Hello, welcome back to Conversations with
Stephen Kamugasa. This is the sixth and final
episode in our 2025 Leadership Series. Today's
guest is Lord Peter Hain, a British politician
who served as Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland from 2005 to 2007, Secretary of State
for Work and Pensions, from 2007 to 2008,
and twice as Secretary of State for Wales
from 2002 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2010.
Peter is a prolific author of 22 books and
contributes to academia, teaching at Gibbs
and Stellenbosch Business Schools. His most
recent book is The Pretoria Boy, The Story
of South Africa's Public Enemy, Number One.
In this episode, we discuss the topic, leadership
in a multipolar new world order. Lord Peter
Hain, welcome.
Thank you, Stephen. Good to be with you.
Your book, The Pretoria Boy, details your
upbringing in Pretoria in the 1950s and 60s.
where your parents were vocal and apartheid
activists, leading to their arrests, harassment,
and ultimately, the family's forced exile
to London in 1966. You recount how, as a
teenager in the UK, you became public enemy
number one in the South African media for
organizing militant protests against all
white South African sports tours. significantly
contributing to the international sports
boycott against apartheid. You described
narrowly escaping jail for these actions
and being framed for a bank theft by an apartheid
security agent. But first, Peter, can you
please share some insights about your childhood?
How has your childhood experience influenced
your appreciation of life as an adult? enabling
you to become such a powerful and influential
politician?
Well, whether I'm a powerful or influential
politician is up to you and others to assess,
not me. But I was the child of two very brave
young white anti-apartheid activists living
in Pretoria at the time, in the late 50s
and early 60s, becoming increasingly involved
in the anti-apartheid battle, working alongside
Nelson Mandela and many of his disciples.
And that led, in the case of my mother, Adelaine
Hain, first of all to her being warned, then
jailed for two weeks, along with my father,
for supporting Mandela's defiance campaign,
his appeal to workers, to black workers,
to stay at home instead of coming into the
white cities around which their settlements
were ringed to work and to support and to
clean and to garden and all those kind of
jobs that whites required of blacks, paying
very menial wages. So they were distributing
leaflets, preparing leaflets when they were
arrested to support Mandela's campaign, his
stay-at-home campaign. It was like a strike
of black workers, if you like, to try and
bring an end to apartheid. And they were
then jailed. That was 1961. In 1963, my mother
was issued with a banning order. A banning
order meant you couldn't take part in political
activity. You couldn't meet more than one
other person at a time. I can give you an
example of how that affected her. It also
contained a clause amongst the many hundreds
of them, restricting her in all sorts of
ways, banning her from talking to another
banned person. So when they banned my dad
a year later, this presented the government
with a dilemma and an embarrassment they'd
never faced before. and they had to give
them special permission to talk to one other
person who is banned on the planet, namely
each other as husband and wife. So there
were these kind of absurdities to apartheid,
but that was just part of life, as well as
dreadful oppression and a terribly violent
security apparatus that killed, tortured,
imprisoned people on an arbitrary basis.
The other banning restriction, as I mentioned,
that stopped her communicating with more
than one other person, so she could only
mix with one other person at a time, meant
that when we held diplomatic parties, whereas
previously my mother and father had been
in the living room, introducing the American
ambassador, the French ambassador, the British
ambassador and so on to black activists in
the main that they hadn't had a chance to
talk to. When it came to coping with her
banning order she had to sit in the kitchen
on her own as I brought the ambassadors one
by one, as a schoolboy at the time, to see
her sitting on her own. She could meet them
one by one. If she stepped next door into
the living room, she'd be contravening her
banning order and could be arrested on the
spot because they had had informers anywhere,
because that would be meeting more than one
other ambassador at a time. So there were
these restrictions on her that were pretty
overwhelming.
