Dear reader,

I write to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the first article published under the amaBhungane banner.

A reminder: that first story, on 19 March 2010, was “Zuma Inc.” and it was in this story that we first identified the Guptas as persons of interest around the controversial new President.

Plans for marking our 10th year in a significant way went out the window with the Covid-19 outbreak, but it is worth recalling what I wrote on that anniversary.

“In the time of the coronavirus, when we’re unsure about next week, never mind next year or the next decade, it is hard to take a long-term view.

“Globalisation has lifted millions out of poverty, but it has also produced unprecedented global fragilities, of which the current virus outbreak is just one symptom, and among which the global climate crisis is the most serious threat – likely to trigger secondary crises of increasing severity in the decades ahead.

“The social contract between states and citizens has been weakened and the ability of political parties and governments to act as instruments of social cohesion and redistribution, rather than merely in the interests of elites, has been undermined, especially by the influence of money in politics.

“But the current crisis has also shown the value of institutions that can sound the alarm, tell the truth, and push back against selfish elites and grimy politicians.

“An independent and vigilant media is a core ingredient for restoring the health of our country and our planet.”

Five years later, in 2025, the health of the both the planet and its polity have deteriorated markedly and it is worth asking: does the prescription remain the same?

This was a question I tried to address with staff over email on 11 February, in the wake of the first moves of the Trump/Musk regime to shut down USAid (which coincidentally reinforced the wisdom of our funding policy NOT to accept funding from state entities).

Titled “Surviving the age of discontinuity,” it aimed to help us think about our own future and that of the NGO sector more broadly.

Here, somewhat condensed, are the points I made:

• The world is changing faster than we are, but still slowly enough for most of us to continue with Business as Usual, particularly as the alternatives are not obvious. Our biggest hurdle is recognising and persuading others to accept that Business as Usual is not an option.
• Trump has actually helped by kicking away some of the ideological and practical supports that still made it possible to believe the world as we know it will continue much the same.
• What are the implications? We need to focus on ruggardisation – what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called anti-fragility. 
• This was starkly evident during the shock of Covid when, for the most part, the rich parts of the world put up walls and looked after themselves. Barring a successful global political alternative, that process is likely to accelerate. It is also likely to include the three big empires: the US; the Chinese and the Russian. 
• While some opportunities to play off great power rivalries in order to protect ourselves may emerge (as they did in the cold war), the new imperialism is likely to be more brutal; more like the 19th century version. As a recent article put it, “rather than posing as their moral and strategic opposite, America is becoming more like China and Russia – a regional great power whose statecraft is increasingly amoral and purely self-interested.”  It feels like we are returning to a world where, as Thucydides said in 400 BC, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
• So, we need to think about ruggardisation at multiple levels: as individuals and families; as organisations and institutions; as communities; as countries and as political blocs.
• At a national level, this means a radical approach to prioritisation. Not surprisingly, this also aligns quite well with the priorities of the poorest and weakest among us: the need for physical security and protection; food; shelter; basic healthcare.
• At the moment, we in South Africa are struggling with the logic and consequences of massive internal power and wealth disparities, which means we are to a large extent reproducing the paradigm of the rich putting up walls and looking after themselves.
• Reversing these trends is only possible if there is a process at scale, which means one that is inevitably largely state and community controlled and managed.
• We are now appallingly bad at this; the state is weak and captured and lacks skills, integrity and credibility. There is also the problem of people with guns simply taking what they want and determining outcomes in their favour. This is already happening all over the country via the construction mafia and other forces.
• We can imagine we have to become (in some ways – particularly with regard to maximum self-sufficiency) more like Cuba, but while minimising the potential for social breakdown, democratic backsliding and so on. Policing this change – i.e., punishing those who steal and cheat, whether by force or not – is going to be very important. Hence our concern with reforming the criminal justice system and the SANDF.
• We are going to have to face a managed economic de-globalisation, hopefully combined with an effort to form international political alliances for greater global equity in dealing with these challenges. More likely, we are going to have to work out how to deal with Empire.

Only a month later and the lessons are even more stark.

US institutions have shown themselves more hollowed out than ours were and there is a depth of deference towards authority that Zuma would envy.

Both our media and our judiciary – even our political institutions – proved more prescient and more robust when we faced our own test of State Capture.

As we look back on the last 15 years, there is much to celebrate, including the way good journalists and good judges have reached across institutional divides to protect the core pillars of our freedom.

Today we will eat cake baked in the shape of the amaBeetle logo, which has become a nationally recognised symbol for accountability since we slipped the confines of our ties with the Mail & Guardian in 2016.

Yet this is no time for resting on our laurels. The tests to come are going to be even tougher.

At their core, the challenges we face are the same as they ever were: to nurture human governance, to try to force accountability into the exercise of power, to fight abuses as best we can and to build alliances for reconstructing basic human solidarity.

The terrain is somehow harsher now.

The independent media is in economic retreat and under political attack globally, and South Africa is not immune to these trends.

Thanks to your support, past and present, amaBhungane is better placed than many to survive the storm and continue playing our part.

Thank you, and here’s to another 15 years!

Sam Sole and the amaB Team