CHRIS ROPER: Being right for the wrong reasons

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Julius Malema. But he does have a point with his comments on Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-based service that provides high-speed broadband connectivity. This can be especially valuable for remote or underserved areas, of which South Africa has plenty. Being able to provide this for our citizens is an enticing proposition, given how life-changing access to the digital economy can be.

In a video interview with MDNtv, Malema pushed back strongly against the entry of Starlink into South Africa, framing it as less of a connectivity solution and more as a threat to the country’s sovereignty. For Malema, Musk’s push to bring Starlink to South Africa is about exerting foreign control and potential regime change backed by Western interests. Being Malema, he frames this as a threat from white people, rather than as just foreign state aggression.

“They’re coming to police us. They’re coming to create regime change. The white people realise they cannot take it through a ballot. And they are now engaged in illegal, unconstitutional methods to destabilise this country, so that eventually they can take it over. We’ve got a lot of strategic minerals that are needed by America and everybody else, including Elon Musk.”

Malema acknowledges that we need to bring connectivity to rural areas. He says, perhaps with more irony than he realises, that we need it because “the rural community, which is still voting for the ANC, is not exposed to a lot of information as to how corrupt these people are”. He seems blithely oblivious that this sort of access to information might also expose the EFF’s flaws.

“But we cannot have a network that is going to be policing us, operated by Mossad to monitor our activities and to instigate insurrection inside our country. We shouldn’t allow that, and we must never be blackmailed not to follow our laws.”

The point is, once you cut past his usual deployment of inflammatory wedge issues designed to drive difference and conflict, such as “white regime change” and that old favourite, white monopoly capital, Malema is right. Being reliant on technologies that are controlled by men who have proved themselves indecently eager to kowtow to governments is a dangerous thing. With Musk, we’ve seen him bend and break a platform such as Twitter, for example, so as to serve the interests of US President Donald Trump, as well as the mad ambitions of Musk’s fellow techno-libertarians, all of whom are hostile to democratic principles.

So, should we take Malema’s opinion seriously? The problem is that politicians all too often use the excuse of foreign threats to drum up populist support, or to weasel out of their own crimes

The fundamental point made by Malema is this: if a government doesn’t control its own technological and administrative architecture, it’s vulnerable to being hijacked and manipulated. Unfortunately, if our politicians are just saying this to score political points ahead of this year’s municipal elections, we risk not grappling with it fully. Even worse, we’re also at risk of giving other states ammunition when it comes to imposing economic and political strictures on our country.

So, should we take Malema’s opinion seriously? The problem is that politicians all too often use the excuse of foreign threats to drum up populist support or to weasel out of their own crimes.

Take the recent protests in Iran. According to a January 16 report by the Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency, “by the end of the 20th day of the protests, the total number of confirmed deaths has reached 3,090, with 3,882 additional cases still under review. At least 2,055 people have been reported with severe injuries, and the number of arrests has risen to 22,123.”

The Guardian reports that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not hiding this fact and “has acknowledged for the first time that thousands of people were killed during the protests that rocked Iran over the last two weeks … some in an inhuman, savage manner”.

But this isn’t the Iranian state taking responsibility for these deaths. Instead, Iran is blaming the US, with the supreme leader calling Trump a “criminal” for his stated support of demonstrations and calling for strict punishment of protesters. The evidence of foreign interventions is spurious at times. “Iranian authorities also released a compilation of footage on Saturday that purported to show armed individuals carrying guns and knives alongside regular protesters — evidence, they said, of foreign saboteurs,” the Guardian said.

Ahmad Khatami, a senior Iranian cleric who wants to execute all protesters (he has previously said the judiciary should treat street protests as “war against God” and apply Islamic punishments, including execution, without leniency), was quoted as saying “armed hypocrites should be put to death”, describing the protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the US. Echoes of Malema’s Mossad, perhaps, in that the Iranian state is just looking for a simple enemy to use in their rhetoric, rather than risk an examination of the complexities of why the country is protesting.

There’s going to be more of this scapegoating, a lot more, as we approach the municipal elections. It’s never been a better time to be a politician looking for a useful enemy to divert attention from their own failings. The geopolitical chaos in which the world finds itself means that there are fewer and fewer good actors on the global stage and an abundance of compromised ideologies. And democracy, alas, is on that list.

The Democracy Perception Index (DPI) is the largest global study of attitudes towards democracy, governance and geopolitical trust. The 2025 edition included 111,273 respondents from 100 countries. It shows a widespread erosion of trust in US institutions and leadership under Trump, especially when compared with global peers.

Remarkably, Trump ranked lower in global popularity than both Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. According to the news site Dagens, while the US reputation has dipped, China has seen a steady rise in its global reputation. “For the first time, the country outperformed the US in positive sentiment across all world regions except Europe,” according to the DPI.

It’s not that I particularly care about China and the US per se. In fact, South Africa needs to avoid giving the impression that it is in either of those camps, or any others that are associated with a rapacious state invested in using it as a pawn in a geopolitical game.

What I do care about is how those two countries often stand as metaphors in discussions about democratic vs authoritarian systems and how they can be used as rhetorical bogeymen by political parties.

So, though Malema’s framing of Starlink as a case of “us vs them” might be annoying, we should train ourselves not to react by taking sides in the simplistic way he and his fellow politicians are trying to impose. As the old guard of democracies becomes increasingly compromised, information ecosystems become vulnerable to attacks on their integrity. In another way, though, it might be just the impetus needed to step up and help redefine democracy for the world.