Lord Peter Hain unpacks: Mkhwanazi, Apartheid, Trump, Ramaphosa, ANC, Jacob Zuma, Madlanga, Big 5

0:00A partake itself was deeply corrupt. Hmm. People think a partake is brutal. Some of them say, oh yeah, it must have been nasty, but it wasn't corrupt. Yes, it was. People were lining their pockets. I feel personally betrayed. And I think many anti-apartheid activists do. So the looted money that comes mostly from South African taxpayers, African taxpayers, poorer people in these countries ends up dwarfing the amount of overseas aid that these countries provide because it ends up in those countries. You've got to have a government that will appoint non-corrupt police chiefs and take on the crime bosses. He's a member of the House of Lords and no stranger to South Africa. As a young person, he was one of the more prominent voices in the spot boycotts against a partake era South Africa competing internationally. He joins us here for his unique insights into corruption, the Zondo Commission,

1:04and thoughts about what's happening in South Africa and post-leberation movements across the world. Lord Peter Heng, welcome to SNWX. Thank you. It's a great privilege to be here. Spectacular having you. I want to start with your upbringing. I mean, at the age of 15, you were an active young man. Your parents were a part of the liberal party. Part of that many young South African today might not know, but was one of the, in the parliament of the time, a very strong and ardent critic of the national party and those that were proponents of the policy of apartheid. That resulted in them getting exiled and so you grew up in the UK. Give me a picture into that house where you grew up. Well, it was in Pretoria. My mother and father were probably the most notorious activists because the A&C had been banned in 1960. A lot of the other anti-apartheid forces had been banned by the apartheid government. And the liberal party of South Africa, which they were members of,

2:09was committed to one person, one vote. So it was not like the progressives of Helen Susman and so on. They played their role and I'm not criticising her, but they were very committed to full democracy, like we have now. And they worked closely with A&C people and people who were being jailed. They, my mother was banned in 1963. My, both my parents. She was the main activist. My dad was an architect at work. So she was, with him, she was first jailed in 1961. That's one of my earliest memories when I was 11. Been working up in the early hours to be told they'd been put in jail. For supporting Mandela's call on black township workers, instead of coming into the white city of Pretoria as it was then, to serve it and work in it, to stay at home and effectively go and strike. So they supported that and they were both arrested and put in jail for two weeks,

3:09which is the, they couldn't find any evidence to bring them to trial. So they were let out. Sure. So extending from that, so then after the ban, obviously move on to the UK, where you finish your secondary school education, but you don't stop your involvement in this, the fight against apartheid in South Africa. In fact, you go on to be one of the more prominent leaders in the UK of the sports boycotts against South Africa here. And it's in that capacity where even the regime tries to take aim at you by sending a letter bomb to you. That's right. The letter bomb was received by our family home in June 1972 and it was powerful and I was told by the police, the London police who took it away and made it safe to blow up not just me, but my whole family, my parents and the whole of the house. But those kind of letter bombs at that stage were used by the apartheid security forces to target

4:09activist leaders like Ruth First was killed, Lain C, Promenade C, leader in Maputo. The student leader, Abraham Tiro, I think it was, was killed in Botswana by that sort of letter bomb. Fortunately, there was a fault in my case, in the trigger mechanism and it didn't go off. But yes, what triggered that, if I could use that phrase, is I concentrated on sport because I was a young, brought up a young sportsman at White South Africa. I knew how important it was to White South Africans to be able to have their cricket teams go to lords, their rugby teams go to Twicken and be fated and welcomed and given lavish hospitality when apartheid was sort of frowned upon. And yet they were, and I thought a lot of my colleagues in the movement said concentrate on arms and trade, not on sport. But I thought you could stop the tours by militant direct action,

5:10by running on the pitch at Twicken and physically stopping the matches is what we did. Cause the cricket tour to be cancelled in 1970. And I was never forgiven by the apartheid state and those white supporters of it and was called public enemy number one at that stage because of sport. And people said to me, why are you concentrating on sport, rather than trade and arms? And of course those were important, but they're very hard to win. In sport, I thought we could win using this non-violent direct action strategy. Previously, what you'd got was people holding up placards outside, Twicken and all lords. And that's a good thing to do, but it didn't actually change things. I want to ask a question and that is why were you so active? You know, we live in a time now and I can say it's as a young person living in 2026. There's so much injustice happening every in the world. And I think about retrospectively in future, how I and my peers will

6:15look back at a lot of injustices happening in the world in 2026 and sort of take stock of what action we took. It's easy now retrospectively to look at apartheid and say, well, it is very obvious, people need it to be active against it and speak up. But in your generation, particularly as someone who grew up in white South Africa and even then went on to the UK, it wasn't a very at least clear idea that if I'm involved here, we will eventually help South Africa defeat this evil system of apartheid. So what spurred you on? Well, I got more involved when I first went to exile and we didn't go willingly into exile. Yes. They stopped my dad working as an architect. They prevented him, earning a living for our family. So we had to go to London. He was able to work there. And my mother and father went immediately and joined the British anti-apartheid movement, which was the biggest movement in the world. A lot of they in sea leaders and others were

7:19based there, people like Tobor and Becky and others who weren't in jail like Nelson Mandela was. Initially, I was supporting my parents as I had in Pretoria, but I didn't really get involved myself till a few years after 1966. And then I got frantically involved because it was a period very exciting for you asked about young people, for youth politics, because we were the big demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the American War in Vietnam, for nuclear disarmament, for all of those causes. It was a really radical period of youth politics that isn't the case now, but certainly was then. And the anti-apartheid struggle became part of that. And what I got caught up in that whole wave of direct action, following, for example, the action taken by predominantly black activists in civil rights movement in the USA, like Martin Luther King follows, Rosa Parks, who took

8:26direct action on the bus to say, I'm going to get on a white bus even though I wasn't allowed to, because racism was pretty bad in the United States, much worse even than it is now. So, that was a period when it was exciting to get involved in youth politics. And the direct action, there were student sit-ins, there was a student revolt in Paris, there were student sit-ins in American universities. And there was a lot of talk and excitement about that amongst young people, and that's why I decided to apply the principle of direct action to sport itself Africa. And we won that campaign, and the spring box didn't tour, and the cricket team was stopped touring for until, you know, transformation happened, and Mandela was elected president in the maiden. There was something to us before that as part of that process. So, you interacted with a lot of the now revered somewhat revered leaders of the struggle. I say somewhat because some who are still

9:29around to this day and occupy livers of power and government have tainted the values, the initial values of what the ANC and the struggle were supposed to represent. I want to know from you, having had that picture at least and that engagement with these leaders in liberation, how do you view the work that was done to build a democratic South Africa? How would you review the ANC from what it was in the 70s and 60s and 80s and 90s when you interacted with it? To the one that today is at 39% has lost the trust of the majority of South Africans and is married with all sorts of corruption. Yeah, and I recognize all of that, and I feel personally betrayed. And I think many anti-aponitiativeists do, and I know many South Africans do of all colours, but particularly Black South Africans feel that the ANC of Mandela and Sassulu and all those great figures,

10:32Kathradah and others, some of whom I got to know, and it was privileged to know, particularly in Nelson Mandela, but they feel betrayed that those values of justice and equality and human rights have not been subsumed and downgraded in what has been a feeding frenzy. It was most brazen and shameless under former President Jacob Zuber, which was really outrageous, and I did something to expose the international complicity and involvement in that by exposing it in the British Parliament. But I think that I happen to know that Nelson Mandela personally felt betrayed by that, but all of us, to see the corruption which has become so ubiquitous in the country, then you think of the noble values of the freedom struggle, and how much sacrifices people made, Mandela himself and Sassulu and the others, Kathradah and Robin Ireland,

11:33you know, they suffered a lot for a cause that we all supported. We didn't suffer in a way that they did, but I think that cause has been betrayed, I'm afraid. Sure. You wrote a book, Liberation and Corruption. In that book, one of the arguments that I found fascinating was specifically when you examine South Africa. You said the seeds of corruption here at least were not unique to the A&C that many of these seeds of corruption were carried over from the old apartheid system, and that when you walk through this argument, you speak to how liberation movements come to be infested from within, and that is the situation that happened in Brazil with the Workers' Party, Nakarago with the Sandinistas, you see with Kondis, Parti and Zambia, Unip and the list goes on and on and on. Can you just unpack that argument for us of how liberation movements go from challenging an establishment and status quo that they absolutely detest into, then

12:38being the thing that they tried to at one point up end? Well, it's a question that you asked me, that I felt haunted by, because I thought you had the A&C as the heroes of the freedom of struggle. You had the Sandinistas, who you mentioned, as the heroes of deliberation from fascism in Nakaragua. What do you get? You get Zuma becoming president and all of that shameless corruption that I've just referred to. You get in Nakaragua, Daniel Hortega, who was never as big a figure because nobody is as Nelson Mandela, became I know, Kondi figure globally. But he was an important pinup for liberationists when I was young, and he's ended up a corrupt, nepotistic, a dictator, presiding over a corrupt regime. So why has this happened? Is what my liberation and corruption, why freedom movements fail is the subtitle? Because when I looked across the world,

13:38almost without exception, looking for a Algeria, the FLN gets into government, overthrows French colonialism, finds it goes corrupt, and the same happened in India where there was no liberation struggle, but there was an independent struggle led by Gandhi and others. And the Congress Party, that was a very noble instrument and leader of that struggle, gets into power and becomes increasingly corrupt. And what you find in South Africa, I railized and research this and proved it, although others have written about it, is that a party itself was deeply corrupt. People think apartheid is brutal. Some of them say, oh yeah, it must have been nasty, but it wasn't corrupt. Yes, it was. The defense industry, sanctions, busting, the people were lining their pockets. And so I think what happened here, and this is not to excuse it, not in any way to excuse it, because I think it's a total betrayal, is the ANC got into power and found a corrupt system,

14:42and then temptation gathered and they became corrupt. The same thing happened in Nicaragua. I'm afraid the same thing happened, almost without exception, right across the world. I mentioned as well, because colonialism itself was deeply corrupt. You look at the French colonialism rule in Algeria. It was infested with corruption. So the FLN come into power and they find a corrupt system and they become infested with it too. And I think it's important to also look at the global economic dimension to this, because, and I discuss this in the book, because global corporates, who were very much in partnership with the corrupt politicians in the state capture episode, in South Africa, the Bain and Company, the KPMG's, the banks like Baroda Bank, which is most the owned by this Indian government, by the way, and HSBC and Standard Charted. That's where it was

15:45through those banks that the looted money went, that the zoomers and the goopters, principally the goopters looted it from South African taxpayers, essentially, and from the public purse and sent it out through those channels. So that's corporate complicity, global corporate complicity. Then you get the management consultancies like Bain and Company brought in to disable SARS, to disable the South African tax agencies, South African revenue service. That is terrible and blatant and criminal, actually. And of course they've had to close down their operation here. And then there were other lawyers and accountants and auditors and financial advisors who advise about setting up shell companies. Then there are governments. London is still a source of a lot of lucid money that goes through London, by its property, the big corrupt guys by property in London, the UK oversees territories

16:45like the British Virgin Islands and others, but the BVI is a principle sort of a harbour for that kind of lucid money. Through the shell companies that the criminals and the politicians and the kleptocrats don't necessarily know what to do with the money, but they use these professional enablers. Lawyers, financial advisors, estate agents in the case of property that they buy to set up shell companies to hide the beneficial owners, which is what the Guptors did through Dubai and Hong Kong. And then you've got the government say of the United Arab Emirates and China, because Hong Kong was a principle sort of conduit for this. So China is implicated, India is implicated because of the Bank of Baroda and the Guptors originally from India. London's implemented, so the United Kingdom government is culpable in this as well. The United States government is culpable too because some of the lucid money ended up there and still does.

17:46And what I show in the book is that, for example, the African continent, which receives a lot of overseas aid from European countries, used to from the United States before Trump, wound up USAID, for a Britain and so on. But actually, if you look at the lucid money that goes into those countries, the rich, old countries of supposedly democratic countries, including the United Kingdom, it is more than double the overseas aid that they send in. So the lucid money that comes mostly from South African taxpayers, African taxpayers, poorer people in these countries, that lucid money stolen from them by corrupt people in their own systems, ends up dwarfing the amount of overseas aid that these countries provide because it ends up in those countries. People who loot

18:47corruptly across the African continent and still goes on in a massive basis, don't leave their money and they elicit illegal proceeds in those countries. They send it to London and Washington and New York and Berlin and so on and through Dubai and through Hong Kong. That's what happens. You open a very interesting thread there because there's a lot made about the public sector role in corruption, but very little emphasis is put on the role that the private sector plays in facilitating this. We mention all the professionals that are involved. It begs a question that maybe moves this conversation from Africa and more to the west. In that space, as you're saying, London has become a haven for a lot of corrupt capital. A lot is being said about Russian capital in the UK buying up properties and space there. What culpability does do governments in the west

19:52actually have to take for enabling the system? With one hand, the US says we can't work with these governments because they're corrupt, but top US banks are taking capital from these African heads of state. They are. Trump, remember President Donald Trump reduced the anti-corruption legislation, which has been quite strong in the US. He actually reduced its impact on businesses because he didn't want to stop the US businesses succeeding abroad. Where I think the key answer to your question is somebody has to pay the bribes. The bribes are given to politicians to be corrupt, is played by the business community, both here in South Africa, but also internationally. That's how it happens. These international global corporates that I've mentioned, some of which I've mentioned, including the banks, make a lot of money out of this. The professional enablers who

20:57help these corrupt people, they make money. If the Gupta Brothers, for example, wanted a shell company set up in, that's to say, a shell by a health shell company, I mean a front company that hides the true owners. If they wanted to set one up in the British Virgin Islands, they didn't have the ability to do that in the cells. They get professionals who are supposed to be regulated and governed by professional ethics in places like London to do it for them. And the Chinese government allows money to be looted through Hong Kong. I've also described how the United Arab Emirates government allows a lot of looted money to pass through Dubai. So what you need is governments to step up and stop just saying they're against corruption and start walking the walk and not just doing the talk. That must mean London, Washington, Beijing,

21:58Delhi, and of course Dubai. So it's not just an African problem or a South African problem, or even an egg-araguan problem. It's actually a global corporate problem that you've got to look at and expose. It begs the question then of an international court-on-corruption. I was at a yesterday where it gibts and the conversation was very spitter around where to from here, South Africa, the era of the Madlanga Commission. And you made this point similarly as well, but there was a brief moment where the idea of an international court-on-corruption was brought up, but I don't think it was fleshed out enough. Well, there is a draft treaty for it, being drawn up by Richard Goldstone, the retired judge here and others who are eminent jurists from countries in Africa, Europe, Canada is involved, and so on. I'm trying to persuade the government of the Labour government that that's what we should do as well, is because there's an

23:03international criminal court, but it doesn't have responsibility or the ability to pursue corruption. And corruption is a massive international problem. It's like two billion US dollars, sorry, two trillion US dollars. It's a figure that you can hardly get your head round. A year is what the proceeds of money laundering and corruption amount to. That's enough to, it's bigger. That's a bigger amount than a lot of African national GDP's, the national wealth. It's very, very big. And it also means that, as I say, it's not the poor countries that are responsible. That doesn't excuse the people who are corrupt in those poorer countries, but it's actually the traditional colonial powers that have benefited largely from this. Wow. So my last question maybe on this is that such an agency would have to have

24:07more enforcement capabilities than the ICC, but its jurisdiction would have to be different from the ICC in that you wouldn't have to, would members states have to co-opt to say we would abide by the findings of the court? You need a call of member states, and I hope the UK will be one of them. Don Trump's US will not be one of them because he doesn't believe in that. And I can never see Russia supported under Putin supporting an international anti-corruption court and probably not China either. I don't know about India, but the fact is if you get enough critical mass and you've already got around about 50 countries signed up to support it, you start to get a situation where if they signed up to the international corruption, anti-corruption court, even if say Managwa in Zimbabwe or Putin in Moscow didn't support it because they very corrupt themselves,

25:11their ability to travel and move their money would be restricted and they would act as a deterrent against others. So it's not a kind of answer to anything. It's not over budget. It's not as silver-bullets, you're quite right to use that phrase, but it is an important step along the road of tackling this beast, which is out of control international corruption. But as is often the case, reality has a way of informing fiction, and though we're speaking about liberation and corruption, which is a very good book, and I have a copy which I do hope you'll sign up to. Of course I will. You have recently authored a new fiction book called Smuggler King, and maybe you can walk us through the story, not giving people too much about it, but what are the core themes that inspire this book? Yeah, of course, Smuggler Kingpin and it's published by Jonathan Ball. I've started writing thrillers.

26:13I've written quite a lot of non-fiction, of factual sort of things, including the Liberation and Corruption book, but thrillers, I read thrillers myself in my spare time, where I have spare time, which is not often enough, and I enjoy them, and I thought I'd try to write them myself. So the latest one is Smuggler Kingpin. It's about the Mafia crime that I think is warringly big in South Africa in the tobacco industry, which is what this is about, tobacco smuggling, gold smuggling, which is a big international crime. I've previously written thrillers about wildlife, poaching and corruption, the Rhino conspiracy, the elephant conspiracy, and the lion conspiracy, but this one addresses that question, and it shows how smuggling is rampant of tobacco between South Africa and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a big tobacco grower, but it then covers a lot of other African countries,

27:13and ultimately the story follows that really bad guy, who's at the center of all of this, although there are lots of Smuggler Kingpins, and he ends up moving his proceeds through a flight that goes over Africa, and I had to consult an African pilot about how to fly a plane across Africa, because I've never done it myself, and I didn't know. So the book, I think from what people have told me have read it, so it's quite pacy, it's a good read, I hope it is, and it's a page tether, because thrillers are different from, say, liberation corruptions, I think is a readable book, but it's harder to read than Smuggler Kingpin, because Smuggler Kingpin is a novel. It's a pacy or attempts to be a pacy kind of thriller, but it tells the story of an important reality, so your question is how much is almost facts in this, and it is based on real life.

28:14I always find it fascinating when authors go from writing hard-hitting fact books into stepping into the fictional world. I think perhaps thrillers, given what you've written in the past, make sense, because if anyone were reading books like liberation and corruption, they'd be saying, well, maybe this is just too good to be true. So as you made that switch in your mind and in your writing process, what did you discover was different? Well, you start off with an idea of how the plot starts and how it might end, but it takes all sorts of different twists and turns and goes down side roads that you hadn't thought about, because as you're writing it, it evolves. And you've got the characters, and I've used some of the characters in the world life thrillers as well, but other new ones come in, including the Smuggler Kingpin himself is a fictional character, but there's a lot of real life to it as well. But you

29:16it is different, you start off with a liberation corruption. I had a plan, I had an idea, which is what I said to you. I was haunted by the betrayal of the values of freedom struggles and liberation struggles. But this one, you've got an overall sense of a plot, but you don't quite know when you start writing us how it's going to develop. And so that's a more testing thing for somebody like me is not a professional thriller writer of the kind that I read in my spare time. So that's a different challenge, but I hopefully I've managed to conquer it and write something that people will enjoy reading. There'll be an important message in it, but above all it's meant to be enjoyable. So what do you hope to communicate with it, to make people more aware of how easily transnational crimes committed, or to awaken people to a much bigger message? Well, I want first of all people to enjoy it and find it readable and a page turner, okay?

30:21So I don't want them to think this is a difficult book to read because it's about a serious subject, but I'm also to think about how, you know, how much global crime there is and how much mafia type crime in South Africa there is that I've mentioned the tobacco industry. I could have mentioned construction at the taxi situation and a lot of other things. So there's a character in it called the security minister, Yasmine is her first name and S.O.P.S. her surname and she's trying to tackle this. She's a good ANC minister and was involved in the struggle and there are a few. And she is trying to tackle this and it's based on somebody I've made, not a minister, but somebody I know, so I'd quite know the character. And the veteran who's the sort of mentor of the young activist, Tundee, who's the principal sort of activist in the story, the mentor is an

31:27older guy called the veteran that I don't refer to him by name, but he's somebody I know as well based on somebody I know. So his backstory is, you know, if I suppose I'm writing some of it about based on people that I know South Africans in the main. So let me actually stay with that because you've met a lot of prominent South Africans who are struggle era heroes. You've met Nelson Mandela, you've met heroes around that line Oliver Tumbo. I want to know what struck you about leaders in that era. You know, I asked that with the frame of 2026, not just in South Africa, but across the world. Leadership seems to be a quality or a commodity, a character that is missing. I agree with you. And the leaders we have are poor leaders on the whole. I'm afraid compared with what I regard as the giants, not just of the freedom of

32:33struggle in South Africa, but their statue, their integrity, their principles. Nobody's a saint. Mandela never claimed to be a saint. Yes. And I don't think Oliver Tumbo did. He's probably a little more saintly, deeply religious in a way that Nelson Mandela wasn't anything like the same extent if at all. Nelson Mandela at his first trial in 1962, my mother, was the only white in the white section of the public gallery. So they would greet each other when he came in. That was his first trial in the old synagogue in Pretoria in 1962. And she told me a lot about it. And when I first met him in Parliament, I introduced a broader along, which is in 1991 when I was a British MP in the British Parliament. And the thing I noticed about him is how interesting he was in people. And what do you find with other leaders, whether they're celebrities in sport or

33:35music or leaders, kings and queens and presidents and primers, does a matter a lot of them in my time? Is you they kind of whether it's the clutching of the crowd or the media sort of spotlight, they turned a drawback. Yeah. And Nelson Mandela was not and they stopped being interested in people. They very become very interested in themselves, but not necessarily in people. Yeah. And I just give you a story about I was escorting Nelson Mandela at the Labour Party conference. I think it was in round about 1996. No, sorry, it was 2000. He'd stepped down as Minister, President, and I was Minister for Africa, the British Minister for Africa, probably the only African born British Minister for Africa that there's ever been and maybe ever will be. But my job was to school him down to meet the Prime Minister Tony Blair. And he was in a room in the hotel, so I had to get him down in this lift. And he asked about the family. And I said, well, my mother's actually in

34:38hospital because she's broken her leg. Oh, I must speak to her. So we're in this, we're in this lift. And I'm trying to find the number for the hospital in my phone when I didn't have it. And I didn't have the number of the ward that she was in in South Wales. Meanwhile, we get out of the lift. The Prime Minister is waiting for us. My instructions are to get my debate on time to see him. And then there's long line of porters and receptionists and cleaners, the ordinary workers of any hotel who make a tick, but are very often not recognised. They were all in a line. The rest of nobody was coming down to greet him. So he starts shaking their hands. The minutes tick by the Prime Minister's delayed. And eventually I get my mother on the phone. And I say there's a very important person to speak to you. I didn't tell who it was. So I hand the phone to him. And he says, this is Mandela from South Africa. Do you remember me? And you know, then we're not out of our

35:43wedding. Elizabeth and our wedding in 2003, we invited him, not expecting him to come. And he said there's cards saying, I'm very sorry I can't come, but I'll be there next time. His sense of humour was impish and mischievous, but he was very interested in people. And it's not just his greatness and his courage and his sacrifices and all those things we know about and his integrity. But also the fact that he was interested in people. Why did he want to speak to my mother? Why was he shaking hands with all of the ordinary workers of the hotel because he cared about people? Sure. I think that's where it lies. The missing element in leadership today. And it's a sense that people don't feel that leaders today give them a sense that they can bring them through or that they care. I mean, at the moment, so you remember of Poland from 1991 to 2015? Yeah. Not consequential at all.

36:45The crazy period in British politics might mind I say from the era of new labour, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, all the way into what became the decline of the Tory party, the rise of the Brexit years and that movement that took over. You now are in the House of Lords. You have seen leadership from a very unique lens. You've been the MP. You've been a minister of foreign affairs for Africa for the UK. And remember the UK cabinet. And remember the UK cabinet. From that view, what differentiates the people who make it into those, let me rather ask it this way, there's a perception that the people who make it into those rooms are somehow different from the public. Well, let's mean observation. Some of them are. Yeah. No question. For some of the reasons I explained, they get a bit arrogant and they go out of it with self-important and they become distant.

37:47But I think also today, what's difficult, different, when I was first a member of Poland, there was no internet. Yeah. There was no email. There were no mobile phones. It's very hard for you, as a young person to imagine that. Yeah. But at I now have a mobile phone and they use the internet every day and I do email them and my granddaughter puts me on TikTok occasionally and Instagram. I'm no idea. I use them myself. And I use social media. But the social media climate is very hostile. And very instant and very toxic particularly for women, prominent women, politicians and leaders of any kind and celebrities and so on. So I think it's a different era for leadership from the one that, you know, in which I was in a leading position. But I think nevertheless that what's different about the current crop of leaders is they just seem to think of themselves only. So I would say that's Donald Trump is above all somebody who thinks of himself. Apparently he's

38:52made two billion US dollars while he's been president. And gotten a 4747 process. Well, all of that. And I think he's making big mistakes. I think his war against Iran, he stumbled into something that he doesn't understand. I'm sounding arrogant about it but I don't think he understands it properly. It was always going to be much more difficult than he pretended. And Israeli primers to Benjamin Netanyahu sort of kind of provoked him into it. And he'll be happy. But I think it's a bad situation. So we're suddenly what's come of bad leadership at that level. And you can look at other leaders who don't display the same standards that I think the leaders of the freedom struggle in this country did. But they seem to be writing a world which is more about them. In a world which is actually now facing greater threats, the climate emergency being an existential threat to the

39:57whole of humankind. And they should be concentrating on tackling that instead of you know, lighting their own pockets and thinking about themselves rather than the people who's suffering. And the thing about climate emergency is it is devastating for the poorer countries. Yes, LDCs. Yeah. The least developed economies are the ones that bear the biggest brunt but they've contributed the least to creating this problem. That's true. And you talk about global finance. Global finance reform does not create any pipelines for money to be spent in mitigation and adaptation, infrastructure, food and security, loss and damage to be made available. But it all begs the question how do we get out of this bad period? I think politicians, parliamentarians, I was very pleased to see the new Labour leader Andy Burnham talk about this and I haven't heard anybody at that level do so. I've been very concerned and critical of the growth of neoliberalism across the

41:01world, which dates principally from the fact that being Margaret Thatcher being Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan, her great buddy being President. So we're talking about roughly 1980. Yes. But it's spread across the world and before that you had Keynesian economics, which Don Maynard Keynes and his either where the public sector was recognised as being playing an important role economically along with the market economy alongside. Now you've got a situation where the public sector is sort of despised and public services cut and austerity and at the same time you've seen the gap between the rich and the poor, widen. So the top 10% have done very well. The top 1% have done incredibly well and the top 0.1% deal on musks and so on out of sight will. But the important thing about that is that under neoliberalism inequality is risen and it hasn't

42:04just hit the poorest the most, it's hit the middle. So 90% have done either stayed still or got poorer relatively speaking. And when that happens, when you hit the middle of society across Europe, United States, UK and so on and elsewhere, South Africa thinks the most unequal society in the world. It doesn't give me any pleasure to say that, but it is. When you hit the middle, you get political disruption and the rise of populism and extremism. We saw that most notably with the rise of the Nazis in Hitler in post-World War Germany because the economy was in a really bad state and the middle of the society was being badly hit by a rampant inflation. People would fill a wheelbarrow with benchmarks, go to a supermarket, where they get there, they needed two wheelbarrows. The inflation

43:05was so out of control. So what neoliberalism has done is not necessarily bred that kind of rampant inflation, but it is caused inequality to rise and it's also caused a great deal of insecurity because of deindustrialization and closure of big workplaces, the decline of trade unionism and those working class voters, some of them have ended up voting for the far right. You see in France, for example, former working class communists have ended up voting for Le Pen's far right islamophobic party. And Nigel Farage who leads the reform party and is the far right leader in the UK and could be the next prime minister. I think Andy Burden's accession to being labor leader and prime minister stands a much better chance of stopping that than Kirsta

44:07did. But that's another symptom of what I'm saying about global inequality and the insecurity and dissatisfaction and instability with the politicians who have allowed that to happen. I think, in closing, I'd want to ask this question because from my observation point, it's that the progression of politics was inevitably going to get us to this point. You see in the 90s, the rise of centrism. We saw it in the US with the ascension of Bill Clinton. To an extent, you saw it with the philosophy of new labor. You had this traditional, very socialist value labor party under John Smith and Neil Kinneck and then transitions to this more centrist focused under Tony Blair. South Africa very much caught the after effects of that in the 90s when we entered our democracy. Some of the hard, almost deeply leftist, embedded policies that the ANC represented as a movement

