Gaslighting – which derives its name from a popular 1930’s movie – is a psychological condition denoting a “form of emotional manipulation in which a person aims to have the victim question their judgement, perception and sense of reality by deliberately and systematically feeding false information”.
In turn, this leads – for the target of the gaslighting – to a loss of confidence, judgement and self-esteem.
In 2023, health journalist and academic Stephanie Wild studied the ANC campaign for National Health Insurance (NHI) as par excellence, a local example of gaslighting in practice. Bear in mind that this predates the current momentum, legislation and even the minister (Aaron Motsoeledi) taking the helm on this controversial and elephantine proposal.
Two years ago, as the ANC determined this legislation would be enacted “whether you like it or not” to quote the president, Wild noted how the governing party responded to “constructive criticism” around the proposal.
She wrote:
“[It stated] that their critics do not ‘care about the people’, making the debate about universal healthcare, rather than the specific bill. This is a manipulation of the facts. More than that, this is a clear ad hominem attack, focusing on the opposition’s character rather than their argument. Other ANC rhetoric has involved making the passing of the bill an extension of the ANC’s role in South Africa’s liberation from apartheid, an exaggeration of accomplishments. In an attempt to escape accountability for the quality of this piece of legislation, further ANC statements have simply suggested that no bill is ‘100 percent’.” (Global Voices 12 January 2023).
But this was mere dress rehearsal for the avalanche of false facts, dodgy statistics, victim-shaming and inverted logic to follow.
And here, the lead came from the top. Remember the signing ceremony for the legislation in May 2024, just two weeks before election day (not that it helped the ANC, on the contrary)? Cyril Ramaphosa – once proclaimed as political heir to the reconciliatory Nelson Mandela – railed against “the well to do, the rich” (how is that for neat gaslighting by a billionaire president?) and whites in general, for “opposing universal healthcare”.
You hardly need to decode the absurdity and false narrative here: legitimate questions on the affordability, practicality, and even constitutionality of this gargantuan enactment get steamrolled as opposition to universal healthcare.
Motseoledi, now tasked with finding the funds (200bn? R500bn? Who knows?) has an answer to the charge that to enact this behemoth will – according to Business Unity SA – require as a minimum a 31% hike in personal taxes and a rise in VAT from 15% to 21.5%. He dismisses the question as “mathematical hooliganism”.
Then his health department, which cannot provide clean bed linen in state hospitals and, worse, lacks the funds to deploy trainee doctors to rural areas, manages to spend more than R20 million on an aggressive advertising campaign lampooning serious and considered critics of the scheme with the smear: “NHI – people before profits.”
No serious debate is possible when the good faith of one side of the argument is traduced and mischaracterised. The people who have built a functioning private health care model here and the more than 9.7 million beneficiaries of medical aid schemes are of no account: they are, per the president, “the well to do, the rich” and their entitlements will, on one interpretation of the legislation, simply be outlawed.
A gentler form of gaslighting was evidenced this week in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s weekly newsletter.
He wrote:
More than divisive, though, was the performance on Human Rights Day from the fading revolutionary Julius Malema, who decided to inject real race poison into his Human Rights (sic) Day rally by singing the infamous “Kill the Boer” song. Ramaphosa, as ANC leader, is not responsible for his opponent’s chant. But as state president, whose newsletter commemorates Human Rights Day, to avert his gaze from the “target for persecution” that Malema precisely offers is a failure of nerve. Or judgement. Or both.
Ramaphosa’s actual words though are both honeyed, misleading and loaded.
“People of a certain race or culture”, to borrow the president’s euphemism, might not indeed be “targeted for persecution”, except by Malema and co. But the entire gamut of race-based “transformation” relies precisely on targeting one race and culture or omitting the same “race and culture” from benefits under an array of laws which preferences one group of South Africans ahead of another.
These are the current facts of the matter. There is a lot of history, a great deal of abuse and a lot of growth-reduction embedded in the same laws, but it does not amount to ‘a completely false narrative. And it is, whatever claims and merits are made for BEE and equity laws, they certainly are – on any reading – “divisive”.
South Africans witnessed this recently on the cricket field. Doubtless impelled by the Vaclav Havel concept that the “state creates an outpost for itself in the minds of every citizen”, Cricket South Africa struck a blow for its idea of transformation.
It ousted the Eastern Cape Warriors team from the 1-Day cup. Were they doping their opponents’ sweets (which happened elsewhere)? Were they involved in ball tampering or verbal abuse?
No, the sin of the Warriors was their failure to “field a minimum of six players of colour, of which three must be black Africans” in the starting X1 that played against the Dolphins mid-February in Durban.
According to the report in News24, the targeted team, in fact, “did field six players of colour. However, only two were black Africans”.
Racial bean counting gone mad, or is Cricket SA simply and exactly replicating government insistence that racial demographics will permeate each and every endeavour and every outpost of life and life chances in SA?
I was recently sent a reminder of how matters have evolved since the ANC moved from its revolutionary phase as leading opponent to apartheid to a three-decade role as government.
You might expect that – in opposition and in exile – the ANC would be far more radical and even extreme than it is today. This would be the wrong assumption, at least regarding sport (and much else besides).
On 25 May 1971, the ANC published a paper for the UN unit on apartheid, with reference to the sports boycott on apartheid SA.
It read in part: “Sportsmen have a special duty in this regard in that they should be the first to insist that merit, and merit alone, be the criterion for selecting teams for representative sport. Indeed, non-discrimination is such an essential part of true sportsmanship that many clubs and international bodies have express provisions to this effect.”
Not Cricket SA today it seems.
And it isn’t gaslighting to suggest that Cyril Ramaphosa should carefully check the blizzard of laws, regulations and ministerial statements. They don’t amount to “genocide” or even “persecution”. But pointing out that “people of a certain race or culture” are indeed “targets” is no less than reality. Not an inversion or falsification of it.
