Authoritarian tendencies and movements all over the world now speak the language of decolonial populism
Ivor Chipkin is at the New South Institute and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)
Jelena Vidojević is Head of South-South Dialogues Program at the New South Institute
Has the United States (US) been captured? This question has been raised by numerous academics in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. If so, valuable insights into current developments in the US, and lessons on how to defend democracy, may need to be sought in unexpected places, with South Africa perhaps being the most significant. According to Daniel Kaufman, South Africa is one of the few countries where a social movement managed to interrupt the work of state capturers. Unfortunately, in most established Western democracies, there is a tendency either to be oblivious to what is happening in countries across the African continent or to misunderstand the nature of the African state and its politics. In such narratives, African politics is too often reduced to an arena of personal accumulation and patronage, stripped of ideals, struggles for justice, and notions of equality.
In 2017, a group of South African academics released a report called “Betrayal of the Promise”. The report was an attempt to make sense of what looked like spiralling corruption in South Africa, drawing on a new concept. Several months earlier, the South African Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, had issued a report called “State of Capture”, implicating then President Zuma, the Gupta brothers and their associates and other senior government and state-owned enterprise officials in a web of intrigue and of illicit payments. This is how the concept of state capture landed in South Africa, unexpectedly and dramatically.
When Joel Hellman, Daniel Kaufman and Geraint Jones first developed the notion of state capture in 2000, their focus was on corruption in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kaufman was the first and last World Bank director to the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic and he witnessed, first hand, how oligarchs used their personal connections with politicians to secure influence over the policy making process.
State capture described how business people exercised improper influence over the formation of laws and policies. A way, as Kaufman later wrote, of making corruption legal. This represented an important intervention in the existing body of work on corruption. The experience from South Africa, however, like that from Serbia, Hungary, Türkiye, Angola, Sri Lanka and Brazil suggests that the role of political elites cannot be ignored. Sometimes state capture is driven by business executives, but at other times it is orchestrated by politicians who manipulate institutions and policy-making processes to serve their own interests, a phenomenon far more dangerous in its implications.
In her influential study, Elizabeth David-Barrett identified three pillars of state capture:
1) It involves influencing the formation of law and policy. Often this takes the form of changing the constitution to allow the incumbent to remain in power for longer than the stipulated term or reducing the power of the constitutional court to overturn legislation.
2) It influences the implementation of policy. The administration of government procurement is a key target, so that state contracts can be awarded to the ‘right’ people.
3) Institutions whose task is to ensure accountability are disabled or weakened. In South Africa, for example, the politicisation of the police meant that certain cases of corruption were simply not investigated. The capture of the prosecuting authority meant that, even if those cases were investigated, they did not get to court.
There is a fourth pillar. It is ideology. The scale and extent of state capture, affecting so many institutions and people, usually mean that capturers need to appeal to existing grievances framed within a legitimating ideology. This is a discourse or set of ideas and practices that can be mobilised to explain and justify what would ordinarily be regarded as improper conduct. Hence state capture is self-righteous corruption.
In South Africa, this ideology was called Radical Economic Transformation (RET). It described the radically unequal and unjust distribution of assets and wealth between black and white South Africans. It proposed a bold programme of redress. State companies, including the electricity utility, Eskom, and the long-distance freight-rail utility, Transnet, relied on an extensive network of private companies for the provision of goods and services. Eskom, for example, bought coal from privately-owned mines to burn in its power stations. RET suggested that the political elite could advance the racial transformation of the South African economy by terminating contracts with white-owned firms and replacing them with contracts with black-owned firms.
The problem was that the South African Constitution does not allow the use of race as the primary consideration for awarding contracts. Jacob Zuma’s administration went ahead and made it so, anyway, changing the rules of the political game in South Africa. His administration weakened parliamentary oversight, deployed loyalists into key civil service positions, removed professionals, took control of how contracts were awarded and deliberately weakened the police and the prosecution authorities. The RET narrative also held that professional administrators who insisted that formal processes be followed and that the law be upheld were being ‘anti-transformation’. Indeed, state capturers created an image of a civil service Leviathan that was hostile to ‘progressive’ politics and unresponsive to the executive. The fact that Jacob Zuma’s friends, political allies and family were the main beneficiaries of practices justified on the basis of RET, did not discredit RET as an anti-bureaucratic ideology, however.