The Pretoria Boy also covers your subsequent
distinguished political career in Britain,
serving as an MP and a senior cabinet minister
in Labour governments. A powerful theme throughout
the book is your continued commitment to
justice, exemplified by your recent use of
parliamentary privilege in 2017 to 2018.
to expose widespread money laundering and
corruption under the then South African President
Jacob Zuma, which played a role in Zuma's
downfall. The book concludes with your reflections
on South Africa's future, and you call for
the country to return to Nelson Mandela's
vision and integrity. Could you elaborate
on the process and challenges you faced in
gathering and presenting that information.
And what lessons do you think other nations
or individuals can draw from your experience
in combating high-level corruption?
Well, this is a huge topic, Stephen, and
a big threat to everybody, and indeed the
good maintenance of international relations.
I was asked in 2017 whilst on a teaching
visit to Johannesburg, the commercial capital
of South Africa, I was asked by senior African
National Congress figures who wanted to get
rid of Jacob Zuma and restore the party to
some kind of Mandela-like normality rather
than the corrupt vehicle that it had become,
to expose the international complicity What
had happened inside the country is brave
investigative journalists had exposed the
terrible corruption and looting that had
been going on, led by President Zuma from
the very top and his family, in cohorts with
what were known as the Gupta Brothers, three
Indian business people who'd come to South
Africa and settled there. and indulged in
all sorts of commercial trickery to loot
the country and getting fake contracts for
public work that they never carried out but
were paid for and so on. So I was asked to
expose that and, as you mentioned, did so
using parliamentary privilege. I might add
that I got a shed load of emails from white
South Africans saying, well done, but I hated
you for stopping the Springboks. the all-white
spingbox. This is in 1969-70 when we were
running on the pitch and stopping them playing
and they never played again until after Mandela
became president and the transition from
apartheid to democracy had begun. But I replied
to them saying well thank you but the values
that propelled me to expose the corruption
and looting in the country, which you approve
of, and exactly the same values propelled
me to fight apartheid. And those were the
values that I learned from my parents, if
you go back to your original question. In
a sense, in my DNA, I was very proud of them.
I supported them as a boy in various ways.
And then I began to plow my own furrow, as
it were, in coming up with a sports campaign.
So ideas and the militant disruption of them
in particular. So the point is that if we're
going to get to come to your question, to
a world in which there is no money laundering,
or at least the curbs on it are significantly
improved, and the corruption also restricted.
We would have to take, if I could use the
phrase, a hell of a lot of effort to get
there because virtually every country is
embroiled in this. You take South Africa's
case under Zuma. A lot of critics were saying,
well, you know, what do you expect in a black
African country? And my answer was, and I
developed this understanding in being given
the evidence, because I didn't have it myself,
in order to expose under parliamentary privilege,
where I couldn't be sued by anybody, what
was going on. I had these detailed draft
speeches provided for me from a deep throat
source right inside the state, and maybe
sources. I've never talked about who he or
she was or who they were. But it was gold
dust. And when you're using parliamentary
privilege, you've got to be responsible.
You've got to be sure it's accurate. And
you've got to be sure you're acting responsibly
and honestly. And having satisfied myself
on all those things, I then did it. But it
brought me to an understanding that this
was just one country in the middle of a vast
money laundering corruption racket that operates
right across the world. It involves trillions,
trillions of dollars, US dollars, each year
being looted and moved around the world,
often stolen from countries like in Africa,
in the deep South, in the global South, and
then invested in the global North. And when
I looked into it, and I recently published
a book called Liberation and Corruption,
Why Freedom Movements Fail, which seeks to
understand the betrayal of the freedom struggles
that people like me supported, as waged by
the African National Congress, for example,
or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to then
find you get corrupt regimes heading those
former admired and supported freedom movements.
And what I found was that actually, there
are global networks, including in London,
including in the UK overseas territories,
including in Hong Kong. So the Chinese government
is implicated. A lot of the money was moved
out through Baroda Bank from South Africa
by the Guptas. That's a partly state, Indian
state-owned bank. So they're implicated.
