Definition: State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests (read the white capital elite) significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage.
The term “state capture” was first used by the World Bank, around the year 2000, to describe the situation in certain central Asian countries making the transition from Soviet communism. Specifically, it was applied to situations where small corrupt groups used their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making to strengthen their own economic positions; these groups’ members would later become known as oligarchs
Before the Anglo-Boer War in the 19th century, early part of the 20th century before the Glen Gray Act of 1894 and the Natives Land Act of 1913, the most successful farmers in the country were black and brown people. The Afrikaner often bought supplies and surplus produce from them
Between 1910 and 1913
Leading up to the Union of South Africa in 1910, just 8-years after the end of the Anglo-Boer War, the English land barons and mine-owners (representing Great Britain) and the Afrikaner farming community decided to deliberately create a system of political and white economic hegemony by introducing white supremacist capitalism to exclude black people from any meaningful economic prosperity. The motive was simple; they needed cheap black labour for the mines and industry.
The Land Act of 1913 turned millions of black people into poor homeless, indigents and created the largest man-made squatters population at the stroke of a pen. It boosted the economy with the sudden massive ownership of stolen land by white people, turning some of them into overnight millionaires, with many Afrikaner owning as many as 60 farms each.
For 75-years since the Union of South, the combined population of white people was always roughly 20%, but they commanded more than 75% of the total earning. Conversely, the black population was always roughly 75%, but they never commanded more than 20% of the total income of the earnings. This is the two most visceral examples of Apartheid capitalist exploitation on an unfathomable scale.
This system of white supremacist racial hegemony was further expanded when the National Party won the national elections in 1948, to become known as “Apartheid,” the world’s most perfect system of racism. By the sixties the income differential between white and black was a staggering 13:1 by 2018 it had dropped to 6:1, still giving white people a massive economic and financial head up. So excessive was the hegemonic economic hold white people and white business had over the South African economy over the last generation it turned the JSE, Johannesburg Stock Exchange into the single wealthiest bourse in the world relative to the size of the economy. And the backend reason, cheap black labour.
In the early nineties pre and post South Africa’s first democratic elections, more than R3 Trillion in surplus cash was transferred to overseas accounts. This was repeated in 2017, when a conservative, right-wing economist, Dawie Roodt warned of an impending economic collapse, the amount, a mere R2 Trillion.
Today white people still overwhelmingly control the commanding heights of the South Africa economy with 72% ownership of the land and 97% ownership of the total capitalisation of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this with a population now reduced to only 6% of the people in the country. South Africa today represents the best case study of how extractive, heterotopian, patriarchal, white supremacist, patrimonial, megalomaniacal feral neo-capitalism works.