Viktor Orbán in Hungary deploys decolonial tropes too. He has consistently articulated his project as one of illiberal democracy, where national sovereignty and cultural identity take precedence over liberal universalism. His government positions Hungary as resisting the encroachment of Brussels, international non-governmental organisations, and global finance. Orbán’s narrative suggests that Hungary is a peripheral nation historically subjected to domination, whether by the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburgs, the Soviets, or (now) by the European Union (EU). Orbán presents himself as the defender of ordinary Hungarians against the Brussels elites. This rhetoric mirrors anti-colonial tropes. Hungary is a colonised entity within the EU, compelled to liberate itself from Western European impositions. By deploying this rhetoric, Orbán masterfully exploits long-standing grievances widespread across Eastern Europe, which are rooted in the region’s historical and symbolic position as part of Europe, yet never fully of it. The rise of Viktor Orbán and the appeal of his rhetoric can additionally be seen as the culmination of Eastern Europe’s trajectory within the EU: from the pro-European aspirations of the 1990s and 2000s to the disillusionment and sovereigntist defiance that took hold in the 2010s.
Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” ideology frames the decline of the US as the result of betrayal by cosmopolitan elites, globalisation and uncontrolled immigration. Though the US is the centre of the world economy, Trumpian politics appropriate decolonial imagery by casting ordinary Americans (implicitly white, working- and lower middle-class) as victims of exploitation and internal colonisation. The deep state, free-trade agreements, China, and uncontrolled immigration are described as forces that have colonised America from within. In this sense, Trump invokes a reversed decolonial narrative: the empire itself imagines itself as the colonised subject. His support base is invited to see themselves as dispossessed by (global) elites in the same way that formerly colonised peoples were. This inversion allows Trump to articulate a populist politics where liberation is framed as protectionism, border enforcement and cultural reassertion.
At the start of Trump’s second presidential term in 2025, Elon Musk was deployed to reduce spending and waste in the civil service. The hand of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was guided by the Office of Management and Budget, headed up by Russel Vought. In an article in the New Yorker magazine, Andy Kroll describes Vought as a “bookish technocrat”, who played a key role in the termination of tens of thousands of federal jobs and froze departmental budgets. It is unlikely that a concern for efficiency and value for money were the driving forces, however. Kroll reports that Vought has complained that American democracy has been hijacked by “rogue judges” and “woke” government bureaucrats. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus”. On these terms, Trump is a “radical constitutionalist” fighting the “deep state” to return power to the Presidency and the American people. Despite its American nuances, this is a language that recalls Jacob Zuma’s.
In South Africa, the consequences of state capture have come to a head. The chronic weakening of state institutions, the misallocation of resources and rent seeking, all contributed to the electoral disaster suffered by the ANC in 2024, when it lost its parliamentary majority. Now South Africa is on the cusp of historic public service reform that will go some way to better insulate civil servants from improper political interference. These changes are as significant as the Roosevelt-era reforms that weakened Tammany Hall politics in the US. They will make it much more difficult to capture the implementation of policy. The ideology of state capture, however, retains its appeal amongst an important segment of the political elite.
Therein lies an important lesson. Political elites, no less than academics, social movements and advocacy organisations run by and for poor and working people, innovate, learn and adapt their politics to the language and the mood of the day, as well to the audience that they are trying to impress and win over. State capture is sustained by a legitimising ideology that allows its protagonists to claim a supposedly righteous halo. Increasingly this ideology takes on the form of a decolonial populism. Authoritarian tendencies and movements all over the world now speak its language. In the hands of political elites with access to and control of government resources and institutions, decolonial populism has become an instrument of self-righteous corruption and the weakening of democracy. Defending society from capture thus requires protecting the integrity of legislative processes, upholding the autonomy and the professionalism of the institutions of law and order and properly insulating civil servants from inappropriate political interference. It requires a robust defence of democracy from elite populism too.
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