Editor’s note: This article by Ivor Chipkin, Executive Director and co-founder of the New South Institute and a lecturer at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), was originally published by The Africa Report on 19 March 2026. It examines whether South Africa’s experience of state capture offers lessons for understanding contemporary threats to democracy in the United States, and argues that defending democratic institutions also requires confronting the ideology that legitimises their capture. It is republished below in full on the NSI website as a courtesy to readers. Readers are encouraged to consult the original publication in The Africa Report as well.

Capturing America: What South Africa can teach the US about defending democracy

by Ivor Chipkin

Has the United States been captured? This is the question that several academics have asked since Donald Trump’s election. The state capture of South Africa holds important lessons on how to defend democracy and dismantle populist ideology.

On 7 February 2018, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a small opposition party in the South African parliament, addressed a question to the minister of finance. They wanted to know whether the organisation I ran at the time, the Public Affairs Research Institute, had received funding from the national treasury. A similar question was asked on 23 November and 30 November 2018. In 2020, they posed this question to the minister again.

At first glance, this might look like the mundane work of a political party seeking to hold the executive to account. There was that, but there was something else as well. As founder and director of the institute, I was the target of the questions, and the purpose was to try to establish a link with a report I co-authored on state capture.

Academic intervention or propaganda

In 2017, I released a report authored with several colleagues on state capture in South Africa, Betrayal of the Promise. My colleagues and I had taken up the challenge of the then-finance minister Pravin Gordhan to “join the dots” and produce a coherent analysis of what looked like spiralling corruption in South Africa.

Several months earlier, then-public protector Thuli Madonsela had issued her State of Capture report, implicating former president Jacob Zuma, the Gupta brothers and other senior officials in a web of intrigue and of illicit payments. This is how the concept of state capture landed in South Africa, unexpectedly and dramatically.

The EFF questions were an attempt to discredit the Betrayal report by suggesting that it had been commissioned by Gordhan. If the department had paid for it, the insinuation was that it was not a sincere academic intervention but propaganda to discredit Zuma and the Guptas.

The situation was surprising because it was the EFF that had taken the lead in opposing Zuma and the Guptas. Why were they seeking to discredit the report?

The answer to this question suggests that we expand our understanding of state capture in South Africa, and more generally.

Making corruption legal by buying influence

When Joel Hellman, Daniel Kaufmann and Geraint Jones first developed the concept of state capture in 2000, their focus was on corruption in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kaufmann was the first and last World Bank director to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. He witnessed how oligarchs used their personal connections with politicians to buy influence over the policymaking process.

State capture described how businesspeople exercised improper influence over the formation of laws and policy — a way, as Kaufmann later wrote, of making corruption legal. This was an important corrective to work on corruption that focused exclusively on politicians and officials.

The experience from South Africa, however, like that from Serbia, Hungary, Turkiye, Angola, Sri Lanka and Brazil, suggested that political elites could not be ignored. Sometimes state capture was led by business executives, sometimes it was led by politicians, who manipulated institutions and processes where public policy was made to serve their interests.

Elizabeth David-Barrett, professor of Governance and Integrity and director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, identified three pillars of state capture:

It involves influencing the formation of law and policy. Often this takes the form of changing the constitution to allow the incumbent to remain in power for longer than the stipulated term, or reducing the power of the constitutional court to overturn legislation.

State capture influences the implementation of policy. The administration of government procurement is a key target, so that state contracts can be awarded to the “right” people.

Institutions whose task is to ensure accountability are disabled or weakened. In South Africa, the politicisation of the police meant that certain cases of corruption were simply not investigated. The capture of the prosecuting authority meant that, even if they were investigated, they did not get to court.

There is a fourth pillar. It is ideology. The scale and extent of state capture, touching so many institutions and people, usually means that capturers need to appeal to a legitimating ideology. This is a discourse or set of ideas and practices that can be mobilised to explain and justify what would ordinarily be regarded as improper conduct. State capture is self-righteous corruption.

