South Africa’s MAGA Manga Business: When chickens come home to roost
Opinion
Anglo American has always been in control of its destiny and has sought to avoid accountability at all costs.
Image: Supplied
SHAUN Jacobs recently penned a dehumanising piece in the Daily Investor titled ‘ANC chasing South Africa’s most iconic company out of the country’ (30 November 2025). The article is not about the ANC per se, but the broader agenda to water down apartheid.
Now emboldened by the MAGA’s showing in the United States under Donald Trump, the conservative, anti-DEI bloc in the white South African community is showing its ugly head.
Over the past months, these groups have visited the US on numerous occasions to spread their vile stories, which now crisscross with geopolitical wars. Besides South Africa taking a moral stance in alleging genocidal acts in Gaza, the white groups are nostalgic about the olden days with Israel.
The South African diocese of MAGA has centred South Africa in Trump’s messy social media rants, claiming that Afrikaners were being killed to divert attention from both the Gaza slaughterhouse and their ill-preparedness to bridge “two South Africas”.
Overlapping with the “anti-globalist”, “anti-woke” and “White First” rhetoric, the push back from the white community against Black South Africa has grown leaps and bounds in the past few months. The DA, with AfriForum as an amicus curiae, is leading the charge against equity and inclusion in South African society.
The obvious targets are employment equity and black economic empowerment policies. Now Jacobs and his ilk claim the unions and the ANC “put the fear of God into everybody related to Anglo, including investors, and so when they had the chance to leave in 1999, they took it”.
Really?
The neo-liberal logic of depoliticising economic discussions is what continues to place South Africa where it is, rather than ANC misdeeds. It is fair to question the former liberation movement for potholes and other delivery problems, but not policy choices that emanated from a “democracy born in chains”.
However, its leaders, from Oliver Tambo to Cyril Ramaphosa, should shoulder the blame for colluding in a scheme that diverted freedom to despair as they played along in the continued subordination of Black imaginations of a free and just South Africa.
This means the ANC can be faulted for embracing shady characters as partners who were supposedly going to help it turn the fortunes of the Black population around. As Wits University academic Roger Southall puts it, this was “an odd combination of political power without money and old money without power”. The ANC cosied up with large white corporations in the hope that the post-1994 period would be about fairness and justice.
In short, the ANC presented itself “as a partner with which large-scale capital could play”. In return, the white corporations only gave “gifts” to placate the Black majority. Some of these corporate gifts are: Black Economic Empowerment, social and labour plans, corporate social investment, King Codes and, of course, AA jobs. The ANC and trade unions put forward the names of their cadres and close allies to take up these ‘economic opportunities’ as millions of Blacks languished at the bottom.
Now that the ungodly scheme of ill-treating the indigenous black populations is crumbling, our local MAGA diocese is blaming the ANC for its double, dirty business.
Jacobs claims the ANC trade unions “pushed Anglo American to effectively leave South Africa in 1999 to ensure the company could survive in its present form”. These observations are bizarre, ludicrous and ahistorical, to say the least. Anglo American cannot be spoken of as if it were a small-timer or a corner shop in Hillbrow. Many reasons make this company built on the oppression of the Black indigenous population to anything but a victim.
To understand how Big Capital has shaped South Africa’s politics to date, one need look no further than Harry Oppenheimer and his larger-than-life company, Anglo-American. This company occupied centre stage throughout the apartheid era, and former apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd is said to have remarked that Oppenheimer could collapse the South African state at any time.
Indeed, as the apartheid government tightened its grip on the rebellion by the African majority at the beginning of the 1960s, Anglo American’s prominence grew even further. The killing of scores of Africans in Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 resulted in a significant capital flight out of South Africa. Anglo-American Corporation’s enormous capital resources helped stabilise the situation and prevent economic collapse.
The New York Times wrote in 1983 that Oppenheimer’s “grip on the country’s resources had never been translated into effective political power”. Thus, after the Sharpeville massacre, he had the opportunity to truly influence the course of events within the South African state. Oppenheimer’s advantage was that he “personified the one power centre the Government party had never quite managed to dominate”.
The massacre created an untenable situation for the Nats — a catastrophic flight of Western capital. His billions helped South Africa slowly recover and set the country on the path to becoming a sophisticated industrial state. Bill Freund cites the example of Oppenheimer’s gift to Afrikaners through the creation of Gencor. The company marked the Afrikaners’ entry into mining. South Africa went on to depend on Anglo-American, which controlled almost every aspect of its economy.
All in all, the Oppenheimer dynasty accounted for roughly half of South Africa’s exports and half of the value of shares traded on the JSE. And that was only in South Africa. His wings stretched to Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, and — very discreetly — Angola and the USSR.
Oppenheimer and Anglo-American even managed to “beat” the tight exchange controls to own businesses in the USA. The flexible exchange controls were only introduced under the new black government in the late 1990s.
Oppenheimer played a massive role in pushing the Nats to speak with the exiled ANC leaders, and did so not out of altruism or the goodness of his stone heart. A company like Anglo-American was already a multinational corporation with interests worldwide.
Nonetheless, the money buried within South African borders and economic sanctions, to a lesser extent, pushed white businesses to talk to the ANC. And with a floundering organisation in exile, the approach by white businessmen was a godsend for ANC leaders.
It can be argued that the ANC comrades were negotiating from a position of weakness, as they had no serious bargaining power. They were also racing against time as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel. Additionally, Southall points out: “Just as the ANC was unable to overthrow the political order, so it was unable to overturn the economic order.” There was no other route the ANC could take but to dance to Corporate South Africa’s music.
The outcome was the lifting of exchange controls a year before Anglo American decided to exit South Africa, following its then-CEO Tony Trahar’s comments about South Africa’s “risk factor” as an investment destination. Finally, the apartheid national champion gained its freedom and took its money along with it.
Anglo American’s move was a pivotal moment in global finance, shifting a large pool of capital from a semi-closed national system to the international market just as the commodity supercycle began. This move led to a global mining investment boom in the early 2000s.
What the company left behind were deadly holes, fake mountains, deadly tuberculosis and economic wreckage. But one thing is for sure, the destructive machine is leaving without paying reparations for its role in forced removals, slave labour, wage theft and other heinous crimes.
I support Mazibuko Jara, the then-SACP spokesperson, who charged that South African capital benefited from democracy “without contributing anything”. As Anglo American finally leaves South Africa, it ignites MAGA’s manga (blatant lies) that the ANC pushed this massive tool of exploitation and extractive capitalism out of South Africa. This is untrue because Anglo American has always been in control of its destiny and has sought to avoid accountability at all costs.
Siyayibanga le economy!
* Siyabonga Hadebe is an independent commentator based in Geneva on socio-economic, political and global matters.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.