Just about every country, the United Arab
Emirates, for example, is implicated in all
of this as well, because Dubai is one of
the principal money laundering centers of
the world. A lot of the lucid money stolen
by the Zumas and the Guptas went through
Dubai, as well as through Hong Kong. And
a lot of it ended up through shell companies,
that's to say completely front companies
that hide their real owners like the Guptas
or the Zumas in this case, but there are
many other examples. So you've got this going
on, this racket going on all the time. And
our international financial system, the banks
are complicit, and a lot of our global corporates
are complicit. You take, for example, one
of the global corporates that I named in
Parliament, Bain& Company. They personally
took advice. Their South African arm linked
to their London oversight managers and their
Boston headquartered management. So this
is not a South African rogue element that
they've tried to pretend, but a part of their
global operation. They market themselves
as a reputable management consultant company.
But Bain& Co met Zuma in his private residence
on at least 17 occasions uh... doing which
they were asked to advise and this is really
important to understand they were asked to
advise how to disable the country's tax agency
the south african revenue service which they
did and it was the badly disabled and a lot
of the cronies of the people doing the looting
got away with uh... not paying taxes to evading
taxes or avoiding them or both uh... illegally
because SARS, the South African Revenue Service,
its tax agency, was completely disabled.
People put in to run it who were willfully
ignoring the tax evasion that was going on
and the smuggling and so on of tobacco and
other illegal activities. So that's an example
of a global corporate, originally and still
headquartered in the United States, operating
right across the world, being part of this
picture. So you see now that the corruption
in South Africa was not isolated to a few
bad guys, though they were doing the looting,
though they did, but actually supported by
a global financial system. and global, some
of them are household names like Baden Company
or KPMG or McKinsey and banks in our high
streets like HSBC and international banks
like Standard Chartered and Baroda Bank.
So you're only going to tackle this problem
if you get international agreement. from
London, from Washington, from Beijing, from
Delhi, from Moscow, which is unlikely under
President Putin since he deeply corrupt himself,
from the United Arab Emirates to stop what's
going on in Dubai, and in the case of London,
to stop London being a main honeypot for
kleptocrats who loot their countries to buy
property in places like Kensington and Westminster
and so on, and around Hyde Park pay millions
and millions of pounds sterling of hard-earned
taxpayers' money in African countries, for
example, and then invested in the UK. And
just to finish this point, when I looked
at the figures, I found that the money looted,
for example, the African continent, which
is huge, was bigger than the overseas aid
that the rich countries in the global north
say, you know, pride themselves as giving,
no longer President Trump's America, to help
poorer countries and poorer people. Actually,
the money looted from those countries and
those very same citizens outweighs massively
the money that's actually given to them in
overseas aid.
What specific actions or shifts do you believe
are most critical for South Africa to return
to Nelson Mandela's vision and integrity
in the current political and economic climate?
Well, many people say inside the country
that the African National Congress is now
so badly corrupted from top to bottom. at
local, municipal level, provincial level,
and national level, that it's impossible
for it to return to its original Mandela.
It's not just Mandela, but Oliver Tambo was
very important in this. Other leaders like
Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada and others.
