This week, South Africa witnessed a spectacle of collapsing halos. John Steenhuisen, leader of the DA and a self-styled champion of fiscal prudence, confirmed he cannot manage his own finances. Mary de Haas, long trading on the prestige of a doctorate and professorship she never earned, was outed as an academic fraud.
And Paul O’Sullivan, the man mythologised as a crime-busting paladin has, since Lt. General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s July 6 press briefing, been facing allegations of impropriety that pierce straight through the armour of his saintly reputation.
Meanwhile, on the global stage, Donald Trump - now in his second political resurrection - has styled himself as a kind of planetary gatekeeper, declaring that the G20 Summit in Johannesburg cannot adopt a Declaration without Washington’s blessing, as if the sovereignty of other nations should bow before his ego.
This comes after a dizzying sequence of reversals: first signalling in September that Vice President JD Vance would attend on his behalf, then abruptly announcing a full U.S. boycott, only to pivot again at the eleventh hour with claims that the United States is now “considering” attending the Summit’s closing ceremony.
These episodes are not isolated embarrassments. They are stark reminders of a deeper, uncomfortable truth that human beings – regardless of race or position - are fragile, fallible, and frequently foolish. Yet in South Africa, this simple truth is constantly suffocated beneath the lie that fallibility is racialised.
Racialised public discourse and the battle for epistemic authority
The racialisation of human error is baked into the public imagination. In 2001, the Mail & Guardian headline “Is this man fit to rule?” cast doubt on then President Thabo Mbeki’s competence, exemplifying how black leaders are scrutinised through a lens of racial suspicion. But the distortion is broader than sensational media. Epistemic authority itself remains contested in post-apartheid South Africa.
The ANC’s 2005 “Sociology of the Public Discourse” series recognised this battle explicitly. Smuts Ngonyama, then head of ANC presidency at Luthuli House, argued that post-apartheid public discourse is a battleground: the black-majority government (before the 2024 general elections) asserts its right to set the national agenda, while a historically entrenched “white elite” continues to defend its material interests and presumes to guide the intellectual life of the country.
This elite, the ANC noted then, frames debate to constrain black agency, reinforcing the illusion that governance competence is synonymous with whiteness. It said epistemic authority and intellectual sovereignty remain contested along racial lines, shaping who is heard, who is credible, and whose failures are racialised.
History, inconveniently for the myth-makers, says otherwise. The entire edifice of colonialism and apartheid was constructed on industrial-scale plunder: land dispossession, forced labour, resource expropriation, and spiritual vandalism. The “civilising mission” was nothing but organised crime masquerading as morality.
So, when Steenhuisen mismanages his finances, de Haas fabricates her academic credentials, or O’Sullivan faces allegations, the racial narrative dissolves. Their failings are individual lapses, not evidence of racial deficiency. Their humanity is acknowledged; their fallibility, personal.
Yet when Jacob Zuma presided over grand corruption, the commentary quickly pathologised his conduct as racial symptom - confirmation of “black imperfection” - as if three centuries of white-led corruption, dispossession, and brutality did not exist.
Lwazi Lushaba calls this the “coloniality of perception” - the reflex of reading black failure as racial essence while sanitising white failure as human error. Ugandan anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject, shows that this logic is not accidental; it is the ideological software of colonial power.
If South Africa needed yet another reminder that fallibility is not a racial inheritance but a human inevitability, it needs to recall the fall of Hansie Cronje in the early 2000s. Idolised as the clean-cut embodiment of white sporting virtue, Cronje’s cricket match-fixing scandal detonated the mythology that moral discipline and integrity are racially apportioned.
His confession - measured, public, devastating - proved what should have been obvious: vice is not a pigment, and failure does not follow the colour line. Cronje shattered, in one stroke, the lie that corruption is instinctively African while whiteness is naturally ethical. His collapse, like all human collapses, was a matter of choice, circumstance, and temptation - not race.
The global racism of misjudgement
These distortions are not South African anomalies; they are global operating systems. They travel effortlessly across borders, across centuries, across empires. Palestine remains caged under the iron machinery of Israeli domination, its people bombed, starved, displaced and systematically erased under the propaganda scaffolding of a “war on Hamas” - a war the United Nations and a growing chorus of states now correctly recognise as genocidal in both intent and effect.
