Consider an alternate history written for the 29 May elections in South Africa.
As a work of historical fiction – based on real characters and actual events – it could include these “facts”: The DA leader, the largest opposition party, is banned from participating in the poll; the ANC, the governing party, is accorded unfettered access to state-controlled media and its opponents are denied the opportunity. Opposition supporters are arrested and harassed; expatriate citizens are blocked from voting, and -despite all this harassment and skewed playing field – reliable opinion polls suggest the ANC is heading for an epic defeat.
On election day itself, the IEC bans opposition agents from observing voting stations, voting machines malfunction across all provinces, international observers are banned from entering the country, and SA National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers are photographed removing ballot boxes from polling places.
Despite all this suppression, rigging and gerrymandering, credible exit polls suggest the opposition surged 30% ahead of the governing party.
The IEC is stacked with governing party cronies and when the ballots are counted, it fraudulently declares, after hours of darkness on its website, that the government has won 51.2% of the vote.
Outcome welcomed
The results of the actual paper ballot count are not released, and the opposition tabulations show it to have won in a landslide.
Undeterred, President Cyril Ramaphosa immediately declares: “I am the president re-elect of South Africa,” and denounces the opposition as “demons” and warns that he and his government “declare ourselves in constant vigilance and preparedness to end the coup d’etat against South Africa”.
Russia, an expert in opposition suppression, warmly welcomes the election outcome, and China quickly follows suit.
Of course, happily – none of these nightmare elements were present before, during and after the historic SA elections in May. Except for the malfunctioning of the voter management devices. But this owed more to the incompetence of the IEC – a case of cock-up rather than grand conspiracy.
Notwithstanding the evidence-free assertions of the MK Party of wholesale ballot rigging, no one believes, bar the conspiracy mongers in Nkandla, that our polls were other than free and fair. And while the ANC had some success in stuffing the multiparty government of national unity (GNU) with far more ministers than its proportional entitlement, its gracious acknowledgement of its loss of power and willingness to work with its opponents, was an object lesson for other liberation parties elsewhere in the world.
The situation in Venezuela
Yet the alternate history outlined here is precisely in real time and with devastating consequences, what happened in Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela. In its aftermath, soldiers shot and killed opposition protesters, and heavily sanctioned Venezuela faces increased isolation on its own continent and in the wider world.
South Africa, ever alive to human rights infractions – major and minor – regarding precisely one country in the world (but it is in the Middle East) has maintained a loud silence on the situation in South America.
Not that the direction of diplomatic traffic should be doubted. Even if we have not sighted any communications from our lady in Caracas. The South African ambassador there, Ms Lindiwe Maseko, is an ANC politician with a long track record in Gauteng.
In 2018, the “winner” of Sunday’s poll, Nicolas Maduro, was snuffing out the last vestiges of democracy. He had already reduced the once mighty economic engine of Venezuela to fumes despite owning the world’s largest-proven oil reserves.
Into the mix came Maseko’s predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi. He used a Mandela Day event in Caracas in July of that year to declare, “If it is necessary that we bring our soldiers to fight against the Americans [which had sanctioned the Maduro regime], we will do it; we cannot allow ourselves to be dominated by the American administration…”
He was rebuked by Pretoria and recanted, but he fell upwards to be posted elsewhere in the world. And while such visceral US hatred did not enjoy official sanction here, the ANC bromance with tyrannical leaders like Maduro continued.
In April 2020, while hungry residents of Cracas were eating their own pets to stay alive, President Cyril Ramaphosa posted a warm post on then-Twitter (now X) on his phone call with “my brother President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela yesterday”, noting: “Our two countries share a close and deep historical bond based on friendship, solidarity and co-operation.”
Another warm post?
Whether there will be any warm post on X from Pretoria this week on the electoral fraud of this rogue regime remains to be seen. In the world of autocracies, however from Russia to China, Cuba and Iran, Maduro is seen as a brother leader.
South Africa whose history, despite Ramaphosa’s previous warm embrace of Maduro, is democratically and demonstrably different. And as we anxiously await renewal of AGOA from Washington, a divergent calculus should apply, though immediate precedents are not encouraging.
Having worked and lived in South America in the mid-2010s, I am admittedly often focused on this hemisphere. But there are at least two good reasons for South Africans to look at events in Venezuela even though it is 10 000 km away on the far side of the South Atlantic Ocean.
First, Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chavez, piloted his country’s road to economic ruin by ramping up populist and unaffordable social spending, assaulting the private sector and, expropriating property and, railing against the West and suppressing internal dissent.
For a while it worked, until his undercutting of his own oil wealth by chasing out foreign firms and local expertise and gyrating resource prices and deteriorating infrastructure, coupled with sanctions, meant the music stopped. Favouring consumption spending over long-term investment continued apace under Maduro.
Declining GDP
Since Maduro took over in 2013, GDP has declined by more than 70% and he compensated for lower oil prices by printing money, fuelling runaway inflation (190% last year) and burdening his country with an estimated $150bn debt. While some muted economic reforms, such as dollarisation, have lessened the economic hardships, the chief beneficiaries of Maduro’s self-proclaimed ” economic renaissance” have been the so-called “enchufados” (the well-connected).
In the words of The Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) recent study: “Life remains fantastic for some, the well-connected who inhabit a wealth bubble rarely perforated by ordinary Venezuelans…they are part of a highly curated illusion of prosperity and image of economic recovery promoted by the Maduro regime.”
And doubtless if the votes of “ordinary Venezuelans” had been properly tabulated, Maduro would be at the exit gate. The second reason to watch Venezuela is that it offers an alternative, plausible future for our own country.
This intimation was provided by own populist cult leader, Julius Malema. On Chavez’s death in 2013, Malema wrote a long panegyric.
It included this paragraph:
Like Malema himself, the quote has not aged well, given Venezuela’s economic collapse and democratic recession. Precisely because South Africa has a democratic system allows fair elections, charlatans and chancers like Malema and his gaseous rhetoric get exposed and have less traction at the ballot box. But the authoritarian alternative remains on offer.
Malema and his fellow traveller, MK Parliamentary leader and disgraced jurist John Hlophe, have been expert at white-anting the key prop of a constitutional democracy, an independent judiciary.
Sacking competent judges, for example, in Venezuela, and stuffing the courts with regime loyalists, paved its path to democratic perdition.
Avoiding that totalitarian temptation was the theme of recent remarks by distinguished former Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron. He warned about such errant lawyers and constitutional vandals:
There will be much to criticise the GNU in months and years ahead. But Cameron’s warning gives you the alternative set-up in plain sight. We have been warned.
