PresidentDonald Trump greets Elon Musk as he arrives to attend a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. SpaceX’s billionaire owner. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
If we thought state capture was bad in the Zuma era, look at what the Trump-Musk regime is doing — fast.
Let’s start by reviewing some of the things that happened on Jacob Zuma’s watch.
The capacity of the South African Revenue Service was gutted, with the removal of key investigative personnel based on trumped-up accusations. A loyalist tax commissioner, Tom Moyane, who had no tax background, was appointed and supported Zuma to the hilt.
Part of the Zuma bag of tricks is close ties to the intelligence community — he used fake intelligence dossiers to remove key people from office several times, including the minister of finance, Pravin Gordhan.
A criminal, Richard Mdluli, was put at the head of crime intelligence. The Independent Police Investigative Directorate was gutted, with the removal of executive director Robert McBride in 2016.
Other significant players in law enforcement were sidelined and removed to allow Zuma allies to loot the state systematically.
Why did Zuma need these allies in corruption? One of his problems is he was financially incontinent. No matter how much money he appeared to make, in the lead-up to his presidency, he was constantly short and needed to be bailed out by rich friends, most notably, in the early years, Schabir Shaik.
Shaik ended up being sentenced to 15 years in a trial that could have included Zuma but did not. Shaik was released on medical parole after two years then underwent a miraculous cure.
His most significant allies, once he became president, were the Gupta family, the first of whom arrived in South Africa shortly after democracy was established. Most of them subsequently acquired South African citizenship with some questions about varying the usual rules while close Zuma associate Malusi Gigaba was minister of home affairs.
The Guptas developed connections deep in state-owned enterprises and were implicated in numerous large-scale fraudulent transactions, eventually fleeing the country when faced with prosecution.
Zuma has been ducking criminal prosecution for many years. His legal team entered a new term into the South African legal lexicon: the Stalingrad strategy. They throw everything at a case to maximise delay.
Zuma is not dissimilar to President Donald Trump, with a staunch populist following that will not believe anything bad of him. He has been credibly accused of rape; the case went to trial but he was acquitted. The ANC Women’s League staunchly supported him despite the disturbingly misogynistic attitudes revealed in the trial.
For a while he commanded wide support in the governing ANC, particularly the youth league headed by Julius Malema, who infamously said he would “kill for him”. By 2012, Malema had split with Zuma and, after being expelled from the ANC, formed the Economic Freedom Fighters and the party subsequently called for Zuma to be jailed over state capture.
Zuma was to get his revenge in the 2024 national elections when his own uMkhonto weSizwe party took significant support from the EFF, and attracted staunch Malema loyalists away.
Zuma is a cunning, unscrupulous populist who harbours grudges and sees state machinery as his personal property.
How different is the state of the US from South Africa under Zuma?
Trump is a populist with an unshakable following who dismiss all scandals as “fake news” no matter how solid the evidence. He, too, is a sexual predator.
Like Zuma, he bleeds money, though he had a lot to start with. He has proved that it is possible to bankrupt a casino, usually seen as a licence to print money, and has faced down jail time by his own version of the Stalingrad strategy — more than a bit abetted by Judge Aileen Cannon, who allowed every time-wasting stratagem his team could think up in what should have been the easiest case against him — stealing classified documents.
Trump also harbours grudges and rides wealthy backers. That takes me to Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, what seemed like a foolhardy vanity purchase at the time. He swung it sharply right, eliminating fact-checking and changed its algorithm so views he favoured were massively amplified — not least by echoing them himself.
He made it impossible to unfollow himself. During the presidential election, he went full Trump. The final tally shows he put an incredible $288 million into backing Trump. With the cost of buying Twitter, that totals a third of a billion dollars. Huge though that sum is, it’s less than 0.1% of Musk’s net worth. Pocket change to the world’s wealthiest man.
So what has Musk bought for this deeply corrupt investment? Trump has announced 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, 10% on China. Musk is in the car business. Details of Tesla supply chains are not public. If Tesla relied deeply on imports from Mexico and Canada, major sources of car parts in the US, you can be sure Musk would have said something.
