amaBhungane, 15 years of peddling empire

By Gillian Schutte

As amaBhungane claps itself on the back for 15 years of watchdog journalism, one cannot help but gag on the sanctimonious nostalgia, the manufactured self-importance, and the deep obliviousness to the historical role this outfit has played in fortifying empire.

Sam Sole’s celebratory piece, masked in the language of accountability and institutional integrity, is, in fact, a confession of ideological capture and a eulogy to the West’s decaying hegemony—under the pretence of independence.

The very opening lines celebrate the collaboration between “good journalists and good judges”, invoking the tired liberal myth that the state and media—so long as they are properly staffed by virtuous technocrats—can fix the rot of capitalism and its neo-imperial order.

This is the same bourgeois illusion that has been sold to the working class since the first newsroom decided to run wire copy from Reuters and AP instead of sending journalists into the mines or the shantytowns. The truth is: amaBhungane was never outside the system.

It was, and remains, an agent of that very system. Worse, it was funded by the very entities it was designed never to critique.

Its foundational exposé, “Zuma Inc”, launched in March 2010, was the opening volley in a long project of democracy-washing white capital. By shining the spotlight exclusively on Zuma’s alleged corrupt networks—most notably the Guptas—it gave the appearance of accountability while shielding the corporate and mining giants that continued to extract wealth and deepen inequality.

The very architects of apartheid finance capital rebranded as respectable democrats, were handed a renewed moral licence through this selective exposé. It was a well-timed distraction that painted systemic plunder as a problem of personalities, not structures.

Sole’s smug reference to amaBhungane’s “wisdom” in not accepting state funds following the “Trump-Musk” regime’s decision to dismantle USAID is a laughable piece of revisionist dung. They conveniently forget that for over a decade, amaBhungane and its ilk feasted on the banquet of US and European donor funding—USAID, Open Society, Ford Foundation—all while casting themselves as neutral arbiters of truth.

Never once did they acknowledge how these funding streams distorted the media landscape, erased local voices, and entrenched a new donor class of gatekeepers who set the ideological parameters of debate. They didn’t just ignore the suffering of the structurally excluded—they helped enshrine it. And they did so with the moralistic fervour of liberal missionaries civilising the savage landscape of African politics.

What Sole now calls the “age of discontinuity” is nothing but the long-overdue collapse of the very globalist fantasy that gave amaBhungane its relevance. Their calls for “ruggardisation”, borrowed from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory of antifragility, come only now, long after millions in the global South have been forced into this condition by neoliberal policies pushed by the very donors and think tanks that propped them up.

Taleb once wrote, “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder...” But the only ones who benefited from the disorder in South Africa were those who had donor funding to cushion it. Working-class communities have been weathering structural precarity for decades—through land dispossession, structural adjustment programmes, austerity, and the criminalisation of dissent.

But only now, when the imperial centre shows signs of internal disintegration, do the empire’s scribes discover what it means to live without certainty. And they treat this discovery like they’ve stumbled upon a new philosophy rather than a daily reality for the majority of South Africans.

Sole’s reference to Cuba is instructive—not because it offers insight into Cuban society, but because it exposes the fault line in liberal imagination. “We can imagine we have to become (in some ways – particularly with regard to maximum self-sufficiency) more like Cuba,” he writes, before quickly back-pedalling with: “but while minimising the potential for anarchy, social breakdown; democratic backsliding etc.”

Cuba, for Sole, is not a country to learn from, but a metaphor to mine—its socialist project reduced to a survivalist aesthetic, stripped of context, history, and revolutionary consciousness. The very conditions that allowed Cuba to endure decades of blockade and economic war—planned economy, collectivised systems of care, and internationalism—are painted as cautionary. He wants resilience, but not the politics that produced it.

His characterisation of global power shifts is no less revealing. Quoting an unnamed source, he warns: “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.”

Here we see the rot of liberal exceptionalism in full view. America, according to Sole, once had a moral core. Now it is “becoming like” China and Russia—coded here as ruthless, godless, power-hungry states. As if the US hasn’t bombed more countries, backed more coups, or spread more misery than any empire since Rome. Sole doesn’t worry about empire—he worries about who gets to own the brand.

He doesn’t pause to ask whether China’s statecraft, focused on infrastructure, development loans, and multipolar trade alliances, may be preferable to Washington’s war economy. Nor does he examine whether Russia’s assertiveness reflects the end of US unipolarity rather than a new axis of evil. His concern lies in the shifting of power rather than the means through which it has always been wielded.

And so the warning about “people with guns taking what they want” arrives—his shorthand for what he calls “the construction mafia and other forces”. But the real mafia have always worn suits and carried spreadsheets. The taking has already happened. The land, the mines, the banks, the pensions—taken.

But now that the taking might be reversed from below, it becomes dangerous. Now he worries about lawlessness, violence, instability. Now he wants reform—“reforming the criminal justice system and the SANDF”—not to protect the people from state violence, but to ensure order is maintained. His version of justice favours elite security while criminalising the desperation of the poor.

Even his call for “managed economic deglobalisation” is filtered through the prism of Western fear. “We need to think about ruggardisation at multiple levels,” he writes. But the poor have been ruggardised for decades. They grow food on toxic soil. They live without electricity or clinics. They navigate flooded roads and criminalised protests. Sole didn’t notice then. But now that his class might lose comfort, it becomes a crisis. For everyone else, it was already the norm.

And then comes the cake. “Today we will ‘eat cake’, baked in the shape of the amaBeetle logo,” he writes, with no trace of irony. The symbolism is too perfect. Like a scene straight from Versailles, the NGO aristocracy celebrates its imagined virtue with dessert while the country buckles under the weight of elite indifference. The beetle-shaped cake may as well have been Marie Antoinette’s.

“Let them eat cake”, indeed—while the masses are told to endure responsibly. The logo never represented the people. It represented donor loyalty, smug editorial gatekeeping, and the slow erosion of anti-imperialist thought in favour of professionalised liberalism. They weren’t holding power to account—they were holding the line against systemic change. The beetle didn’t bite the hand of capital. It crawled into its palm and made itself useful.

If amaBhungane’s legacy is to be remembered at all, it should be seen for what it became: a conveyor belt of soft imperial discipline disguised as journalism. It told us that justice could be performed through press releases and exposés, not mass movements. It comforted the comfortable and turned the suffering of the structurally excluded into a pantomime of professional concern. It hollowed out the idea of revolution and replaced it with litigation.

Here’s to 15 years of colonial apologism dressed as accountability. And here’s to its slow unravelling in the eyes of those who see clearly now.

Gillian Schutte is a South African journalist, author, filmmaker, and Marxist feminist. She has spent two decades covering social, environmental, and political struggles across the country. Her work critically exposes the role of media, whiteness, and empire in South Africa.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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