An hour ago I was driven past the Walmer police station in what used to be Port Elizabeth. It’s in a good area. The roads are clean and busy, the shops and businesses look smart and prosperous. All South Africa should look like this. Passing the police station still shook me; it was right here that Steve Biko, who I knew a bit, was murdered in September 1977.
You’d have thought that in the absence of the demolition of this ugly memory there’d at least be a bust of Steve at the entrance. It’s the site of arguably apartheid’s most politically consequential murder. But there’s nothing.
I assume this is because he wasn’t ANC. Yes, there’s a Steve Biko Bridge in East London and an unrecognisable statue outside the city hall. There’s a hospital in Pretoria that, like many things the ANC names after struggle heroes, has been left to decline. Biko was bigger than the slap of his name on the end of a bridge, but like many people who gave their lives so we could live in a democracy, he is slipping from memory.
Time is cruel. And we do democracy no favours by harking constantly to the past. But what do you do with so many South Africans today who moan that democracy doesn’t “work” anymore? In their dreams they have jobs and homes and money. Water comes out when they turn on the tap and it doesn’t cost the earth to buy a car.
The fact that more than half the population have none of this is not the fault of democracy, but tell that to them. It’s the system, they’ll reply: what’s needed is a strongman. Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma ply this trade and it won them a bigger share of the vote in May than the DA. That may say more about the DA than it does about them, and fortunately they are not speaking. But in the US an experiment in pushing democracy to its limits is under way, and it’s on our phones and TVs and it’s happening in English.
Trump is directly challenging nearly 250 years of constitutional democracy
President-elect Donald Trump is appointing zealots to his cabinet and while they need Senate confirmation Trump controls that too. His foreign policy picks will support Israel’s unbearable war on Palestine. His pick for attorney-general, Matt Gaetz, has been investigated in the past for sex trafficking and perhaps understandably wants to shut down the FBI.
His health nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is an anti-vax millionaire conspiracy theorist who wants kids to drink raw milk and to remove fluoride from America’s drinking water. Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who shot her 14-month old dog because it was “untrainable”, would get homeland security. Tulsi Gabbard, a cheerleader for Russian President Vladimir Putin, would become national intelligence director, overseeing 18 US agencies.
Trump is directly challenging nearly 250 years of constitutional democracy by insisting his election gives him the right to do what he likes and he is using a strong democratic mandate to attack the democracy that put him in office. Zuma or Malema would do the same.
The dangers are unintended consequences. Trumpists want a powerful America to throw its weight around. Voted into office by an electorate tired of inflation, Trump will use new import tariffs to try to grow jobs in the US, and if that leads to higher prices he’ll try to stop the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates to combat them.
Political interference in the Fed would provoke a huge crisis of confidence in US capital markets and begin an irreversible decline of the dollar. The greenback’s dominance started after World War 2 when, in addition to pouring billions of dollars into European reconstruction, the US opened its impossibly deep markets to imports from the rest of the world and paid for them in dollars.
Trump is going to teach us why we need to be careful with our democracy even though it has been such a poor vehicle for the delivery of prosperity for the majority of South Africans. The system now, flawed as it is, at least guarantees us some degree of accountability.
Anything less and we’d still be stuck with a generation of liberation and post-liberation politicians who would steal from the blind. The ANC has us in an economic mess we can’t easily escape and we must hope America and the world survive Trump. They probably both will but it will be an ugly four years.
Our duty, meanwhile, will be to protect our democracy by always demanding more of it. I often wonder what Steve Biko would have made of South Africa now. I’m pretty sure, looking around him at the poverty and the pain, he’d be angry as hell. We should still all be angry.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.