Sitting through the live stream of the Madlanga commission, I sensed a certain déjà vu. The setting was sober, the testimony grave and the moral tone familiar. Across the ocean, in another democracy, Donald Trump was doing the same — turning grievance into theatre and rage into ritual. Different languages, same script.
Trump’s mix of elite entitlement and popular rage mirrors, in form if not in scale, the very instincts that have hollowed out governance in SA, revealing how democracies can turn their own institutions into stage props. Power becomes performance, democracy an ornament.
Trump’s paradox, as a creature of the elite and its most vocal critic, echoes the choreography of the postapartheid elite, in which the very performance of anti-elitism consolidates elite control. Both seek to expose “the swamp”, as they navigate the grub and the grime within it for gain.
In SA, moral posturing provides a substitute for delivery. Political life unfolds in ritual displays of accountability — commissions, reshuffles and consultations perform democracy rather than enact it.
The Madlanga commission of inquiry into criminality, political interference and corruption is a case in point. On the surface, a noble exercise in transparency; in reality, another episode in SA’s endless drama of revelation without remedy.
In SA, moral posturing provides a substitute for delivery. Political life unfolds in ritual displays of accountability — commissions, reshuffles and consultations perform democracy rather than enact it.
Like the Zondo commission before it, it exposes the heart of the rot, but the likelihood of structural renewal remains elusive.
The country is captivated by spectacle precisely because it performs what citizens crave: a sense that someone, somewhere, is taking the rot seriously, even if we’ve lost the capacity to act. They function like Trump’s rallies —democratic theatre, showcasing grievance and promising redemption, while the machinery of real change remains jammed.
In SA and Trump’s US, it’s less about governing than about showing outrage, declaring virtue and asserting loyalty. It’s all about tweets on the one hand and task teams on the other. Trump’s performative aggression and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s performative deliberation are two sides of the same democratic decay — shock, empathy and the promise of process; performance art in bureaucratic form.
It’s all about displays of accountability rather than its practice, where populism, combined with political payola enables the capture of the state at its apex. It’s a feedback loop of entitlement and resentment: elites invoke liberation and feel entitled to rule, while the disaffected masses are offered resentment instead of reform. Each feeds the other: corruption breeds anger, anger feeds populism and populism shields corruption. Trump has perfected this alchemy; SA grapples with it daily.
The country is captivated by spectacle precisely because it performs what citizens crave: a sense that someone, somewhere, is taking the rot seriously, even if we’ve lost the capacity to act.
The rituals are intact but increasingly serve as décor. The Madlanga commission epitomises this — reflection and revelation masquerading as reform. It’s democracy in the confessional booth of the republic.
Trumpism and postapartheid decay are not aberrations; they are the natural outcome of democracies that mistake performance for power. Instead of collective, institutional action, we get spectacle — the rally, the commission, the televised outrage; the promise of renewal and the reality of internal inertia.
These are two democracies, each talking to themselves while the lights dim. The danger is not that institutions collapse overnight, but that citizens stop believing they matter — the true hallmark of a failed state. The institutional decay follows predictably. When truth becomes partisan, when loyalty is prized over integrity and when the state becomes an extension of personal power, the machinery of governance seizes up. The US’s institutions have years over SA’s, but the habits of dysfunction are hauntingly similar — contempt for expertise, the corrosion of trust and politics that rewards outrage more than competence.
Quo vadis, on our own Appian Way?
• Cachalia, a businessperson and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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