In his 1965 manifesto, Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories, Guinea-Bissauan freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral declared that “the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.”

Unrelenting in his work to better the lives of people in the erstwhile Portuguese colonies, Cabral was assassinated for his anti-colonial efforts in 1973. In post-liberation South Africa, this brand of selfless pragmatism towards the greater good, unencumbered by self-serving ideology, is a chimera. 

It was conspicuously absent during the 2023 State of the Nation address (Sona), when well-fed, well-dressed (often self-proclaimed) struggle stalwarts occupying the seats of privilege and power, applauded the declaration that “no one will be left behind”. This, incredibly, while human disaster engineered through persistent governance failure is dragging scores of South Africans into destitution, surviving off social relief of distress (SRD) grants that do not cover the most basic needs. 

In an ironic twist, the applications for SRD grants of R350 a month surged by nearly 100% just days after Sona. The majority of these applications were lodged by the born-free, yet hopelessly left-behind generation younger than 25. More hollow democratic spin and empty promises but, apart from the swiftness with which political power is concentrated and planning centralised, only inaction and deterioration can be witnessed.   

Spin dictatoring is not new. As Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain in Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (2021), it is fast becoming a cliché. It is the guise of modern autocracy, substituting spin and deception for fear and oppression. Spin dictators such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are well versed in democratic speak; they forge public support through appearing democratic. They prefer suits over military uniforms, show up at the World Economic Forum in Davos and court international investors. 

Spin dictators and low-quality democratic leaders may be quite indistinguishable from other politicians. Moreover, weak democracies present rent-seeking opportunities to unscrupulous politicians, making them constantly vulnerable to hijacking by would-be spin dictators. In practice, life in an illiberal, threadbare democracy may not be that different from one in a spin dictatorship. Both entail an existence where freedom and opportunity are promised but not realised. Elections may even be held. On a scale measuring representative and participatory governance, however, they huddle together on the illiberal end, far from liberal democracy characterised by capable, accountable states. 

Democratic backsliding into even mild forms of autocracy should be preventable; that is the point of democracy. Institutional gates are erected through constitutions, independent judiciaries and various checking mechanisms to keep the executive accountable to the electorate, who then control the gates to keep the accountables in their lane. But democracy is only as strong as its institutional gates and the gatekeepers’ proclivity to not let their guard slip.

Democracy comes under threat if the elected leadership succeeds in defanging the checking institutions and packs them with cadres and loyalists. In a 2016 paper, On Democratic Backsliding, Nancy Bermeo describes a deliberate, state-led process she refers to as executive aggrandisement, which is the systemic and incremental dismantling of the institutional checks and balances that democracies need to enforce executive accountability. 

Aggrandising the executive sees a political executive self-identifying as the sole repository of the people’s mandate. They justify their aggrandisement as they target democracy’s gate-keeping institutions; using the rhetoric of democracy, they paint democracy’s checking institutions as representing the anti-transformation, anti-people or anti-liberation establishment. Sliding into spin dictator territory as they centralise and concentrate power, the deception may even garner public support and popularity as the spun narrative hammers pro-people platitudes such as that no one will be left behind. 

This is the familiar territory of brazen defiance of democratic accountability, sweeping governance failure and state theft. This is the tale of South Africa’s electricity crisis. 

Justified through patronising democratic speak, a state of disaster was ushered in swiftly, further centralising power and undoing checking mechanisms. It may serve us well to remember that our aggrandised executives are not democrats. They are comrades running a flawed democracy, nurturing alliances with the most dictatorial, anti-people regimes in the modern world. 

It was disconcerting to witness the ease — perhaps relief — with which they slipped into extreme central planning and coercive control during the Covid-19 lockdown. To be compelled by circumstance to execute such profoundly anti-democratic action would be jarring to the democratically minded, but to them it was not. The legacy of the sweepingly unconstitutional executive action during that frenzied time is probably permanent in the tourism and tobacco industries for instance, while the minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs remains in defiance of a court ruling attempting to enforce a semblance of accountability. All lies and easy victories. 

The institutional gates are under severe strain. What now remains to prevent aggrandising leaders from further subverting checking mechanisms and tipping South Africa into spin dictatorship is the active resistance of the informed. 

The 2022 Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks South Africa as a flawed democracy. And it’s weakening. Since the inception of the Democracy Index in 2006, South Africa’s democracy score and global ranking have backslid every single year. 

Several sub-categories are used to calculate a country’s overall democracy score, one of them is political culture. This is by far our poorest scoring category. It measures whether the crucial democratic culture of responsible citizenry — in essence, the active gatekeeping necessary to safeguard citizens’ own democratic interests — is present. Also, as the Democracy Index Report makes clear, “a culture of passivity and apathy, [and] an obedient and docile citizenry are not consistent with democracy”. 

We should object as strongly as the democratic and constitutional parameters permit. Accountability is the thin line that sets democratic states apart from predatory and dictatorial ones. The institutional levers of accountability are only useful to keep the aggrandised executive and would-be spin dictators at bay if they are operated. Ultimately, change is really up to us, the gatekeepers. 

This article first appeared on the Mail & Guardian on 27 February 2023. Dr Sansia Blackmore is a Senior Lecturer at the African Tax Institute in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the University of Pretoria.