Our collective intelligence as South Africans should not be insulted by describing current events as coincidences. EFF commander-in-chief Julius Malema is handed a punitive five-year prison sentence while Roelf Meyer, an apartheid-era MP of the illegitimate National Party, is elevated to Washington as ambassador instead of answering for the crimes of that regime.
If this is not co-ordination, it is certainly alignment. It reflects the political instinct that has shaped post-apartheid South Africa: protect white privilege, punish black people who demand equality.
Meyer is sold to the public as a bridge-builder from the democratic transition. What is buried from younger South Africans is that he was defence minister, overseeing a brutal military machine of a regime rooted in racial domination, land theft and state violence.
Such contradictions have haunted our democracy. Many who upheld apartheid entered the new South Africa with wealth intact, networks intact, reputations recoverable and no consequences for their crimes against humanity. Those who suffered apartheid were told to be patient, reconcile and wait for justice that never came. Economic exclusion remained. Land concentration remained. Structural inequality remained. Yet men of the old order were repeatedly welcomed back as respectable voices of reason.
Meyer’s appointment must therefore be understood politically. It is not merely diplomacy. It is reassurance to powerful interests at home and abroad that South Africa remains in the hands of people who will not disturb inherited privilege.
Then comes Malema’s sentence. No-one argues that firearm laws should be ignored. The issue is proportionality, consistency, context and credibility. Nobody was injured. Nobody within the vicinity of the incident laid charges. No attempted murder charge existed because no-one was targeted. Yet a direct custodial sentence was imposed. Meanwhile, apartheid-era criminals continue to roam free, and countless politically connected offenders evade meaningful consequence.
We cannot keep rewarding those who made peace with injustice while punishing those who demand it be undone. We cannot keep mistaking caution for wisdom and submission for diplomacy.
Even more troubling is that Malema’s white bodyguard, who handed him the firearm despite licensing requirements, was acquitted, while Malema carries the punishment. South Africans are entitled to ask what principle explains that outcome. They are entitled to ask why leadership status was used in aggravation, as though equality before the law means some must be punished more harshly because of profile rather than conduct. We are either equal before the law or we are not.
The magistrate argued that leaders must be held to a higher standard. Ethical expectations of leaders may be higher, but criminal punishment must be rooted in law, fairness and proportionality, not symbolism. Courts cannot become theatres for political messaging.
This is where Donald Trump enters the picture. Trump is a convicted criminal whose public conduct, erratic statements and contempt for legal norms make him unfit for office. He has inserted himself into South African politics by demanding Malema’s imprisonment and amplifying fantasies of white persecution. He has done so alongside organisations such as AfriForum, which has long attempted to internationalise domestic resistance to equality, posture as an alternative prosecutorial authority and lobby foreign audiences against the democratic choices of South Africans.
Trump’s hostility should not be dismissed as irrelevant noise. When a US president directly targets Malema, while a former apartheid-era politician is elevated to Washington to appease that climate, and Malema then receives a severe sentence, South Africans will draw conclusions.
This does not require a secret meeting or signed instruction. Power often operates through alignment rather than conspiracy. Foreign pressure, domestic elites, racist lobbying groups and weak governing leaders can all move in ways that reinforce one another without formal co-ordination.
The result is familiar. Voices demanding redistribution are demonised. Labels like “radical” are deployed to delegitimise redistributive or anti-imperial positions that are widely held. Malema is not radical for insisting that land injustice, racialised wealth and economic exclusion must be confronted. Those are mainstream concerns in black South Africa.
The deeper crisis is that the current ANC leadership too often treats the party’s conference mandates as suggestions while presenting drift to the right as moderation. The embrace of a GNU that includes the DA and FF Plus, comfort with old power centres and failure to implement transformative policy have widened the vacuum into which others step.
South Africans should also remain calm about threats from Trump. Even if diplomatic relations deteriorate, this country will survive. Capital follows profit, not tantrums. US companies operating here are unlikely to abandon profitable markets lightly, while China, Brics partners and others are in a position to fill any vacuum created by Western arrogance.
We cannot keep rewarding those who made peace with injustice while punishing those who demand it be undone. We cannot keep mistaking caution for wisdom and submission for diplomacy.
This is not coincidence. It is power recognising itself and protecting itself.
• Sexwale is a communications strategist with an interest in South Africa’s post-apartheid politics
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