It was a collective leadership of the ANC
which gave such strong, visionary social
justice and human rights orientated ideas
and policies for the rest of the world to
admire and many of us to follow. To return
to that is going to be very hard because
it's like, you know, it's like cancer in
your body. Once it's in there, it's really
difficult to get out. And South Africa sadly
has experienced a form of corruption that
goes from daily life, a police officer stopping
you by the side of the road as you drive
past on a spurious traffic offense and ask
you to pay money to let you go, even though
you've done nothing wrong. You need a permit
for your Zimbabwean migrant worker to continue
working. You have to pay a bribe to get that
permit. You even have to pay a bribe, I found
out, to take a driving test. not to pass
that driving test, but to even begin to take
it, to bribe the instructor, who then assesses
whether you pass it or not and are able to
drive a car. So it's from the bottom up,
right the way to the episode around the Zumas
and Guptas. And sadly, there are still people,
despite President Ramaphosa's best intentions,
still people in the cabinet who are deeply
complicit in all of this. Now, having said
that, the ANC, to its great credit, did accept
its electoral defeat at the last election,
I think last year in 2024, did accept that
it was defeated for the first time, got less
than 50% of the votes, and it's gone into
a government of national unity. Now, a lot
of other countries, in Africa in particular,
but elsewhere in the world, Russia being
an example, don't accept defeat. They don't
allow a vigorous opposition party, whatever
support it may enjoy. That's typically true
of South Africa's neighbor Zimbabwe. The
government is voted out, and the government
just rigs the election results to stay in
power. And sadly, that's all too typical
of countries elsewhere. So to get credit,
the ANC did accept its defeat and went into
a government of national unity. Now that
may trigger a process, either of the corrupt
influences of the ANC getting control of
the party again after President Ramaphosa
stands down and his term of office comes
to an end. Either that happens, in which
case I think the ANC is dead. or elements
who want to return it to its vision, the
Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu vision, then if they
get ascendancy, then I think the party can
be pulled back round. But the record of liberation
movements, if you study it as I have, and
describe and analyze it in a recent book,
Liberation and Corruption, that I mentioned,
a more recent book than a Pretoria boy, then
the record is not encouraging. Virtually
every liberation or independence movement
has lost power because it became corrupt,
from India to South Africa to Nicaragua,
right across the world.
South Africa's legal challenge against Israel
at the International Court of Justice, the
ICJ, regarding Gaza has been widely viewed
as an exercise of moral leadership. leveraging
the country's own apartheid history. In the
context of a new multipolar world order,
do you believe this aggressive human rights
stance has genuinely restored South Africa's
moral capital and its role as a leader of
the global South? Or is its diplomatic position
being undermined by the current domestic
failures you often critique, such as corruption
and state capture?
Well, I do think it's badly damaged by corruption.
And whereas it was a global hero, an iconic
country under Nelson Mandela, it fell from
global hero to near global zero under President
Zuma. There's a lot of good things about
the country. I visited it often. It's got
a great constitution, independent judiciary,
an independent, vigorously critical media,
opposition parties that are free to organize,
and most important, an active, vigorously
critical and independent civil society. Now
those are all elements often not present
in countries which have corrupt kleptocracies.
I think of Russia, I think of Zimbabwe, Sorry,
I just need to take a little sip. I think
of lots of other countries, amongst them
Zimbabwe, Russia, and elsewhere that do not
have these independent agencies and that
is in South Africa's to its credit and the
original vision of the Mandela Tambo led
African National Congress and the transition
from democracy and those institutions and
agencies that were encouraged and promoted
do provide countervailing power bases to
a corrupt or over-autocratic elite. But your
question is, where does South Africa fit
into the emerging global order? It's a complex
global order because China's not a democracy,
though it's going to be the superpower of
the world. India under Narendra Modi has
departed from the secular democratic vision
of Gandhi and Nehru in India and the Congress
party that they created and led to become
very Islamophobic, very authoritarian. And
so it's not clear where India will end up
in this new global order. And then ranged
against those global South countries with
which South Africa is largely aligned. And
that includes Russia, which under Putin is
an authoritarian autocracy and a deeply corrupt
one. So where South Africa positions itself,
regardless of the International Court of
Justice intervention to criticize Israel
and indict it for crimes of genocide in Gaza
and so on, I think there's a bigger question
for South Africa. Where does it stand on
Ukraine, for example? It says it's non-aligned.
