A core task of an ambassador is to put the best gloss abroad on challenging aspects on the home front.
True to this idea, on the eve of his departure to the United States as ambassador-designate, Ebrahim Rasool said of the fragile GNU here, and the exclusion of Jacob Zuma’s MK Party from it: “There is positivity over the fact that we have largely isolated our populists.”
Zuma though obviously never got this memo. Nor did significant factions within Rasool’s own party, the ANC.
To the extent that Zuma has any ideology at all beyond a gaseous mishmash of half-baked parts, ranging from antique nationalism to modern racism, his economic “theories” owe a bit to Karl Marx.
The other famous Marx was humourist Groucho, much funnier and far less destructive than his earlier namesake, Karl. Zuma, though – in his energetic and implausible attempts to reclaim his membership of the ANC (which confirmed his expulsion) ignores Groucho Marx’s sage advice:
Yet even if his quest fails as it likely will, Zuma still exerts a gravitational pull on many remaining in his old party.
In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Zuma advised that “white parties” are bad, he won the 2024 election but was cheated of victory, and that “the ANC has become corrupt”.
Zuma and his family are, in the true sense of the words, political grifters. He is not alone in this universe.
In many places, countries are or were led by titanic ego-driven populists who use high office as engines for self-enrichment or as instruments of revenge against enemies, real or perceived.
The Peronists in Argentina, the Zumas in South Africa, the Trumps in America among others, are members of this club: they set one section of society against the other. They weaponise differences and grievances and ride roughshod over rules and respect for others and hijack public institutions for personal ends.
Since Rasool is off to America to attempt a reset of relations with the world’s hyperpower, he should listen to a recent podcast I heard. Donald Trump, according to famous songwriter Tim Rice, described the musical Evita (which Rice co-wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber) as his all-time favourite. “Trump watched it six times,” Rice advised.
That was not surprising: Trump has successfully torqued the image of the strong man, or Caudillo, and coupled it with political nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”). The power couple at the heart of Evita – twice elected Argentinian President Juan Domingo Peron and his glamorous second wife, Eva Duarte “Evita” Peron, in turn wrote the script for modern populism. Like Trump would do later, the Perons converted fame before entering politics (he as a military officer, she as a radio star) into potent political currency.
Evita died of cancer in 1952, aged just 33, while she was the first lady of Argentina. Her husband, the archetype military officer turned authoritarian Caudillo, first served as president from 1946 to 1955, then was ousted in a coup and fled into exile. With its hankering for past perceived glories, a restive nation called him home after 18 years of enforced absence in 1973; ailing and enfeebled, he again assumed the reins of the presidency. He died after just one year in office.
A living presence
Dead for nearly sixty years on my arrival in Argentina in 2009 also as country ambassador, Evita though remained a living presence in the life and politics of her people.
In 2009, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was the President of Argentina, Eva and Juan Perons’ latest successor, to whom I presented my credentials at the Casa Rosada. This was in the ‘Pink House’ or presidential palace on whose balcony Madonna belted out her songs in the movie Evita. She, too, was a hard-charging leader of the Peronist movement, and her husband, Nestor, was her predecessor.
Rumoured given her perfectly unlined face to benefit from cosmetic enhancement, Kirchner also attempted to Botox her failing political image at the time, in a country beset by rampant inflation, extreme protectionism, deep corruption, ransacked institutions and a medley of financial crises caused by her government. To do this, she conjured up the imagery and tactics of long dead Evita. “Santa Evita” was mentioned frequently by Kirchner, and a vast profile of Evita was silhouetted on government buildings
Novelist VS Naipaul visited Buenos Aires in 1974 when the country had returned briefly again to the rule of Juan Peron. He noted that the politics of destructive but redemptive victimhood, which Evita (and her movement) championed, chimed with the national sentiment. He called it ‘the hate as hope’ brand of Peronist populism.
Of course, both Perons and their political successors had a very basic ingredient for their winning recipe, just as the Zumas in South Africa and Trump in America channel in slightly different ways: the deep inequalities which disfigured Argentina and which they were determined to change which they did. With huge economic consequences.
There, too, was a personal edge for Evita: as she wrote in her autobiography La Raizon de Ma Vida of her impoverished childhood: “…and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor did not cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.” Class envy, Argentina-style.
The ANC/EFF/MK attacks – minus any conferred sainthood – on white monopoly capital or the Stellenbosch Mafia were an almost exact localised version of this.
Reflecting on a visit to Argentina during my time there, veteran newspaper editor, Tim du Plessis, drew a direct line between the Peronists and the ANC. He wrote:
And except for the fact that in the 19th century, Argentina essentially imported its majority white population from Europe and decimated its indigenous people, he was on the money. Of course, the ANC has, as per Rasool, fallen from electoral grace since, but a lot of the old recipe lives on in their kitchen.
Just as here, there are vast riches in Argentina, from the most fertile farmlands (the Pampas) in the world to untapped critical mineral deposits down South and in its famous Mendoza vineyards. Many of its people, from footballer Lionel Messi to writer JL Borges are, or were, global talents. Little wonder that a century ago it was one of the 10 richest countries in the world. “As rich as an Argentine” was then a common refrain.
Yet its very bad politics and eccentric – or worse – governance largely at the hands of successive Peronist administrations had seen its vertiginous descent downward to an economy smaller than South Africa’s during my time there. It also held the unenviable record for posting the highest number of sovereign debt defaults in world economic history.
Cristina Kirchner herself (both as president and later as vice president) and her brand of crisis economics continued to hold the fort in Argentina until November 2023.
Javier Milei
Furious and fed up with their impoverishment caused by rampant inflation and state corruption, Argentina elected a libertarian economist, Javier Milei, by a landslide. He sported Elvis-style sideburns, cloned his dogs, campaigned with a chainsaw and, in the most Catholic of countries, studied the Hebrew Torah. He described himself as an “anarcho-capitalist”.
Like the Peronists, he too had his enemies list, and it was topped by leftists in the world and the Peronists at home: he detests Kirchner and her party, and he has begun to dismantle their economic and political agenda. Contra to the Peronists, he loved America and loathed Cuba.
To close the circle with Donald Trump, who so loved the musical Evita, Milei was the first foreign leader to visit the recently elected US president in November 2024 in his Mar a Lago compound. “Make Argentina Great Again” Trump joked with Milei. “You know, MAGA, he’s a MAGA person.”
Doubtless the real Evita was spinning in her tomb in the mausoleum in Recoleta cemetery.
While Milei in Argentina has turned his back on the failed economics of his populist predecessors, too many still in the ANC hanker for a return to the populist grift and plunder of the Zuma years.
And as the big man in Nkandla plots his return to the mother party, many still inside it will likely welcome him, or his successors, back. The times change, but old tunes still enchant.
