Honestly, I don’t know anyone who really knows what’s going on. Donald Trump, the fruitcake president of the US, assembles an armada off the Venezuelan coast and, on the night of January 3, his forces penetrate the presidential compound in Caracas to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia.
Briefly, millions of Venezuelans breathe the cool air of freedom. Maduro has been a cruel dictator, stealing elections while protected by freedom-loving Chinese, Russians and Cubans. More than 30 Cuban guards died in the raid.
Trump, in return for the regime’s “co-operation” in allowing the US access to Venezuela’s large but derelict oil industry, has allowed the dictatorship in Caracas to continue. Some 900 Venezuelans are political prisoners.
Make no mistake: Maduro was an utter thug. When Maduro became president in 2013, wrote Harvard economist and former Venezuelan planning minister Ricardo Hausmann this week, “Venezuelans were four times richer than they are today. A disaster followed: the largest economic contraction ever recorded in peacetime, triggering the departure of 8-million Venezuelans. Brutality, repression and corruption accompanied the catastrophe.”
It’s grotesque. But nothing in it justifies Trump using raw power to breach the sovereign territory of an independent country.
Trump won praise from some conservative politicians and commentators in South Africa. But the only possible civilised response is contempt for both Maduro and the manner of his removal. What will our conservatives say when US Marines take Greenland by force?
Trump has won praise from some conservative politicians and commentators in South Africa. They are completely wrong. The only possible civilised response is contempt for both Maduro and the manner of his removal.
Of course our government, once a big fan of Changing the World Order, now finds it changing too fast. Having failed to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was super-fast out of the blocks this time, noting “with grave concern” this “manifest violation” of the UN charter. But the greater the complexity of the problems the ANC faces, the smaller seems its appetite for fixing them.
So cue tape of President Cyril Ramaphosa calling Maduro his “brother”. Much the same would apply to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, violator of Ukraine, or Xi Jinping, tormentor of Taiwan.
The ANC loves these guys. Add Cuba. Add Iran. The more political prisoners you have, the more likely the ANC admires you.
There will be a reckoning. Trump will face his own, most likely from inside his own Maga court. And Americans will die trying to control their new prize. But why we align ourselves with the others — the “progressive anti-imperialist” out-and-out fascists — is just beyond explanation.
In the absence of an accounting, it is at least amusing to watch our navy exercise with Iran this weekend, knowing that back home Iranians are trying to topple the religious fanatics who have them ruled for 45 years. My best explanation for our insistence that we are neutral or “non-aligned”, and our complete inability not to align ourselves, is that the ANC just doesn’t care. Certainly, Ramaphosa no longer cares. His function between now and whenever he is required to go is simply to keep the ANC as cheerful as possible as it quietly expires.
Ramaphosa’s initial idea was somehow to teach the ANC that it could not have everything it wanted. It was too hard and he lapsed instead into a routine in which he agrees with or signs anything the party wants and then allows the courts to refine it.
For his own good, though, one hopes he doesn’t have too much of his vast wealth in dollars because the US is coming for him and other ANC leaders with sanctions of some sort this year. Denouncing the arrest of his “brother” Nicolás and demanding his release is just the reminder Trump needed.
There’s no satisfaction in that either, however poor Ramaphosa has been at his job. There’s no part of Trump we need in this country, though we must take care to properly welcome his new ambassador. We must be the opposite of Trump.
The fact is Ramaphosa has not so much lost the plot as he has had the plot removed from him. He and the entire ANC live witlessly on the economic promises and policies of the past. But in the blink of an eye the world has changed and it will never be the same.
Brexit was 10 years ago and only now are the consequences clear: Britain is shrivelled. The same will be so of the Trump years. The world will have less wealth, less democracy, less freedom.
And in 10 years’ time, here at home, we will be writing the final story of the Ramaphosa years: The Great Disappointment — how South Africa first lost its nerve, and then its freedom.
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