But in practice, it's aligned itself with
Putin's invasion. It hadn't supported, as
I would have expected, the ANC is an anti-imperialist,
anti-colonial movement in its prime to have
supported the Ukrainians in their resistance
to invasion and imperialist aggression from
Putin and for the self-determination after
all. Independence and liberation struggles
are either about self-determination or they're
about nothing. So I think there are question
marks over South Africa. Equally, I think
there are, which creates the troubling contemporary
situation and the breach between the Global
South and the Global North, are equally troubling
questions for the Global North countries
that claim to be, you know, in Joe Biden,
former President Joe Biden's comparison,
leading the charge for democracy against
autocracy. But a lot of the Global South
countries say, well, you're hypocritical.
You invaded Iraq in defiance of international
rules. You've allowed Israel to commit crimes
in Gaza and to continue to defy international
law over its illegal settlements in the West
Bank. You tolerate all of that. You're hypocritical.
You want us to back you over Ukraine. And
I agree with that personally. I support the
Ukrainian self-determination struggle. But
then when it comes to Iraq or Gaza, you behave
differently. So I think the West, the global
North has got a lot of questions to answer.
And I wish South Africa had been playing
and would play in the future a genuinely
non-aligned role, saying we're not going
to support either activities claiming to,
you know, in Israel, Gaza, on the one hand,
particularly of a current kind, or Russia's
aggression in Ukraine. We're going to support
neither of these, neither Netanyahu nor Putin,
but instead of which they've compromised
themselves. And I think that's troubling.
Can I just pause to take another sip of water?
And you had it announced, Stephen, that's
okay.
Yes, please.
I'm afraid you've ended up with me with a
rather bad cold and sore throat. Right, carry
on.
When we started planning this podcast in
2024, our primary purpose was to focus the
entire episode on your book, The Pretoria
Boy. However, the world has changed significantly
since the election of Donald Trump to the
presidency of the United States of America
in November 2024. In recognition of this
change, I have taken the liberty of asking
three individuals to each contribute a question
or two. The first contributor is Dr. Nick
Westcott. Dr. Westcott was director of the
Royal African Society from 2017 to 2023.
After completing his PhD in African history
at Cambridge University, he embarked on a
distinguished career with the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office in 1982, which included
serving as ambassador to Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina
Faso, Togo, and Niger from 2008 to 2011.
He is the author of Imperialism and Development,
the East African Ground Act Scheme and its
Legacy. He serves on the editorial board
of African Affairs and is a member of the
Chatham House and the Royal Geographical
Society. Nick's questions are as follows.
How can Africa best protect its interests
in the new multi-polar world How can it be
being the grass that gets trampled as it
was in the Cold War? Should Britain ally
more closely with the US, with Europe, or
with Africa and the Commonwealth in the new
world order? It looks increasingly difficult
to do all three.
It is, I fear, difficult to do all three,
but if you come to the first part of your
question, where should Africa stand in all
of this, or the question you've asked on
his behalf, it comes back to what I was saying
over South Africa. I think it's better, I
would prefer Africa to be genuinely non-aligned.
instead of, for example, finding itself bought
up by China. China is not a colonial power
in the sense of occupying and conquering
and land grabbing, but it is, in practice,
getting hold of africa's precious mineral
resources in return for uh... building bridges
and roads and uh... other forms of infrastructure
which it does using its own workers rather
than investing in the schools and upgrading
the skills of the local economy so i think
there's a different form of neo-colonialism
being practiced by china which i think africans
need to be alive to and then there are lots
of other uh... global forces meddling in
africa it's not just anymore the the the
the european colonial ex-colonial powers
like britain and france and spain and germany
and so on it's not them just meddling it's
actually also russia the Wagner group president
Vladimir Putin's kind of mercenary army is
very active in north africa and the sahel
region in particular in the Sudan conflict
and in other conflicts around Africa, where
it's trying to offer security to military
elites in return for grabbing or getting
paid in the form of gold and other precious
mineral resources from those countries' mines.
and deposits. And then you've got the United
Arab Emirates playing a similarly shadowy
role in Sudan, for example, and in other
countries where you've got sort of a lot
of powerful forces meddling in Africa again,
but they're different ones from the past.
