisted that she didn’t defend colonialism per se. But her protestations are unconvincing; to quote a senior party colleague, John Steenhuisen, her behaviour is “utterly inexplicable”. She is experienced enough to know that perceptions are crucial in politics, and that her words reflect not only on her, but on her party.

So why did Zille think it necessary to open this debate now? With all that’s going on in South Africa, what makes this issue so urgent?

Perhaps she simply sees it as her prerogative to voice any sentiment she likes under her constitutional right to freedom of speech. But there’s simply no need to exercise that right in all circumstances, no matter the cost. What of her obligations to respect party policy and to do nothing which brings the DA into disrepute?

After all, as premier of the Western Cape, she is as conspicuous a figure as any in the party, so the original tweets and her subsequent justifications can hardly be dismissed as the ramblings of a minor functionary. And it’s far from unreasonable for those outside the party to conclude that her sentiments are shared more widely among her comrades.

Turning back the clock

Crucially, Zille’s behaviour grants the ANC a welcome reprieve just as it goes into meltdown over the various problems with Jacob Zuma’s benighted presidency. Now the party leadership can implore its constituency to cling to nurse for fear of something worse, ceaselessly deploying the Zille tweet in the months and years ahead to contrast itself with a supposedly racist and backward-looking rival.

And where the racist accusation cannot be personally levelled at DA figures, an alternative ANC narrative will quickly surface – namely that the DA’s senior black figures are little more than marionettes, their strings pulled by white puppeteers.

The DA leadership knows how vulnerable it is to that criticism, and is taking action accordingly. While Zille initially refused to apologise – an action bordering on extreme egotism – she eventually issued an unconditional apology for her behaviour on June 13, and has now been removed from any further role in the party’s internal structures.

While she remains premier of the Western Cape, her official sanction was a crucial victory for Maimane. Had Zille gone unpunished, his credibility would have been shattered. Still, it may yet prove too little, too late. For all the progress the party has made, it can only win power with a clear-headed strategy to attract many, many more black votes.

With her idle, tone-deaf musings, Zille has shaken her party’s structures, taken the heat off the ANC and undermined Maimane’s project. Her reputation is unlikely to survive, and the damage she’s done could take years to repair.

James Hamill, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

ANC policy papers point to a party in a panic about losing power

Reuters/Mike Hutchings

The documents released ahead of the policy conference of South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) expose a panicking party that sees enemies everywhere. While previous policy conferences addressed real policy issues, all energies are now focused on retaining state power as the leadership faces damning claims of capture by a kleptocratic elite.

The discussion documents show a party that professes a desire for self-correction and renewal. But, it seems to have neither the guts, nor the necessary internal balance of forces to do so.

At the same time the documents point to deepening paranoia and an increasingly authoritarian tendency. In combination, they seem to emanate from a parallel universe where the party’s interests have become elevated above those of the South African society at large.

Some of the text show a party that’s going through the motions. There’s trotting out of lofty ideals left over from when it still occupied the moral high ground. It’s a rhetoric that used to be meaningful and powerful. But it’s been emptied out by the ANC’s increasing failure to harness the state’s resources for the good of all.

For example, one of the documents “Organisational Renewal and Organisational Design” claims:

[the ANC’s vision] is informed by the morality of caring and human solidarity, [and its mission] is to serve the people of South Africa.

Beyond this nostalgia for what it used to be, the ANC documents display little sense of the depth and severity of the political, constitutional, economic and governance crisis facing South Africa. What does come across strongly, however, is a party that feels beleaguered and panicky about possible loss of state power.

Party and state are conflated

The “Organisational Renewal…” document issues the following admonition:

it is in the interests of the movement to… undergo a brutally frank process of introspecting and self-correction.

This sentiment is overtaken by disappointment over the party’s poor performance in the 2016 local government elections. Several pages are dedicated to investigating how other liberation movements became defunct. It transpires that the primary emergency is “to ensure that the ANC remains at the helm” of government.

Of course political parties are about getting and holding on to power. But because of the ANC’s habit of conflating party and state, there seems to be no understanding that its feeling of destiny – that it should rule “until Jesus comes” as President Jacob Zuma put it – won’t dictate the will of the people.

Parties get reelected because they demonstrably govern in service of the will of the people. If the ANC should demonstrate that, it will be returned to power in 2019 . If not, it won’t.

There is an admission that the,

moral suasion that the ANC has wielded to lead society is waning; and the electorate is starting more effectively to assert its negative judgement.

Significant sections of the motive forces seem to have lost confidence in the capacity and will of the ANC to carry out the agenda of social transformation [due to] subjective weaknesses [in the party].

These weaknesses are identified but in a way that skirts around the extent and depth of state capture. More and more evidence, including hundreds of thousands of leaked emails, have emerged that an Indian family of business people, the Guptas, has over the past numbers of years gained a hold over Zuma and a network of ANC leaders. This grip stretches from national to local level, and from government departments to state-owned enterprises.

But in the ANC documents black capitalists are blamed for “corrupt practices including attempts to capture institutions of political and state authority…” The Guptas only get an opaque acknowledgement with reference to lobbying:

[T]he lobbying process engineered by clandestine factionalism destabilises the organisation… Factionalism’s clandestine nature makes it a parallel activity…

But it’s almost as though the document’s authors don’t believe their own diagnosis, or the implications of the party’s “subjective weaknesses”. The document becomes contradictory. Even as it admits that the “motive forces” … “still desire such change and are prepared to work for it”, it starts to cast suspicion:

the mass of the people can, by commission or omission, precipitate an electoral outcome that places into positions of authority, forces that can stealthily and deceitfully chip away at the progressive realisation of a National Democratic Society.

The people are the problem, not the party

That “the people”, rather than a party that’s lost its way, are in fact the problem becomes more ominously clear in the document on “Peace and Stability”. Leninist vanguardism makes the party still feel it knows best, and that the people are useful fools.

It’s worth quoting the whole section to see the extent of the paranoia in the ANC and the array of enemies it creates to avoid confronting the enemy within.

According to the document, the main strategy used by foreign intelligence services is to:

mobilise the unsuspecting masses of this country to reject legally constituted structures and institutions in order to advance unconstitutional regime change. The alignment of the agendas of foreign intelligence services and negative domestic forces threatens to undermine the authority and security of the state.

Their general strategy makes use of a range of role players to promote their agenda and these include, but are not limited to: mass media; non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations; foreign and multinational companies; funding of opposition activities; judiciary, religious and student organisations; infiltration and recruitment in key government departments; placement of non-South Africans in key positions in departments; prominent influential persons…

A small clique vs South Africa

The proposed organisational renewal is to bolster the ANC secretary-general’s powers. Even this belated and lacklustre attempt to reduce the ANC president’s control over the party is compromised, as the clarion call of the discussion documents is “Let us deepen unity!”.

That’s why the actual enemies cannot be confronted, those that have insidiously corrupted the very life and soul of the party. Instead, a worrying paranoid and authoritarian tendency emerges. Its targets are journalists, judges, church and business leaders, activists, opposition parties, foreigners and intellectuals.

Nowhere is the fact confronted that Zuma, president of the ANC and the country, has ceded South Africa’s sovereignty to a foreign family, or that state-owned entities and government departments are being repurposed to enrich a small clique at the expense of South Africa’s people.

Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.