The Presidency has done it again. While some of us are fixated to the Madlanga Commission and the Ad Hoc Committee, some dodging potholes the size of lunar craters and wading through rivers of human excrement in the streets of our country, our fearless leaders in the union buildings pulled off yet another stroke of world-class brilliance: they begged the World Bank for a $925 Million dollar-denominated loan, yes you heard me right DOLLARS; Because nothing screams “sovereign independence” like mortgaging your children’s future in a currency you don’t even control.
The loan is meant for or to prop up the country’s crumbling metropolitan municipalities and dubbed the “Metro Trading Services Program”, it is being sold as a six year urban renewal lifeline: performance-based grants to fix potholed roads, flickering streetlights and sewage spill that have turned once-vibrant cities into dystopian relics. But this is no rescue, this is ransom.
President Matamela has just auctioned another chunk of our country’s sovereignity to foreign lenders who have been gorging on our debt carcass for decades now.
Forget the fairytale that this money will fix potholes and sewage rivers. The metros are grasping: unemployment festers at 32%, and GDP growth limps at under 1%. Peel the press release gloss, and you will see that this loan isn’t salvation- just the latest bid in a rigged auction that has been running the New Dawn.
Maumela’s uncle, under the weight of fiscal paralysis, keeps showing up to the block, hawking slices of the nations autonomy for quick cash. And the auctioneers? The World Bank, IMF and their cadre of bond traders, ever eager to offload capital at premium rates.
Picture it: 1994, an imposed messiah of the people introduces the rainbow dawn, we inherit apartheid s poisoned chalice—inequality etched into the soil, a state captured by racial capital. Fast-forward three decades, and the script is still the same just different characters. Now it’s dolla capital that holds the gavel. Our gross government debt as a country has ballooned to 75.1% of GDP as of September, last year and it is projected to hit 77.4% by years end, while the external debt alone clocks in at $179 billion in Q2 2025, roughly 45% of our estimated $400 billion GDP— a ration that’s not yet “Greek Crisis” levels but surely creeping towards the red zone where interest payments devour budget. Our interest payments are currently sitting higher than what we spend on basic education.
The World Bank doesn’t lend out of charity; it lends to capture. When the dollar debt hits the magic threshold, what the IMF declares as the “debt distress”— the state stops belonging to the people. Policy gets written in Washington, Municipal assets get auctioned to the highest private bidder, pensions get raided, wages get frozen and protesters get bullets. The romantic relationship between Matamela and capital is turning South Africa in a giant fire-sale, it was done in Zambia. It is also done in Sri Lanka, next up we are going to see Table Mountain on eBay. The Union Buildings is at its weakest, Spineless, shameless and apparently allergic to mirrors. Instead of confronting the rot, instead of firing the looting mayors and jailing the tenderpreneurs, it borrows to paper over the evidence.
Instead of telling the World Bank to shove it’s “performance conditions” (code for privatisation and austerity) it bows, smiles for the cameras and thanks it’s creditors for the privilege of deeper enslavement. Ramaphosa’s GNU isn’t a government; it is a liquidation sale with extra steps, a coalition of cowards and opportunists who would rather sell the country piece by piece than confront their own failures.
Under His Clownency CM Ramaphosa the auction continues, every new loan is a nail in the coffin of South African independence. The metros will still collapse, the debt will still grow and the people will still pay— first with their services, thn with their freedom.
This loan wasn’t or isn’t a lifeline, but a suicide Note signed by a President that has forgotten whose country this is.
Nelson “Dieta Motjhapalong” Mokoena is an independent writer and activist.