So I think Africa has got to decide where
it goes. Good governance, which is very sadly
often absent, is part of the answer. If you've
got good governance, you're well on the road
to establishing a future in which you are
not underlined. And if you take South Africa's
case, and come back to my Pretoria boy memoir,
there's a lot of, in the ANC's case, a lot
of kind of, I think for historic nostalgic
reasons that the Soviet Union countries including
Russia of course supported the African National
Congress because it could not get support
from London and Washington and Paris and
Berlin who favored effectively turned a blind
eye to the apartheid regime continuing and
partly because of that You know, what, for
example, South Africa's government is ignoring
that less than 1% of South Africa's trade
is with Russia. And I suspect over 30% is
with the US, Europe, UK, those traditional,
if you like, interventionist colonial powers.
So South Africa's got to decide where it
stands. And just putting all its eggs in
the Russian basket is not going to get it
anywhere economically, particularly as it
finds under a very, very difficult president
to handle, Donald Trump, increasingly under
attack, with its preferential trade relations
with the US being severed potentially and
other forms of support undermined. South
Africa has got to decide, is it going to
be, comes back to my point originally, is
it going to be genuine and online, getting
help and offering partnership wherever it
can, but not conceding its own integrity
either to Moscow or to Washington, if you
like, or to Beijing or to Dubai, Abu Dhabi,
but plowing its own path. and recognizing
that the continent, South Africa is probably
the richest country on the continent still,
that the continent contains unique assets
and unique riches, as well as a lot of poverty,
and therefore has a lot to offer other countries
in exchange for good economic relations.
The second contributor is Dr. Nic Cheeseman.
Dr. Cheeseman is professor of democracy at
the University of Birmingham. Previously,
he served as the director of African Studies
Center at Oxford University, and is currently
the founding director of Birmingham Center
for Elections, Democracy, Accountability,
and Representation leader. His recent book
is, The Rise of Authoritarian Middle Powers
and What It Means for World Politics, co-authored
with Marie-Eve Desrosiers. Nick's question
is as follows. Given the growing role of
countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and
the UAE in Africa, for example, the civil
war in Sudan, Is there a danger we focus
too much on great powers such as the US,
China and Russia, and not enough on these
middle powers?
Yes, I think he makes a very good point and
he referred to those countries. Saudi Arabia
is a very authoritarian country, the UAE
less so, Turkey less so, but still led by
powerful strongman syndromes. and intervening
in a malevolent way in various fashions.
Turkey's role in Syria I think is, you know,
a North African country, well I'm sorry a
Middle East country but not an African one,
but Turkey's role in Syria is very questionable
and And that goes for the other countries'
role, Saudis and UAEs in Africa, and I've
mentioned something about this. So I think
he's right, that this new world that is emerging
is multifaceted and multifaceted. multi-powered
in different kind of, with centers of different
sort of node points, power node points in
different parts of the world. It's not as
straightforward, the U.S. and London and
the U.K. being in one corner and the rest
being another. It's now much more complex,
which is another reason, in my view, for
Africa steering its own course in countries
like South Africa, returning to the Mandela
vision and setting out a foreign policy that's
genuinely non-aligned as opposed to complicity
and authoritarianism.
The third and final contributor is Lord Alf
Dubs. Lord Dubs is a former child refugee
from Czechoslovakia, as well as a former
politician with the British Labour Party
and a former Member of Parliament. Lord Dubs'
questions are as follows. Are you happy with
the government's direction of travel as regards
EU-UK relations, or would you like it to
go farther? What do you think about Trump's
decision to close the door on refugees from
most countries, but to welcome a number of
Afrikaners, some of whom have expressed anti-Semitic
views?
Well, Alf Dubs, Lord Dubs, is a colleague
of mine in the House of Lords. And I've known
him for many decades. So I have enormous
admiration for him. And as you mentioned,
Stephen, he was a child refugee from Nazism.