South Africa’s economic transformation gambit

In South Africa, this ideology had a policy framework, Radical Economic Transformation (RET). It described the radically unequal and unjust distribution of assets and wealth in South Africa between blacks and whites, and proposed a bold programme of redress.

State companies, including the electricity utility, Eskom, and the long-distance rail utility, Transnet, relied on a wide web of private companies. Eskom, for example, bought coal from private mines to burn in its power stations. RET stated that the political elite could advance the racial transformation of the economy in South Africa by terminating contracts with white-owned firms and entering into contracts with black-owned firms.

The problem was that the South African constitution does not allow using race as the primary consideration for awarding contracts. The Zuma administration went ahead anyway, changing the rules of the political game in South Africa. His administration weakened parliamentary oversight, deployed loyalists into key civil service positions, removed professionals, took control of how contracts were awarded and disarmed the police and the prosecution authorities.

RET also had a theory of government and the civil service. Professional administrators who insisted that formal processes be followed and that the law be upheld were attacked as being anti-transformation. Indeed, state capturers appealed to the image of a civil-service Leviathan hostile to “progressive” politics and unresponsive to the executive.

That Zuma’s friends, political allies and family were the main beneficiaries did not discredit RET as an anti-constitutional ideology, however. The EFF was opposed to the corruption of Zuma, but they were sympathetic to RET. The Betrayal of the Promise report went too far for them, suggesting that Zuma’s corruption and his anti-constitutionalism went hand in hand.

Twisted decolonial tropes in Hungary and the US

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also deploys decolonial tropes. He has consistently articulated his project as one of illiberal democracy, where national sovereignty and cultural identity take precedence over liberal universalism. His government positions Hungary as resisting the encroachment of Brussels, international NGOs and global finance.

Orbán’s narrative suggests that Hungary is a peripheral nation historically subjected to domination — whether by the Ottoman Empire, Habsburgs or Soviets, and now by the EU and global liberal elites. This rhetoric mirrors a decolonial trope: Hungary is imagined as a colonised entity within Europe itself, compelled to liberate itself from Western European impositions.

US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again frames the United States’ decline as the result of betrayal by cosmopolitan elites, globalisation and uncontrolled immigration. Though the US is the centre of the world economy, Trumpian politics appropriates decolonial imagery by casting “ordinary Americans” (implicitly white, working and middle-class) as victims of exploitation.

The “deep state”, free-trade agreements, China, and even migrants are described as forces that have “colonised” America from within. In this sense, Trump invokes a reversed decolonial narrative: the empire imagines itself as the colonised subject. His base is invited to see themselves as dispossessed by global elites in the same way that formerly colonised peoples were.

This inversion allows Trump to articulate a populist politics where liberation is framed as protectionism, border enforcement and cultural reassertion.

How to crack false-righteous ideology

In South Africa, the consequences of state capture have come to a head. The chronic weakening of state institutions, the misallocation of resources, and rent seeking all contributed to the electoral disaster for the African National Congress (ANC) in 2024, when it lost its parliamentary majority.

South Africa is on the cusp of historic public-service reform that will go some way to better insulate civil servants from improper political interference. These changes are as significant as the Roosevelt-era reforms that weakened Tammany Hall politics in the US. They will make it much more difficult to capture the implementation of policies. The ideology of state capture, however, retains its appeal among an important part of the political elite.

Therein lies an important lesson. Political elites, no less than academics, social movements and organisations run by and for poor and working people, innovate, learn and adapt their politics to the language and the mood of the day.

State capture is sustained by a legitimising ideology that allows its protagonists to claim a righteous halo. Increasingly, this ideology takes on the form of a decolonial populism. Authoritarian tendencies and movements all over the world now speak its language. In the hands of political elites with access to, and control of, government resources and institutions, decolonial populism has become an instrument of self-righteous corruption and the weakening of democracy.

Defending society from capture thus requires protecting the integrity of legislative processes, upholding the autonomy and the professionalism of the institutions of law and order, and properly insulating civil servants from inappropriate political interference.

It requires a robust defence of democracy from elite populism.