On the X account of the recently redesigned and outstanding-looking Politicsweb site, Talking Sense podcast regular James Myburgh makes the excellent point that “the point of the malign information operations being run in South Africa is not to present the corrupt as honest – which is no longer possible – it is to present the honest as corrupt, so that ordinary people are no longer able to distinguish between the two”.

That is spot-on and the campaigns against both Tony Leon and now more recently Mark Burke are examples (more on the latter later this week). The ANC and EFF, for example, are now running material that claim Leon and Burke as both examples of white or DA corruption.

There is a lot to read into that, most important of which is that the ANC and EFF have given up trying to rid themselves of corruption – inside themselves they know that is never going to happen, so the best they can do is to level the playing fields by trying to convince the public that the DA, and for that matter any other challenger to their remaining grip on power, is just as corrupt as they are.

In and of itself that would amount to nothing. But screenshot the headlines run by legacy media platforms and that all changes – and the deceit gets real traction across society.

Why does the DA not defend its people? The best answer is that they don’t have the professional ability to put together reasoned and knowledgeable defences around what are often very clever and complex attacks. The ANC likes it that way. A dumbed-down DA is a problem but a manageable one. A really sharp DA would be quite something else.

Good, then, on Adam Habib for endorsing Helen Zille in Johannesburg. Habib is the leftist former vice-chancellor of Wits University who was shrewd enough to evade, sidestep, outmanoeuvre, and generally undermine the ruinous “Fees Must Fall” campaign which other university leaders indulged, such as Max Price, who was allowed to ruin UCT. According to Habib the collapse of Johannesburg under the ANC “is why Zille needs to win Johannesburg, and decisively! If she does not get an overall majority, the city and South Africa are doomed. Her victory and the clean-up she will subsequently undertake is necessary… She is the only candidate in Johannesburg with a proven track record of turning a city around. She won Cape Town from the ANC, which is why I believe she needs to win Johannesburg decisively… Everyone else is simply responding to her, which is reflected even in the racist diatribes. My fear is that she will win the largest vote share but fall short of a majority, leading other politicians to gang up against her.” On the malign information operations directed at her, he said, “This is both pure racism and discriminatory on age grounds. My response; I am proud of an electorate who chooses an elderly white Gogo if she is competent.”

That this sentiment, which the ANC so fears, is taking hold is why that party is so set on driving more and more malign information operations against people like Leon and Burke.

Habib has been a victim of such an operation before. Some years ago, he was stupidly and falsely accused of racism. Among the very few South Africans who stood up for him were the liberals [the right wing in modern-day parlance]. Most of the left just looked away. Perhaps something around that lingered.

There is of course a much easier way for the ANC. Just allow reforms in the economy. But again last week it kicked back hard against those when its leader, acting in his capacity as South Africa’s president , hosted a delegation of big business leaders for another set of promises and pledges to improve conditions for ordinary South Africans, in an event that was dressed up as a government delegation but was actually just a party-political election campaign stop. Big business and Ramaphosa have been consistently at that game for over 14 years – since they collaborated in the 2012 National Development Plan. Today, their collective efforts have been such that the rate of economic growth is half what it was when they started! But again last week they made the same promises and same assurances, none of which addressed the reasons the economy is not growing.

Smirking big business in their expensive suits and shiny shoes rubbing their money while backslapping with Ramaphosa and the politicians is how the public saw it and the people were enraged at the callousness and dishonesty of it all.

So what do the people do? They move past the ANC and big business. Support for the ANC has been cut in half and all around big business an illicit economy is taking root, from mining, to construction, to alcohol, to clothing, to designer brands, to pharmaceuticals that will cut into its margins and market share.

Why? Lawlessness and corruption are there. But deeper than that, the illicit economy offers goods and services and incomes and jobs, above all jobs, that the formal economy around the big banks, big retailers, big insurers, and other big corporations promised but did not deliver. Monopoly capital, as Professor Habib and every other thinking leftist has always said, has failed the people just as the ANC has.

The left is right about monopoly capital in South Africa – it is dead right. The right and the liberals must catch up – where they haven’t already. It would be good if the thinking left and the thinking right got together to do something about it.