So he has, you know, he carries a lot of
credibility when he makes points around these
kinds of issues. I think Britain, I thought
Brexit in 2016 was a disaster for Britain
and some of the current economic problems
that we have which affected the last Conservative
government and left us a terrible legacy
with the Labour government and which continues
to grapple with them are due to the fact
that We turned our back and put up barriers
against the richest single markets in the
world, the European Union, much bigger than
the US or China on their own. And they're
on a doorstep, and we were members of the
same single market, and we exited from that.
So there was bound to be a cost, and there
has been, an independent for independent
economists now agree that at least 5% of
our national wealth has been lost, permanently
lost. So I do believe that closer relations
with the European Union countries of a trading
kind in terms of lifting customers' barriers
and all sorts of other things, uh... should
be uh... the student and kissed on those
governments uh... promises to kissed on his
labor government to spread his has already
begun that that journey how far can go without
another referendum to reverse the decision
because i think it could well be reversed
is another question and and do you want to
go through the the business and turmoil and
you know peaceful civil war and sometimes
not so peaceful but massive uh... painful
divisions that were created during the Brexit
referendum by going back in fully, as some
argue, and I understand why they do, but
I think that's, there's enough to get on
with without imposing that kind of additional
stress on governance for, say, a Labour government.
A Conservative government's not gonna do
it. But it is a big question. And as I say,
just to summarize again, we have chosen to
tear ourselves away from the biggest single
richest single market in the world and put
up barriers against it. And this is madness.
And therefore, what should happen is that
those barriers are progressively reduced.
and eliminate it because actually it's not
in europe's interests either it's not in
the european union's interests either to
have barriers against uh... one of the most
the biggest economies of the world the uk's
whatever our current trials and tribulations
there was a question about trump's decision
to close the door on refugees yes sorry uh...
the one exception to refugees that President
Donald Trump has made is to welcome white
Afrikaans speaking South Africans. I think
there's quite a small group of accepted his
invitation and as I understand it have not
all had a happy time. But that seems to me
to illustrate Donald Trump's policy perfectly.
He's quite happy to have whites refugees
and he paints a picture of South Africa and
portrays events in South Africa. However
critical I've been, He's not criticized the
country for being corrupt, because there
are questions around corruption to be asked
of his government and the way he operates
as a president, amassing enormous wealth
through his business empire, through his
sons and relatives in particular, in his
name. I think it illustrates the hypocrisy
of his refugee immigration policy, and I
think Alf Dubs is quite right to ask that
question and highlight it. Why white Afrikaners
are given preferential access when they enjoyed
unique intergenerational privileges under
apartheid, I think is a question that Trump's
never wanted to answer.
The title of our podcast is Leadership in
a Mount Polar New World Order. George Monbiot,
a Guardian columnist, published a piece on
April 13th, 2025, titled Right-Wing Populists
Will Keep Winning, and He Will Grasp This
Truth About Human Nature. He wrote the following,
and I quote, Already, Trump has waged war
on everything that builds prosperity and
well-being, democracy, healthy ecosystems,
education, health care, science, and the
arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite
some slippage, his approval rating still
holds between 43% and 48%, far higher than
those of many other leaders. Why? I believe
part of the answer lies in a fundamental
aspect of our humanity, the urge to destroy
that from which you feel excluded. He continued
thus, the one thing that can stop the rise
of the far right is the one thing mainstream
parties are currently not prepared to deliver,
greater equality. The rich should be taxed
more and the revenue used to improve the
lives of the poor However frantically centrist
parties avoid the issue, there is no other
way. Peter, if, as George Monbiot suggests,
the appeal of right-wing populists stem from
a human urge to destroy that from which you
feel excluded, and the solution lies in greater
equality, What practical steps can societies
take to bridge these divides and ensure that
policies truly address the root causes of
disaffection rather than just the symptoms?
