Avoid a Modi authoritarian solution for South Africa | Opinion | M&G

The faction of the ANC led by President Cyril Ramaphosa includes people who aspire to the wholly fantastical idea that there can be some sort of return to the way things were before Jacob Zuma stormed the political stage. That hope is forlorn for the simple reason that a return to the economic and political arrangements that collapsed the Thabo Mbeki presidency will, in time, do the same to a Ramaphosa presidency.

But, although this faction may have some of its roots in the trade union movement and the popular struggles of the 1980s, it is now too elitist to pursue a serious attempt to ally itself with popular forces and sentiments in a potentially democratising project, one that could sustain its credibility in society and secure its authority in the party by routing widely loathed local political bosses.

Rich Mkhondo, an intellectual firmly embedded in elite circles, has taken matters a step further and, in the, openly called for dictatorship. Mkhondo says he is for an enlightened despotism “that will exercise absolute power over the state, but for the benefit of the population as a whole”. His list of “benevolent dictators” includes a figure as chilling as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This is not to suggest that Ramaphosa’s trajectory is likely to end up in a position as extreme as Narendra Modi’s in India. Modi has spent his entire life in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh , a far-right organisation inspired by German fascism that has spent almost a century preparing itself for an authoritarian form of hegemony. The ANC includes authoritarian currents but, thankfully, none of them are remotely analogous to the RSS.

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