An alarming new mood is taking hold in South Africa. The latest Afrobarometer survey shows that nearly half of South Africans, 49%, say they would approve military rule. Just three years ago, the figure was 28%. For the first time since 1994, more people favour military rule than reject it.
After 30 years of democracy, the promise of freedom is wearing thin. Seven in 10 citizens are dissatisfied with how democracy functions. Unemployment remains the deepest wound, followed by crime, corruption, collapsing infrastructure and water insecurity. More than 75% of the unemployed say they would not oppose military rule.
Support for authoritarianism is strongest among people aged 36-55, mostly in rural areas and living in poverty. It is a generation that came of age with democratic hope and has watched that hope corrode.
These attitudes are not mysterious. When people are jobless and hungry, when politicians enrich themselves while services collapse, democracy begins to look meaningless. When families cannot eat or access water, a strong man can start to seem attractive.
We have seen this before. In Europe in the 1930s, fascism rose from despair. Hitler and Mussolini promised work, order and national renewal to societies battered by economic collapse. In Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, military regimes in Argentina, Brazil and Chile claimed to restore stability after corruption and chaos. In recent years, West Africa has seen a wave of coups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, where Capt Ibrahim Traoré has drawn huge support across the continent, driven by social media portraying military rule as patriotic renewal. Each time, democracy was corroded from within long before it was overthrown.
South Africa is now showing the same warning signs. The rhetoric of discipline and purification that once marked fascism in Europe is echoing in our own politics.
Operation Dudula is a clearly fascistic organisation, but it has been granted impunity by the state, the ANC, the police and much of the media. Its members have blocked access to hospitals, preventing migrants from seeking health care.
The danger runs deeper than Dudula. The MK Party has spurned constitutional democracy altogether. The Patriotic Alliance and ActionSA express open hostility to migrants while claiming to speak for the poor. Gayton McKenzie embodies a far-right populism in the Trump mould: loud, theatrical and vengeful.
Authorities and much of the press treat Dudula as if it were a legitimate community movement.
The danger runs deeper than Dudula. The MK Party has spurned constitutional democracy altogether. The Patriotic Alliance and ActionSA express open hostility to migrants while claiming to speak for the poor. Gayton McKenzie embodies a far-right populism in the Trump mould: loud, theatrical and vengeful.
The EFF adopt a similar posture, using military titles and parades. Julius Malema firing a gun at a rally captured a politics of menace that normalises violence as spectacle.
In KwaZulu-Natal, enthusiasm for Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi has grown even as regular police killings escalate. When a society begins to applaud police killings, democracy is already under threat.
The ANC bears immense responsibility for this climate. Decades of corruption and mismanagement have destroyed public trust. The governing elite has lost moral authority, and the opposition has failed to provide a credible alternative rooted in justice and dignity.
Instead of addressing unemployment and inequality, politics has degenerated into spectacle and blame. The media too often amplifies xenophobic rhetoric and treats prejudice as legitimate debate. When migrants, shack dwellers and the unemployed are portrayed as threats rather than citizens, democracy is hollowed out.
Despair now defines much of South African life. Gambling has become a form of economic self-medication, a desperate search for luck in a society that offers no opportunity. The heroin epidemic, concentrated among unemployed young men, tells the same story of despair.
Lurid accounts of whoonga and nyaope being concoctions of ARVs, rat poison and television cathode tubes are false and dehumanising. These are not new or exotic drugs but heroin, used by people who have been abandoned by the economy. Added to this are the very high rates of murder among young men, reflecting the cheapness of life in a society in deep crisis.
Restoring faith in democracy means restoring the public good: working water systems, functioning schools, safe streets, fair policing, clean administration and, above all, employment. No democracy can survive mass joblessness. Work is the foundation of dignity and citizenship.
We need leadership that rejects cruelty as a substitute for policy. Rebuilding democracy requires a politics rooted in solidarity rather than fear.
Authoritarian ideas are spreading because the democratic project has failed to offer hope. Dudula’s impunity, organised labour’s silence, the media’s xenophobia and the rise of militarised parties are all symptoms of a country losing confidence in democracy itself.
• Buccus is a senior research associate at ASRI and at UFS. He is the author of Promises and Peril: the South African Crisis, available at Exclusive Books nationwide
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