Some foreign companies, such as VW, are deeply exposed. As an economic nationalist that might not bother Trump but US-based manufacturers, such as GM and Ford, as well as Chrysler parent Stellantis, anticipate being hit hard. Tesla? Not a peep.
And that is just part of it. Like Zuma, Trump’s grudges include eviscerating law enforcement. FBI agents and managers and department of justice lawyers involved in cases against him have been fired in droves. Those involved in the 6 January prosecutions are also targets; the number of FBI agents fired could run into thousands.
He is gutting other aspects of government that could call him to account. Inspectors general are tasked with rooting out fraud and corruption in government departments. He has attempted to fire 17 of them in one go, a move that is being contested as unlawful (but nonetheless being enforced).
Musk has moved key personnel into top roles in government, particularly in HR, where ideologically-based dismissals are occurring and a large number of federal staff have been told they can resign “voluntarily”.
Musk as an industrialist is deeply conflicted and has had multiple run-ins with regulators; he is not even a member of the cabinet. In fact, all this started before much of the cabinet was in place.
One of the casualties of Musk’s power is Federal Aviation Administration administrator Mike Whitaker, who repeatedly clashed with Musk over SpaceX’s lax attitude to safety. Shortly after Whitaker resigned and the voluntary resignation letter to all federal employees, a military helicopter crashed into a civilian plane in Washington.
Trump was quick to blame this on “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) even making the bizarre and ludicrously incorrect claim that the Federal Aviation Administration employed mentally disabled people as air traffic controllers.
It could, of course, be a sad coincidence that planes are falling out of the sky on Trump‘s watch but, DEI or no, the US had an unparalleled record of air safety in the years before his return to office.
All of this is against the backdrop of eviscerating respected news media. South African-born billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is influencing the Los Angeles Times to support Trump, after making it back away from endorsing anyone for the election. Eric Reinhart wrote an article deeply critical of Robert Kennedy, Trump’s wackadoodle nominee for health and human services secretary. The paper edited the article to reverse its meaning. Jeff Bizos, owner of the once-revered Washington Post, forced it to drop endorsement of the Harris campaign and the paper has been bleeding writers and subscribers since.
Mark Zuckerberg has dropped fact-checking from Facebook. Add to this threats to sue media over anti-Trump stories and we are fast moving to an era where there are very few genuinely independent, quality news sources in the US.
Contrast that with apartheid South Africa where media owners at least pretended to support editorial independence.
Trump and Musk use culture wars to distract from their deeply corrupt motives. To the extent that Zuma does that, he is similar. But a key difference is that Zuma’s backers were opportunistic amateurs by comparison. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Soon-Shiong have immense resources to back them. They are not coming in to loot the state from a zero base.
So where does this leave the US?
Musk is extremely dangerous. Unlike Trump, he has a good idea how large, complex systems work. Even if his first attempt is incompetent, he can hire good people to fix the damage. He is an unscrupulous sociopath who has no compunction about lying on an industrial scale. He is more than capable of gutting the government to the advantage of his plutocratic friends who are shamelessly lining up behind Trump.
His purchase of the US presidency is an act of corruption that makes the Guptas look like pilferers of the change at a church fete. The compliance of his fellow billionaires means that the US is heading for a very dark time. Particularly as they have corrupted some of the most trusted media.Other than that some of these billionaires are from South Africa.
What does this all mean for us? It’s not like they will be sent back. If the US sneezes, the world catches a cold. The damage these people could do to the rest of the world means we have to care. Just one example — trashing US health agencies and the US pulling out of the World Health Organisation makes us all more vulnerable if another pandemic breaks out.
Even if we see the US in its normal mode as a parasitic imperialist power, this can get many times worse. We need to put up defences and be ready for a very rough ride. And we need to up our own game so we are less dependent on outside help.
Philip Machanick is an emeritus associate professor of computer science at Rhodes University.