By Bheki Gila
2025 will forever be remembered for the classic commentary of the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who declared that the era of unipolar hegemony is over.
This probably means the ushering in of a new or acknowledgement of an already existing multipolarity of the globe’s political architecture.
And the path to the inevitability of such multipolarity, must as of necessity pass through the painful catharsis of deconstruction. To be sure, it would be the deconstruction of lies and propaganda that undergird the narrative that either the US worldview or democracy, or both, as the case may be, are ideal for all countries on terms only the Americans can approve.
There has been a voluble amount of deliberate lies churned out to prop up the Western hegemony. For one, the most expansive is the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine. The other is the war of angels against devils in West Asia.
It just so happens that the fuel that engendered the pathogens of lies, deception, and info wars, which quickly metastasised throughout the veins of the global media ecosystem and policy institutions, has been the USAID.
Notwithstanding its insidious operations, dark and inscrutable, it had reserved a small percentage of its budget for health programs, clinics, and, where they were applicable, the provision of antiretroviral drugs.
But the USAID got a sweet deal. Having sponsored coups and regime change colour revolutions according to John Bolton, including Covid biolabs and lawfare against Donald Trump, it ended with an angelic image of a global health care provider.
Perhaps all the countries that are missing out on the USAID health largesse should be agitating for the formation of a US-funded Global Health Fund.
To its chagrin, the National Endowment for Democracy has equally been defunded, resulting in the curtailment of some of its activities. This Ronald Reagan neo-con 1983 initiative had an interesting errand.
To do publicly what the CIA does clandestinely. They are responsible for contriving the blinding halo that anything that is American is democratic and that a rules-based order is, pyramid-like, where America determines all the rules and everyone else obliges.
Not many tears have been shed for the curtailment of its hubris. The Latin American refrain of the ’70s and ’80s among its diplomats, is apposite in this respect. Why is there no military coup in the US? It is because there is no American embassy in Washington DC.
In South Africa, ground zero of the continent’s info wars, USAID has funded many organisations that had gotten accustomed to being ineptly loud where they could have benefitted from a studied silence.
With the sudden drying up of their financial oasis, we expect so many of them to either silently fold and mutate into some benign regime change outfit or, like the Afrikaner Weerstande Beweging (AWB), vanish into the vast and imponderable political ether.
The most curious of these are the media houses. They were reading from the same US deep state hymn book. The only thing left is for South Africa to know who the beneficiaries of this notorious slush fund were.
That way, we would gloat as we stare at the pantheon of regime change artists who have been masquerading as democracy advocates.
The GNU is another deceptive façade of our political intrigue, a contraption dreamt up by the ANC moneybags and a coterie of former apartheid heavyweights. They needed an ideal setting, which Gdansk in Poland provided as a perfect venue in June 2023, we are told.
The energetic Secretary General of the SACP, Solly Mapaila, is mortified. He is convinced that the outcomes of the 2024 elections fitted a scripted construct. It had to, lest Auntie Helen Zille would reluctantly activate the “doomsday” button.
In this Mapaila hypothesis, fairly distributed on social media, the threat to leave the GNU is all but scheduled episodes of a demented burlesque.
Poor President Cyril Ramaphosa! The businessman president’s penchant is always to borrow money, leaving South Africa with an amortisation burden of R2 billion every day.
The country’s dilemma is dire, grave even, reminding him and his advisors that South Africa cannot borrow its way to prosperity, nor indeed beg its way out of debt. Raising the VAT obligation from 15% to 17% was a botched, checkered move, which his GNU partners quickly blocked.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana could promulgate the 35% surcharge, or whatever amount they have resolved to impose, on exporting unbeneficiated minerals. Something is preventing him, though, making every caring patriot restless.
But then again, this is the age of deception. And as we have come to learn, the world of deception has infinitely vast resources to fuel the political merry-go-round.
The war in Ukraine may possibly come to an end sooner or later. At least the people who have been preparing for it since 2004 are about to shut the financial spigots that have sustained it hitherto.
The much-vaunted war between the USA and China may not occur in the next four years, nor a nuclear exchange in a hot war, marking the beginning of a third world war during that time, to the indignation of the European war machine.
Only the lies and propaganda will shift to a new theatre. Gaza!
* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a barrister-at-law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.