The same presumption animates every justification, every missile, every veto: the belief that non-white peoples are inherently incapable of self-determination, that their sovereignty is illegitimate unless supervised by others, that competence - political, moral, civilisational - resides somewhere else, anywhere else, but never in them. This is the root of global misjudgement: the enduring colonial falsehood that some humans are custodians of order while others are permanent wards of history.
This year’s G20 Summit, hosted in South Africa, exposes the global persistence of this worldview. Trump’s attempt to delegitimise any Declaration adopted in Johannesburg is not mere diplomatic thuggery; it is racialised epistemic arrogance. He cannot conceive that Africans are capable of convening a global consensus.
Murphy Morobe once famously observed that Western political culture regards African value systems as “pagan, primitive and savage.” Trump, shaped by a lifetime of entitlement, enmity, and white grievance, inhabits that imagination without hesitation. The very idea that South Africa, under the leadership of Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, can convene a successful G20 Summit shatters the fragile racial mythology that undergirds his worldview.
It is not mere politics he resents; it is the audacity of black competence on the global stage, a direct challenge to the centuries-old epistemological fallacy that authority and legitimacy are the exclusive province of whiteness.
Fallibility: the universal human condition
Philosophers have long reminded us that the ontology of human knowledge is precarious. Plato (Theaetetus) doubted we can ever achieve pure certainty; René Descartes (Meditations) cautioned that intuition is often delusion; David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature) demonstrated that reason is driven by habit, not logic; Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations) insisted that all knowledge is provisional and falsifiable; Bertrand Russell (The Problems of Philosophy) warned that certainty breeds intellectual tyranny; and Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil) exposed how the will-to-power masquerades as truth.
Steenhuisen, de Haas, O’Sullivan, Cronje, and Trump are not exceptions; they are confirmations of this ontological reality. Their failures reveal humans, irrespective of race or station, as mosaics of insecurity, temptation, and contradiction.
Thomas Sankara, in Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, urged leaders to embrace criticism as a tool for self-correction. Fallibility, for him, is a political resource, not a racial or moral indictment.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the Mind, underscores that colonial epistemology has historically racialised ontology itself: black error is coded as racial, white error as natural. Thabisi Hoeane similarly warns that societies interpreting black failure as racial essence can never cultivate ethical governance. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, calls white supremacy a totalising psychological order - a lie lived as truth - that distorts the very ontology of human value and competence.
Toward an ethic of humility
Paul Ricoeur, in Fallible Man, reminds us that humans are “capable, yet fallible” - not because of race, but because fallibility is ontologically embedded in the human condition. Mamdani, Lushaba, Ngũgĩ, Fanon, and Sankara all insist that liberation requires the unlearning of racial arrogance. Fallibility must be decoupled from race. Only then can justice prevail, accountability be fair, and critique be measured rather than racially loaded.
Trump and the global delusion of white infallibility
Trump’s belief that he can prevent world leaders from adopting a Declaration in Johannesburg is not just hubris. It is civilisational narcissism - the conviction that legitimacy flows from whiteness and global governance must orbit around a single white ego. It echoes colonial administrators who declared African sovereignty inherently defective, Palestinians eternally unfit for self-rule, and non-white independence a contradiction.
Trump is not an aberration. He is a symptom of a loud, unfiltered nerve of a world still addicted to the cognitive architecture of colonial supremacy.
The courage to be fallible
This week’s revelations remind us that humanity is a fragile project. Bodies falter, minds err, societies misjudge. The task is not to deny human imperfection but to confront it without racialised distortion.
A mature democracy, and a just global order, require abandoning the myth that perfection follows racial lines. Accountability without humility becomes cruelty; humility without accountability collapses into relativism. Fallibility is a human condition. Humility must be the political response. Africa, hosting the G20 on its own soil, proves that competence, authority, and legitimacy are human achievements, not racial ones.
*Zamokwakhe Ludidi Somhlaba is a Political and Security Risk consultant based in Pretoria. He writes in his personal capacity.
