BIG READ: Beware: militarist adventurism ends in death

Were you among those who felt a rush of adrenaline on hearing the sky-tearing roar of the South African Air Force’s jets making a show of force over Gauteng during the recent G20 summit? And was the sensation one flush with patriotism, or tinged with nervousness?

In the aftermath of 14 killed in action near Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo in January 2025, there is generalised public concern about the combat-readiness of our forces and their equipment; for example, only two of 2 Squadron’s 25 Gripen fighter jets are reportedly airworthy, and the malaise stretches from undersupported troops to undermaintained submarines and frigates.

And yet, an astonishing new report by independent poll platform Afrobarometer says that half of all South Africans would prefer a military regime to a civilian government in power in the Union Buildings.

The report, released on October 21, possibly represents the greatest sea change in political opinion among the public since the dawn of democracy 31 years ago.

We are fortunate in having a defence force that is not coup-prone as elsewhere in Africa.

“For the first time in more than 25 years of surveying South Africa,” Afrobarometer notes, “the share of citizens who support military rule is higher than the share who oppose it. Almost half of respondents would approve of the army coming in to govern the country.” The figures are 49% for a camouflage-clad junta replacing parliament, and only 42% in support of our hard-won democracy.

The first time Afrobarometer polled on this question in South Africa, in 2011, the militarists scored only 16% versus 69% for the democrats, though that was still an uncomfortable minority opinion for any democracy. A reversal that began with a slight movement in 2015 with 20% for the soldiers versus 67% for the civilians, gained ground significantly in 2018 with the militarists surging to 57% and the democrats slumping to 34%.

A factor in democracy’s slippage might have been, though Afrobarometer does not speculate, the rise to prominence of the EFF on a radical platform that borrowed eclectically from Marxist-Leninist, black nationalist and pan-Africanist rhetoric. It notably adopted a militarist ethos with its massed ranks of red berets and overalls, and with leader Julius Malema styling himself as “commander-in-chief”.

The EFF’s militancy and provocative style of politics, particularly its unprecedented disruptions of parliament, had observers reaching, and sometimes overreaching, for analogues to explain this new populist phenomenon.

Academic Vishwas Satgar argued in a 2022 paper that it appeared to be a “black neofascist” party because its “race baiting, nativist nationalism, hypermasculinity, and disposition to violence are similar in these respects to the new fascisms rising in Europe, the US, and India”.

But racist nativist nationalism does not automatically equate with neofascism, so it is probably better to characterise the EFF as a left-populist party that nevertheless borrows some tropes from the fascist toolbox, notably the palingenetic appeal to a threatened racial community that requires a cleansing return to an idealised mono-ethnic golden age.

Imraam Baccus, senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-economic Research Institute (ASRI), which produces analyses on civic engagement, race and identity, characterises the EFF as “highly authoritarian nationalist”, albeit with chameleon-like policies on issues such as immigration that are more pan-Africanist than right-nationalist.

However, Daily Maverick opinionista Jackie Shandu, himself an EFF policy wonk, pointed in an earlier 2014 piece to the component of the EFF that concerns us here, describing it as “a proudly Sankarist formation”, referring to the Marxist revolutionary Capt Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso who, after his murder in a countercoup in 1987, became a Guevara-styled martyr for the African nativist left, which is now emboldened by a rash of coups across the Sahel and West Africa.

It is notable that the more clearly nativist neofascist black beret splinter from the EFF, the extremist Black First Land First (BLF), also describes itself as a “Sankarist” party, though its electoral showing has been so pitiful that it has hitched itself to the wagon of Jacob Zuma’s MK party, which Baccus calls “predatory”, “authoritarian nationalist” and socially far-right.

Afrobarometer’s report shows the democrats bounced back to 50% in 2021, the year of the Zuma faction’s attempted insurrection, arguably as a result of widespread public horror at the chaos, bloodletting, and the sight of an incipient class (and race) war, with middle-class communities having to defend themselves against the mobs where the police, overwhelmed, were absent.

Christopher Merrett in his review of the book Eight Days in July by journalists Qaanitah Hunter, Kaveel Singh and Jeff Wicks, which was published just four months after this “ANC civil war”, concludes that the writers produced evidence that “shows that joint, civilian, military and police intelligence reports warned as early as May 11 of such attempts to undermine the authority and sovereignty of the state”.

“The vacuum appears not to be information but consequential action from police and politicians and for several days, both were missing ... with ANC leaders and the security forces paralysed by factionalism and posturing around the divisive figure of Zuma.”

So while the South African security forces, particularly the military, are hardly hothouses of sedition themselves, Merrett suggests they are vulnerable to competing notions of what loyalty means. We have seen this sort of paralysis before: in an almost week-long failure by the police to act in 2008 during the “xenophobic” pogroms. Paralysis is as dangerous as divided loyalties, because any such security force vacuum invites adventurous, maverick senior commanders to step into the gap without a political mandate.

Our security forces are burdened with a bloated general staff, apparently to appease overinflated egos, but at least that removes the bottleneck in career advancement that is the most common cause of military coups in Africa: the thwarted ambitions for promotion of brigade-level officers, the most dangerous layer, as they can field significant forces.

However, the July Days demonstrated that the enemies of democracy were dead serious about trying to tip the scales. They looted 1.5-million rounds of ammunition from Durban harbour and R120m in cash from ATMs, and their “most ambitious targets”, as Merrett stresses, seemed to be the Vaal Dam, Constitutional Court and JSE.

Yet it was the SANDF itself that crushed the uprising, and with the militarists retreating to 30% popular support in the Afrobarometer polls, then 28% by 2022, it suggested that even some MK party blowhards were rattled by the uncontrollable nature of what they had unleashed.

