Dear amaB supporters,
The decline and fall of empires is not for sissies – but fortunately, neither is South Africa.
Let me explain.
In preparing to write this end-of-year newsletter, to say thank you for your attention and your support, I have been fortunate to come across two lectures that have helped me focus my thoughts.
In addition, AmaBhungane is exiting its 15th year in existence, but is going strong and on the cusp of hiring quite a number of new staff. Both events have forced me and my senior colleagues to think more deeply than time usually allows about who we are where we are going.
That question is also the broad subject of the latest series of the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures, the first of which was given in 1948 by philosopher Bertrand Russell, with the 2025 (series of four) being delivered by Dutch historian and moral philosopher, Rutger Bregman.
Bregman’s first lecture is entitled “A time of monsters” and takes its theme from the famous Gramsci quote, “’The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Bregman is worth quoting at some length (though I commend you to the full series), “To grasp the depths of our current misery, it helps to start with a classic story of collapse. When the great historian Edward Gibbon described the decline of Rome, he didn’t speak in vague abstractions. He gave us names, dates, and details, page after page of cowardice and corruption…
“And yet what shocks you most when you read Gibbon today isn’t the depravity, it’s the familiarity. Gibbon wrote about politicians who lacked seriousness. Elites who lacked
virtue, and societies that mistook decadence for progress. Two thousand years later, we live in an age where billionaires dodge their taxes, politicians perform instead of govern, and media barons profit from lies and hatred. The Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned. Our elites live-streamed the fire and monetized the smoke. Immorality and unseriousness. Those are the two defining traits of our leaders today. And they’re not accidental flaws, but the logical outcome of what I call the survival of the shameless. Today, it’s not the most capable who rise, but at least scrupulous. Not the most virtuous, but most brazen.”
This problem is very familiar to us in South Africa, because – as the second speaker I want to quote has put it – our very own Jacob Zuma wrote the playbook on State Capture: the playbook that Donald Trump has now followed with devastating consequences for the United States (and the world, whatever one might have thought about the vanishing ‘pax’ Americana).
That insight is probably rather obvious to amaBhungane readers, but that should not detract from an appreciation of the broader thesis put forward by our own Prof Salim Abdool-Karim in a recent lecture entitledDisinformation: An Evolving Threat To Human Rights.
Abdool-Karim, in an entertaining exposition drawing on his experience of battling medical disinformation (which began with his decision to confront then President Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism), gives us two less obvious insights: that disinformation is an essential weapon for State Capture and that in advanced cases, such as under Trump 2.0, disinformation has become institutionalised, it has become both a political weapon and state policy.
This reminds us that disinformation is not about ideology, it is about providing a cover for extraction: for looting and the goal of absolute, unaccountable power.
And because this weapon relies on creating a fake narrative (a swimming pool is a fire pool) it targets truth-tellers, like judges, journalists and scientists.
This analysis fits neatly into amaBhungane’s own attempts to think through our priorities for the next 15 years.
Broadly we have isolated two major priorities: firstly, the architecture of extraction, a definition that encompasses state capture, but also private sector corruption and abuse that ranges from tax avoidance to the investment in ruthlessly extractive technologies like online gambling.
Our second focus is the disfunction of our accountability systems: those features of state and society that are supposed to prevent the extractors from running amok and punish those who use the social contract for toilet paper or target practice.
Our NPA documentary released a year ago was an attempt to raise the alarm about the weakness of the National Prosecuting Authority and its leadership, a weakness that has recently and belatedly been brutally exposed.
Bregman, in his final (fourth) lectureFighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine takes our analysis of the extraction economy a step further, situating it in the overwhelming pervasiveness of manipulated, monetised digital reality.
Again, it is worth quoting him at some length, because he has a message that draws some unexpected (and hopeful) parallels.
He says, “In my previous lectures, I spoke about two moral revolutions of the 19th century, the fight against slavery and the struggle for women’s rights. But I didn’t mention the third one yet. Temperance. Many abolitionists and suffragettes were also temperance activists. This movement is largely forgotten nowadays, but it holds vital lessons for us. Back then, alcohol was not a casual indulgence but a social catastrophe. There were no warning labels, no age restrictions, no limits on advertising. Saloons dotted every street corner, wages disappeared into the bottle, and families were torn apart by violence and neglect. The alcohol industry profited from human weakness while devastating entire communities.”
If that sounds like our online gambling epidemic, it should.
But he goes on: “And that is why people rose against it. The temperance movement was one of the largest democratic movements in history, led by women and workers. They believed that real freedom meant being fully present, to choose connection over compulsion. They saw addiction for what it is, the moment when the power of choice no longer exists. And so they demanded radical measures, higher taxes, stricter licensing, and even total prohibition.
Today, we face a new addiction industry, not of wine and whiskey, but of apps and algorithms.
Many of Stanford’s brightest minds are building a single great Moloch, an attention-hijacking machine that devours our focus, steals our time, and leaves us emptier by the hour. And AI threatens to supercharge it all.”
Bregman is an optimist and so he draws hope from the historic ability of human beings to come together for the greater good.
Prof Abdool-Karim’s lecture reminds us of the power of the forces ranged against that ideal – including what both he and Bregman identify as a rising tide of fascism – but he insists that, as in the struggle against Apartheid, every small effort of truth-telling makes a difference.
This communal effort to call out the fake, the corrupt, the self-serving and the incompetent, gained a significant boost earlier this year when General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi took the risk of telling his truth to the nation.
Whatever his motives – and despite many opportunists seeking to use his challenge to rewrite our own history of State Capture – he has ripped part of the veil aside to expose the brutal underworld that perverts so much of our national destiny.
It was an action of can-do and courage that is also somehow essentially South African. It gives us hope.
At amaB we also draw hope from the fact that after 15-years of truth-telling we are still standing and still making a difference.
In that spirit, I commend you also to the special 15th-year edition of our annual report, which reflects on some of the highlights of that journey.
With your engagement and support, we’ll be here for the next 15-years.
With appreciation,
Sam Sole, Managing Partner
The post In 2026 we need less Nazis, more Mkhwanazis appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.
AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism
