There is a peculiar irony in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the detaining of Badar Khan Suri in America and the request for Momodou Taal to surrender to the US immigration authorities in 2025.
These acts resemble more 1976 Soweto than a society claiming to be a beacon of democracy. Young scholars detained for engaging in activism and critical inquiry are both symbol and symptom: a symbol of student-academic resistance and a symptom of a state system that, like all regimes in decline, begins to fear its thinkers more than its enemies.
The arrest of Suri in Georgetown, Washington, and the search for Taal should not be seen in isolation. It occurred in the same week that the US department of education is being dismantled — a symbolic and material deconstruction of the public commitment to learning. As American intellectual Noam Chomsky argued, what we are witnessing is the “manufacturing of consent” through strategic ignorance, where the powerful pull back from public education and then punish those who seek to educate themselves.
Today, these acts of resistance are being met with silencing, surveillance and smear campaigns instead of rubber bullets — and while the mechanisms have changed, the intent remains to muzzle thought, delegitimise dissent and to turn the student into a suspect. But we know that suppression of thought is not sustainable. Galileo’s telescope was once seen as heresy. Today, it is science. In others, like Angela Davis and Steve Biko, we see that institutions may seek to silence the person but cannot erase the idea. To arrest the mind is to arrest the future.
While the US sharpens its arsenal of sanctions, another global force rises quietly, not through domination, but through discipline. China has transitioned from a largely agrarian economy to the second-largest economy in the world. Not by invading its neighbours. Not by toppling foreign regimes. But by building roads, railways, factories, satellites and cities.
China is often criticised for its political constraints in investing heavily in higher education. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, between 2000 and 2020, China increased research and development spending by more than 1 700%, becoming the world’s largest producer of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates. This is not accidental. It is a strategic decision to shape the future, not censor it. This is not a romanticisation of Chinese governance, which has its contradictions. But it is a reckoning with reality.
In 1978, China’s GDP per capita was about $150. By 2023, it exceeded $12 000, according to the World Bank in 2023. That is not merely growth — it is transformation. Where the West exports weapons, China exports roads. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has extended its influence across Asia, Africa and Latin America, not through occupation but through construction.
Which, then, is the greater force for stability? China offers an unsettling counter-narrative, where patience and planning outmanoeuvre arrogance and aggression.
Leadership legacy
This is what true leadership demands — a capacity to imagine beyond one’s own ego. To resist the seduction of immediate applause and instead commit to generational purpose. Contrast this with today’s politics of spectacle, where the “world’s greatest democracy” is being reduced to partisan theatre and its leaders posture with threats instead of policies. This is not leadership. It is performance. Leadership in its most courageous form is the refusal to humiliate — either your people or others. It is not about enforcing submission but cultivating vision. For the Chinese, time is not the enemy, but the strategy. Where the West plans in quarters, China plans in decades. While others seek domination, China seeks durability.
Leadership rooted in long-term investment is wisdom. In boardrooms, parliaments and global summits, we witness men and women confuse coercion with conviction. To threaten is easier than to persuade. To dominate is simpler than to develop. But there is no vision in the clenched fist.
South Africa, too, has not been immune to this distortion. In recent years, we have seen leadership reduced to a struggle for access, not to public service, but to patronage. Bullies in tailored suits silence dissent in the name of unity. Whistleblowers are buried beneath commissions. Activists are labelled troublemakers. And the rhetoric of “moving forward” is weaponised to avoid reckoning with the rot.
But the people are not blind. They remember. Authentic leadership relies on faith in people, justice and process. One silences opposition, the other listens. One hoards power, the other disperses it. One demands loyalty, the other earns trust.
Leadership, therefore, is not domination of the other but devotion to the whole. It is about being the clearest in conscience. And herein lies the contrast. Bullying tactics rely on fear. For all their noise, they are hollow. They do not build. They intimidate. They do not dream. They defend the status quo. And in doing so, they sabotage the very futures they claim to lead.
A result of the US shift in policies has been the retraction of funds. For those applauding the stance of the US — you will have to think again. This is not a burden the ANC government will carry alone. It is one we will all have to share.
South Africa’s public research institutions, as an example, once a source of national pride and continental leadership, are now under threat from sustained underfunding. In 2024, government budget cuts saw major reductions in support for the National Research Foundation, with knock-on effects on postgraduate bursaries, independent research and infrastructure development. Public health research, essential for understanding the country’s complex disease burdens and preparing for future pandemics, is facing severe constraints just as new strains of tuberculosis and long Covid continue to rise in the population.
This quiet decimation of South Africa’s intellectual future is just as dangerous as overt repression. It makes it harder for young scholars to imagine careers in academia. It forces scientists to seek opportunities abroad. It also risks widening the gap between elite and marginalised institutions. Historically black universities and research councils in under-resourced provinces feel the blow of these cuts most acutely, further entrenching educational inequality.
If we do not fund our thinkers, we will be forced to borrow our thoughts. And if we silence our scholars, not with prison bars but with empty budgets, we risk becoming spectators in a world shaped by others.
Multiple futures, one choice
The future is not a single road paved for us by those in power. It is a network of possible paths, some lit by justice, others shadowed by fear. The question is not whether South Africa has a future but which one we are willing to fight for. There is the future of apathy, where we allow inequality to harden into caste. In this future, potholes become metaphors, and public hospitals echo the cruelty of indifference. Youth unemployment festers and township schools become warehouses of forgotten potential. This is not a dystopia imagined — it is a future already incubating in the margins of our cities.
There is the future of resentment, where our fractured past is weaponised for short-term gain. In this future, identity becomes a wedge rather than a source of solidarity. We scapegoat migrants, silence activists and treat difference as danger. We seek independence for the Cape and asylum for the Afrikaner. Power becomes performative, and nationalism is mistaken for nation-building. The institutions hollow out slowly — until suddenly, they collapse.
But there is also the future of reckoning, a future in which we pause long enough to ask hard questions — not only of our leaders but of ourselves. In this future, we do not look away from corruption but confront the systems that permit it. We do not apologise for dreaming nor do we retreat from the complexity of healing. We rebuild, not just infrastructure, but the ethics that hold a society together.
And then there is the future of radical inclusion. A future where education is not a privilege for the few but the promise to the many. Where disability is not pitied but platformed. Where gender does not determine safety. Where the child in Mitchells Plain and the child in Sandton have equal reason to hope. This is not a utopia. It is imagination grounded in action. And it begins not with policy alone, but with people who refuse to forget. We are that generation now. We stand at the intersection of betrayal and becoming. Between the tyranny of small expectations and the promise of collective courage. We can mimic the dysfunctions of the world’s loudest nations or we can craft something distinctly ours — a South African model of justice, inclusion and interdependence.
But it will not emerge by accident. Futures are authored, not inherited.
The arrest of a student. The shuttering of education. The posturing of political bullies. These are not isolated acts. They are signals — signs that we are at the edge of something. Whether it is collapse or rebirth is yet to be seen. But know this — history has never been changed by those who waited for permission. It has always been shaped by those, from Soweto to Selma, who refused to be quiet.
South Africa is not broken beyond repair. It is waiting. Waiting for leaders who do not confuse charisma with character, nor compliance with courage. It is waiting for a generation that does not fear the truth but carries it like a lamp in dark times. So, we must act, not with bitterness, but with boldness. Not with cynicism, but with clarity.
Let us be the generation that does not inherit a future, but crafts it. A future where ideas are not punished but protected. Where education is not shut down but held up. Where leadership is not feared but followed. And if we are to write such a future, let it begin with a single, simple conviction – that truth, spoken, studied, and lived, is not a threat. It is our greatest hope.
Dr Armand Bam is the head of Social Impact at Stellenbosch Business School.
