Without putting too fine a point on it, Jacob Zuma and his MK Party have accelerated what I can only term the enshittification of South African politics to a point where we’re pretty much now in the same post-democracy toilet as the US.
I’m borrowing the term enshittification from the writer Cory Doctorow, who coined it to describe the pattern of ever-decreasing quality of experience that we see in online products such as Facebook, X, Google Search, Uber, Amazon and so on.
In Wired magazine, he described the process. “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two sided market’, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
Change the word platform to political parties, and it makes a rough kind of sense. First, they care, or at least seem to care, about their fellow citizens. Then they abuse their citizens by becoming corrupt and selling their country to, for example, the Guptas. Then they start to abuse just about everyone as the pot of money gets emptied. And then, suddenly, they lose their majority and die.
Yes, politicians, like platforms, sit between buyers and sellers, and it’s the people they claim to represent that they’re sitting on.
That was an extraordinarily confused metaphor, though you probably got the gist. Politicians like Zuma — and now, horrifyingly, like the Zumas, plural — are turning our democracy to shit.
We’re pretty much now in the same post-democracy toilet as the US
If you want an even more pertinent scatological metaphor, consider the case of the Koreas.
North Korea is sending what are described as “rubbish-filled balloons” over into South Korea. This started a few days ago with an initial batch of about 200, and then last Sunday they sent another 600 more of the rubbish-filled balloons across the border, containing stuff such as cigarette butts and plastic. And according to the BBC, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that “some of the fallen balloons carried what appears to be faeces, judging from its dark colour and odour”.
Since the campaign started last week, about 900 balloons have been launched. The South Korean defence minister, Shin Won-sik, is quoted in The Guardian as describing it as “unimaginably petty and low-grade behaviour”, with Seoul warning of strong countermeasures unless Pyongyang stopped such “irrational provocations”.
This is where we are. A country sending balloons filled with excrement across the border. “Pyongyang defended its release of the balloons earlier this week, saying the ‘sincere gifts’ were retaliation for the balloons sent into North Korea with propaganda against leader Kim Jong-un.
“North Korea has long been infuriated by the balloons sent by South Korean activists, which carry anti-Pyongyang leaflets. Sometimes, they also include cash, rice or USB thumb drives with South Korean drama series.”
The leaders of the two Koreas agreed in 2018 to stop distributing leaflets, and the South Korea parliament even passed a law in 2020 criminalising the sending of leaflets to the North. But that law was struck down last year by South Korea’s constitutional court, which called it a limitation on free speech.
In 2018, during a period of improved inter-Korean relations, the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain”, including the distribution of leaflets. All of which led this week to, as described in The Guardian, Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, mocking South Korea for complaining about the balloons, and saying that North Koreans were simply exercising their freedom of expression ...
We’re beyond standing back and seeing South Africa’s political reality as shaped by forces of history. No, it’s being shaped by a coterie of corrupt clowns who have realised that if the mighty Trumps and Putins of the world can just do whatever the hell they want, so can they
And that’s the enshittification of democratic rights for you. One nation’s freedom of expression becomes a dictator’s excuse to ridicule human rights. Pretty much the same thing is happening in our political arena after these recent elections, with our would-be dictators from the MK Party threatening all sorts of ridiculous things, to the extent that they’re stealing from the Trump playbook and claiming that the election was rigged.
Here is what Zuma said when he threatened violence if there wasn’t a recount of the election results, as quoted in the Daily Maverick. “‘In my view, South Africa had been deteriorating in what we envisaged it to be. I am worried now that there are wrong things that happened during counting by the institution which should handle this for us, guided by principle and laws.’ He warned that if the complaints were not dealt with before a results declaration was made on Sunday, it would ‘provoke’ the collective.
“‘Nobody must force us to accept the results, when the results are not fine. The institution needs to satisfy us. Nobody must declare tomorrow and, if it does, they will be provoking us. Do not start trouble when there is no trouble, give the political parties the opportunity to present their cases, do not rush us.’”
What these sort of threats do is weaken democratic institutions. Trump does the same thing when he threatens vengeance against his foes when he becomes president again.
What Doctorow writes about online platforms applies to that other great experiment in social cohesion, democracy. “We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history’, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn. Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way.”
We’re beyond standing back and seeing South Africa’s political reality as shaped by forces of history. No, it’s being shaped by a coterie of corrupt clowns who have realised that if the mighty Trumps and Putins of the world can just do whatever the hell they want, so can they. As Doctorow writes, we know who they are. It’s less clear, alas, what we can do about them.
I’m afraid I’m guilty of having found the EFF’s disruption of parliament entertaining, mainly because it punctured the pompous regality of the ANC, a party that believed it was divinely entitled to do whatever the hell it wanted. And who didn’t find those plaintive cries of “Order, Honourable Member, Order!” amusing?
Alas, this time around the Speaker will be crying out “Ordure, Honourable Member, Ordure” now that the party of enshittification has won 58 seats in parliament. One has only to look at Russian super-influencer Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla’s response to a question about what agenda she and MK will be driving in parliament, in terms of getting the economy back on track. “We’ll do what President Zuma did under his economy, which was great. We’ll just go back to that.” Oh, goodie. Another firepool sale of our country’s assets to look forward to. And let’s not forget what a loud voice Russia will now have in our parliament.
Still, if there’s one silver lining to this enshittification cloud, it’s that the plucky freedom fighters over at the Referendum Party got almost no votes, so the Western Cape remains unfree for another few years. But it’s not much of a silver lining. We’re in for a bumpy ride in the next few years, and our democratic institutions are going to take a pummelling.
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