Selling the Family Silver: Power, Extraction, and the False Promise of Balance in South Africa’s Political Economy
Introduction: Davos , Washington , and the Pedagogy of Humiliation There is something quietly revealing about South Africa’s annual pilgrimage to Davos. There, amid the rituals of elite networking and the theatre of global consensus, South African leaders encounter the realities of power stripped of ceremony: conditional access, asymmetrical bargaining, and the expectation of compliance dressed up as partnership. It is an experience uncomfortably familiar to those lower down the domestic hierarchy; mining-affected communities, the working poor, and those whose lives are shaped by decisions taken elsewhere and justified after the fact. The irony is not that South Africa is treated poorly at Davos or in Washington, but that its political leadership appears perpetually surprised when it is. When President Ramaphosa travelled to Washington and was treated as an inconvenience rather than a partner, some commentators rushed to frame the moment as an aberration, a function of Donald...