Well, whether I have to agree with George
Monbiot or not, he is on to something that
I've argued myself, namely that since the
global neoliberal era as it's been described,
the replacement of global Keynesian post-Second
World War economic management, namely expanding
public services and supporting a flourishing
market economy alongside. and you need skills
so you need the public sector to invest in
skills and research and development and so
on in order for the private sector to go
off and and uh... make money and create jobs
and and create wealth in that way if you
slash through austerity programs the public
sector as has been the fashion and the rage
under neoliberal economics signified, symbolized
by Ronald Reagan as President of the US and
Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the
UK. What you've seen since the 1980s is rising
inequality, but more important, the squeezing
of the middle. And if you look at the global
economic order over recent decades, what
you find is that the top 10% have done well,
the top 1% have done incredibly well, and
the top 0.1% stratospherically well. Now,
the significant thing about those is not
just the rich have got richer, but the 90%,
which includes the middle classes, the middle
of society, as well as those at the bottom,
have either fallen behind or stayed still
while the cost of living has gone up. And
so that breeds massive political turbulence.
And I think that explains a lot of what has
happened in the world, why you get the Trumps,
why you get the other ones, why you get,
you had the Boris Johnson syndrome in Britain
for a while. These are all kind of these
sort of strong men, sort of populists. Because
the traditional middle of society and the
working classes of society get seriously
alienated, because at least under the post-Second
World War Keynesian era, most people were
getting better off. The poor may be falling
behind, but most people were getting better
off, in the industrialized global north,
that is. Deindustrialization and neoliberalism
has created massive inequality right across
the world, in every country. And I don't
find it surprising that you've therefore
had political populism signified by Trump
and others across the world, and that you've
had political turmoil and instability, and
the centre parties of the centre-left and
the centre-right that, for example, of alternated
power in the US, between Democrats and Republicans,
or in Europe between the conservatives and
the so-called socialists, though there's
not been much socialism about them in Europe,
between Labour and conservatives in Britain.
have found themselves, those traditional
center parties that have alternated in power,
under attack because they've been complicit
in this global inequality and neoliberalism.
So I think that's the root cause of all of
this instability that is causing such havoc
across the world and stopping us addressing
vital threats, like the biggest one, in my
view, is the global, you know, is the climate
emergency. And we're seeing what it's doing
in Indonesia, in countries like Bangladesh,
and in the United States itself. Terrible
flooding, terrible fires, extremes of weather.
Global warming has never just been about
temperature rise. It's actually about unleashing
raging extremes of weaTher.
And finally, Peter, please advise our listeners
where they may find your book, The Pretoria
Boy, the story of South Africa's public enemy
number one.
Well, it's published in South Africa by Jonathan
Ball Publishers and throughout Africa. In
Britain, it's been published by Icon Books
that is available across the world from either
source. And it was written, as I hope you
found it, in a readable way. It's not a kind
of heavy tone. It's a story from my childhood
to my adulthood and the continuing connection
to South Africa. And the story of South Africa's
public enemy number one, that label, was
given to me during the campaigns to stop
all white races, South African rugby tours,
cricket tours and other sports where whites
only, such as in the Olympics, were permitted
to represent their country.
Lord Peter Hain, thank you very much for
being a guest on this podcast. Stephen, thank
you for having me. This podcast was brought
to you by The Kamugasa Challenge in partnership
with Democracy in Africa. Democracy in Africa
is a platform dedicated to building a bridge
between academics, policymakers, practitioners,
and citizens. In 2026, we start a new series
on citizenship and civil society. The first
episode in the citizenship and civil society
series is entitled, Who Are We Now? Citizenship,
Civil Society, and the Multipolar World Order.
An interview with Lord Alf Dubs, a British
Labour life peer, a former member of parliament,
and a lifelong campaigner for the rights
of refugees. The podcast will go live on
February 9th, 2026. If you enjoyed this podcast,
please click the share button in your app
to send this episode to a friend. Thank you
very much for taking the time to listen to
this podcast. Until next time, goodbye.