45:14changed when they got into government. RDP was abandoned for gear and so on and so forth. It resulted in this point. But now it seems that the political establishment across the world is trying to convince people that centrism is yet again the only solution to this polarization. Well, if for centrism, I think the center is important, whether it's center left or center right, but the center parties, if you take Europe, for example, you have the socialist parties, including France, which has now virtually disappeared and been pushed aside in other European countries. And Labour's suffered big sort of setbacks before we won on a small share of the vote, a landslide majority, in 2024. And we're still dealing with the aftermath of that. I think the main reason that people have got dissatisfied is those center parties that they used to rely on have not

46:16tackled the neoliberal cadundrum, have not put forward a credible economic strategy that relies on the market economy but is prepared to defend public investment and good public services, as being vital to provide a decent standard living for everybody and to give opportunity to everybody. I think the center parties in a sense have retreated from, and I don't think leftism is necessarily going to win a majority. I think if the Labour Party went back to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, you would not win. He got massively defeated in 2019. And I don't think he was a very good leader, but I equally don't think that I think failing, if you fail to address the inequality and the insecurity that neoliberalism has brought, then you're going to get into trouble as a center party. And I think you're right that the center parties across the world

47:20in a sense open the door to the kind of problems and right wing leaders that we've got in the present time. I like it early when I said that was my last question. I have to ask you though, current events in South Africa relating around the Mad huge influence over police investigations and interfering with how policing works in our country. What I have to ask you about this is, it's for South Africa where we are now, the road to recovery. For many, it seems like it starts with this commission of inquiry, but this commission of inquiry, you were part of the Zondo commission. Okay, we have evidence. You gave evidence. Commissions of inquiry are only as good as the actions that are taken after that. Are you right?

48:24How do we get over the moment that we are living in now? What would need to make my longer valuable enough for us to say, okay, we've now begun dispensing with the not just corruption, but the infestation that's taken over our police? You've got to have political leadership to do that. You've got to have a government that will appoint non-corrupt police chiefs and army sort of leaders and others and take on the crime bosses, because unless you do that, this corruption, as people have described it to me who know a lot about it, say that it's less brazen and shameless than it was under former President Zuma, but it's actually very serious at the present time, because you've had the dismembering or neutralizing or taking over an infiltration of the law enforcement systems. On the other hand, what are things going for South Africa? Is where the ANC lost the last

49:26election? It accepted the verdict. A lot of other countries in the world that doesn't happen. The ruling party doesn't accept its lost. Especially liberation movements. Especially liberation movements, Zombab, we notably. I mean, the ruling Zondo P.F. parties never accepted the result when the opposition won. That's good. The constitution in the end is held. Although Sila Ramapose has been heavily criticised and disappointed many people, he has actually appointed people, for example, to the South African Revenue Service, that was deliberately disabled on advice for a global corporate banan company on how to do it under Zuma. At least it had a good head point that has got the agency working to collect taxes instead of letting the tax fraudsters off as it was. So there have been some good signs,

50:26I think, to say that everything is terrible is a mistake, but everything needs to be a lot better. Things can get better. Things have to get better, because South Africa, sadly, was sort of a hero and an else in Mandela. I'm not saying it fell to zero under Zuma, but it came pretty close. It lost its status as a kind of beacon for liberation and democracy. Yet the institutions that the Mandela government brought in and were succeeded partly under Mbaki before Zuma, the institutions still are quite strong. So they're still the potential to, for example, use the constitution and the law to enforce the measures that should be enforced to tackle crime, but you've got to tackle this curse of infiltration by the Mafia criminals of the law enforcement

51:28agencies, which is what you've just described coming out of this latest commission. There has to be action to follow it. And this Svuggler-Kingpin thriller actually focuses on the trouble that the security minister has, my fictional character, in dealing with that and how the activists involved in this battle, the sort of lengths they have to go to to confront it as well. Lord Hain, thank you for joining us on SMWX. It's a pleasure. Fam, if you really enjoyed this interview, please make sure to like, share and subscribe as SMWX is on its way to half a million subscribers. Until next time, keep spreading the fire.