Fully seven in 10 South Africans are dissatisfied with the way democracy functions in the country.

—  Afrobarometer

But amid the general sclerosis in the ruling ANC and with the official unemployment rate at 33% and power blackouts undermining recovery from the Covid lockdowns’ destruction of nearly half the country’s small businesses, by 2022, the democrats had plunged to 54%.

Today, “fully seven in 10 South Africans are dissatisfied with the way democracy functions in the country”, Afrobarometer states. “Poor South Africans, unemployed citizens, and middle-aged respondents record the highest levels of dissatisfaction.”

One of the spurs to the alarming results of the 2025 poll appears to have been unfortunate timing. Lt-Gen “Lucky” Mkhwanazi made his allegations of the cartel capture of the police slap-bang in the middle of polling, flanked by masked, armed and camouflaged men. That image seemed to act like a lightning rod of popular passions for militarist “solutions” to corruption.

We are fortunate in having a defence force that is not coup-prone as elsewhere in Africa: the sole occasion on which anything like an armed uprising against the central state from within its own armed forces occurred was more than a century ago, the 1914 Rebellion, in which a commando under Union Defence Force officer Jopie Fourie rallied the rebels, but they were defeated and Fourie was executed.

The recent eruption of seven militarist coups started in Chad, followed by Mali, Guinea and Sudan in 2021, then Burkina Faso in 2022, Niger and Gabon in 2023, and on November 26, Umaro Sissoco Embaló of narco-state Guinea-Bissau was ousted by a military forestalling a deadlocked presidential election. The vision of muscular camouflaged leadership sprouting in so many countries has emboldened the Africanist vision of remaking African politics by command.

I have previously written for Business Day on the nature of this “coup corps”, on how a unique new African class, wittily termed the “lumpen militariat” by Kenya’s Prof Ali Mazrui in an influential 1973 paper, has now transformed into what Nigerian-American Prof Ebenezer Obadare calls a “gangsta militariat”, who spout “the now standard denunciation of ‘Western neocolonialism’ and a promise to impose law and order amid chronic instability and lawlessness”.

The instability and lawlessness in the Sahel is largely occasioned by the utter lack of the ability of these very poor states to allocate resources such as healthcare to far-flung semi-desert provinces, plus embezzling and ennui in democratic institutions, and the rise of Salafist militia that have taken advantage of that vacuum, germinating and arming other destabilising players in turn, such as cattle-herding gangs and secessionists in Nigeria.

In large part, the failure of a long counter-insurgency campaign driven by Western forces, mostly French and US, to curb the spread of radical Islam has led to a collapse of faith in the West. The surge of coups and an ironic reorientation of the new militarist regimes, are often based on a misdirected nostalgia for the dead USSR, towards a Russian neocolonialism complete with its Africa Corps, the ex-Wagner mercenary expeditionary force.

I have worked in Mali before and found its people to be genteel and cultured, but that was before the current round of instability, so I will pass the mic to political scientists Morten Bøås and Viljar Haavik of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, who have done extensive fieldwork on the Malian junta under Gen Assimi Goïta.

They note that a Mali-Metré poll shows a remarkable degree of public support for the junta — nine out of 10 Malians — even though, with service delivery patchy, poverty extreme, inflation high and growth sluggish, average Malians, 60% of them under 25, are getting poorer.

To achieve this sleight of hand, Goïta has marshalled a “strongman” image that borrows heavily from Malian history and myth, the result of which, the researchers argue, “shows a youthful African population that is desperate for social change and willing to endure hardship to reach their promised land”.

But the most popular figure held as representative of this antidemocratic movement in the region is baby-faced 37-year-old Capt Ibrahim Traoré, the “interim president” of Burkina Faso, who is hailed by many Africanists as the “new Sankara”.

To understand the appeal, I have re-read Ernest Harsch’s Thomas Sankara: an African Revolutionary (Jacana, 2014). Harsch had interviewed Sankara at length on several occasions, so his perspectives are worth considering, and what emerges is a compelling figure who dramatically transformed his country, formerly Upper Volta, from a French stooge into an independent nation.

Sankara certainly did clean house after he came to power by coup d’etat in August 1983, disciplining the civil service, embarking on public works projects that delivered services to poor and rural people, and turning the economy around from extractives to local beneficiation — the sorts of things attractive to most South Africans.

As an avowed anti-imperialist, he tried to establish with France under François Mitterrand “a relationship of equals, mutually beneficial, without paternalism on the one side or an inferiority complex on the other”. Though he was opposed to independent trade unions and corporatised Burkinabè society through his vigilante-like committees for the defence of the revolution, this is the sort of dignity platform for which, Bøås and Haavik stress, many young Africans are willing to suffer privation.

I am writing a new book on how apartheid defence minister Magnus Malan transformed us from a police state to a military state with a thin civilian veneer.

Those to whom junta rule appeals totally forget what living in such a state was like: death squads hunting dissidents, the militarisation of society, with a biased hanging judiciary and paper parliament, surveillance of everything from churches to kindergartens, with cadets in schools, and conscripts firing live ammunition and chemical weapons at poor township residents for daring to protest.

But perhaps a lesson closer in time is the piteousness of those deluded unfortunates of the MK party who were recruited into fighting in Russia’s war on Ukraine, only to wind up begging to be allowed back home. It turns out it’s not all about spiffy berets — but the very real possibility that militarist adventurism will end in death.

● Schmidt’s ‘Ziggurat: Magnus’ Military State’ will be published by Jacana in 2026.