There’s something darkly familiar about the rise of Trump 2.0 — a sense of déjà vu that should send shivers down the spines of anyone who lived through South Africa’s own era of state capture.
We’ve seen it before: Institutions gutted, oversight bodies declawed, loyalists quietly inserted while the public is distracted by political theatre. In South Africa, we called it “state capture”. In the US, they may soon call it Trump’s second term.
During Jacob Zuma’s presidency, we witnessed the rapid erosion of institutional integrity. It wasn’t just corruption. It was the systematic repurposing of the state — transforming public institutions into weapons of factional power. The line between private gain and public duty disappeared.
Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election is no ordinary democratic exercise. He promises not a new vision, but vengeance. His allies have drafted the Schedule F plan, a blueprint to purge thousands of non-partisan civil servants and replace them with personal loyalists.
We once called it cadre deployment. They now call it “draining the swamp”. But language aside, the goal is familiar: Dismantle the independence of the state and consolidate control through compliant actors.
South Africa is a young democracy. The US is the world’s oldest constitutional republic. But as journalist Martin Wolf has warned in his own context, even well-established democracies can be corroded from within when populist strongmen are enabled by broken systems and cynical elites.
If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.
They used to sing: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” These days, the tune is darker: If democracy can collapse there — in the land of checks, balances and Broadway optimism — it can collapse anywhere, including here.
State capture doesn’t arrive in jackboots. It creeps in behind a desk. It rewrites procurement rules, replaces watchdogs with allies, turns ministries into patronage hubs. By the time the public wakes up, the state has already been repurposed.
And sometimes, it’s not just the state that’s captured — it’s the economy.
Americans may believe they’re immune. They are not. They are sleepwalking towards a cliff we once tumbled off — and they will soon wish they had paid attention. Not to mock us, but to learn from us
When Zuma fired finance minister Nhlanhla Nene in 2015 — a move linked to Gupta pressure — the rand crashed. Later evidence showed that Gupta-linked entities were positioned to profit from that collapse. This wasn’t clumsy corruption. It was economic sabotage disguised as governance.
In Trump’s orbit we find hedge fund managers, crypto-barons and political financiers — people for whom volatility is not a threat but a profit opportunity. Their investments thrive on disruption. Truth Social, speculative digital assets and deregulated platforms, have become vehicles of political monetisation.
This is the new model: politics not just as power, but as portfolio. As Wolf might put it, the challenge is not just populism — it is the hijacking of public authority by private opportunism under the illusion of democratic legitimacy.
In both countries, the lesson is clear: when institutions fail, it’s not just the vulnerable who suffer — it’s also the democratic system itself that begins to die.
So what can the US learn from South Africa?
First, never assume institutional resilience is automatic. Left unguarded, it crumbles. In South Africa, we’re still rebuilding the Treasury, Sars and the prosecuting authority — all scarred by strategic sabotage.
Second, state capture is not an accident — it is a deliberate project. It comes cloaked in the language of reform, nationalism or liberation. Its tools are patronage, procedural warfare and narrative manipulation. The capture of a central bank, a court, or a tax agency is never just about — it’s about neutralising the future.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama puts it better: “Institutions are not just formal rules; they are deeply embedded habits and norms. When these are eroded, formal rules alone won’t save a democracy.”
We may scoff at US exceptionalism — but we should also be wary of South African amnesia. Because who are we — from the so-called Dark Continent, from a place Trump once called a “shithole” — to offer lessons to the most powerful democracy on earth?
And yet, we’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends — with institutions gutted, trust shattered, and hope auctioned off for political survival.
Americans may believe they’re immune. They are not. They are sleepwalking towards a cliff we once tumbled off — and they will soon wish they had paid attention. Not to mock us, but to learn from us.
The difference is, we had an excuse: Our democracy was young. They don’t.
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, but the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” as Fukuyama wrote in the often misquoted or misunderstood The End of History and the Last Man. He meant it as triumph.
It may yet read as obituary.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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