Populist Challenges to South Africa’s Energy Transition

• In Event: Critically Reinterpreting Populism in Africa

Abstract

In this paper we trace the emergence and expansion of a populist movement advocating ‘Radical Economic Transformation’ and vilifying white business elites and their supposed political enablers in South Africa. We combine detailed archival work to understand the movement's background with social media network analysis to map its spread and reception in digital spaces. We then explore how and why this movement – which was framed as an imminent threat to democracy and social cohesion – fractured and dispersed in both physical and digital spaces. In the final part of the paper we draw on two periods of fieldwork including interviews with senior figures and policymakers in the energy sector, as well as focus groups and interviews with members of the National Union of Mineworkers, to explore the movement’s legacy and implications for efforts to reform (and decarbonise) the energy sector. We examine how and why its discourses of foreign subversion, ‘white monopoly capital’, and comprador elites have continued to resonate when vulnerable and marginalised working-class communities are confronted with threats to their livelihoods. In particular, we detail how these discourses have been used to express fear, anxiety, mistrust, and enmity toward internationally financed, state-driven efforts to implement a ‘just transition’ in the country as it moves away from coal toward renewable energy: a transition that represents the most profound socio-economic upheaval in contemporary South African history, potentially threatening social cohesion and the country’s democratic norms.

Authors

• Nicole Beardsworth, University of Pretoria

• Ruth Bookbinder

• Alexander Beresford