ROB HERSOV & ERNST ROETS : How One Person Put This Government On Trial | Military Rule, Tax Revolts

Ernst, welcome to Cape Town.

Thank you.

Nice to see you down here.

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for hosting me and it's great to speak with you again.

Tell us about Lex Libertas. You founded it this year. Tell us a little bit about the founding, where you are and what it's all about.

So Lex Libertas is a very new initiative. It was founded earlier this year on the 7th of March. We announced it with just a website and a video, no funding or anything like that. We were just sort of starting it. And it was initially called the Pioneer Initiative. We started getting people on board. We had some meetings and engagements with our contributors. And we then launched the institution in a more final version on the 15th of May this year. So Lex Libertas means law and freedom. It's Latin for law and freedom. And what we mean by law is not law as in a piece of legislation. It's law as in a legal framework. Or a constitutional dispensation. What we seek to achieve is a viable political dispensation for South Africa. So, Lex Libertas is a— it could be described as a combination of a think tank and a pressure group. The think tank part, or the vision at least, is a viable political dispensation. And we believe in order to achieve that, the system needs to be decentralised and we need to promote autonomy and self-governance so that people Govern themselves to a much more significant extent, or communities govern themselves as opposed to the government governing them on their behalf and at their expense.

And this is not race-based, it's more culture-based.

Yes. Yeah, the focus is very much on culture and on what we call natural communities. So natural communities, just communities that grow just out of human nature, you could say, the way people interact naturally. They develop their own languages, they develop their own cultures, their own communities. And people have a natural proclivity to form communities, and that ought to be respected. So the think tank part is to say, we're going to do research about where is South Africa currently, and what could a better South Africa look like? Especially, we're already doing that, looking at different political systems all over the world, what could be applicable, what could be better for South Africa? And then the advocacy part is to channel the research and support the advocacy work that we're doing. Building our support base into practical, tangible action to promote a more viable democracy.

So if you look at Lex Libertas as an organogram, which are the divisions? You've got research.

There's 5 things we do. The first is the research part, as I described. The second is local advocacy. So that is reaching out to people within South Africa, different communities in South Africa, getting increased support for the idea that we need to bring government down. And we need a more decentralised system, which is a core function. We're not going to succeed if we don't have, if we don't build a movement in South Africa in that direction. The third is international advocacy. So that is to get increased international support, and support starts with something like recognition that this pursuit is a legitimate pursuit, but it's international support could also be fundraising. It could also be practical actions. It could also be policy decisions, diplomatic pressure, and so forth. The fourth is to channel that into practical action, to go out and actually do things, not just to publish papers. So there's an activist side to it. And then the fifth is to create de facto realities. So to just help to enable communities to just, to a significant extent, just take control over their own affairs. There where the government was supposed to be, but through its own incompetence have just become absent. It's one of our greatest threats, but also opportunities. It's just the incompetence of the South African government, where there's a lot of things that they should be doing, but they aren't doing it. There's just this political void, and that void could be filled with organized crime, with gangsters and mafias and so forth. But the void could also be filled with good communities organizing themselves and just, just filling the gap and taking control of their own affairs. And we believe that's one of the most important aspects. Of what needs to be done to move towards a better future.

So these communities could be linguistic communities, like the Afrikaans-speaking community. They could be religious communities.

Yes.

They could be tribal communities.

There's two broad narratives on South Africa that are both wrong and perhaps dangerous. The one is that South Africa is just a racial country. It's just different races in South Africa. The whites and the blacks and the coloureds and the Indians and so forth. And each race group has its own interests that ought to be protected or prevented from transpiring. The other is the narrative that there are no differences between people, that people are just— everyone's just the same, that everyone is just South Africans, end of story, nothing else. We believe the balance is somewhere in between, that South Africa is a very diverse country. Diversity has become this buzzword in a very strange way because the modern notion of diversity is actually to destroy diversity. It's actually to create some form of a melting pot where we pretend that people don't have their own cultures and proclivities and so forth. And so we believe the appropriate way is to let communities function the way they prefer to function. So I recently had an interview with a friend of yours as well, Princess Belakazi Mabandla.

I love Bels.

Who's a part of a royal family of a community in the Eastern Cape, and she has strong views on her community, and they have their own nation, you could say, or their own volk, you could say in Afrikaans, in the Eastern Cape with their own traditions and culture, and they want to see that preserved. And it's not the place of the government to go to them and say, well, actually, we have a problem with this, or actually, we are going to decide on your behalf how your community should be run. And that's why we're saying that the solution is to bring government down, to bring it down to local communities so that people can have a more significant say over their own affairs.

I think it was you that said, you know, that during the national government times, pre-1994, all decisions were made in Pretoria. And then for the next 31 years till now, under the ANC rule, all decisions were made in Pretoria. And it clearly doesn't work.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the criticism we get when we talk about this. People say, but this sounds like you want to go back to the apartheid system. When you say self-governance, is that not a homeland system? And it's actually the contrary, where, and it's not just the apartheid, it's even before that, it's even when South Africa was unionized under the British, there's a very strong coreality between how South Africa was governed under the British, then under the Afrikaners or the National Party, and now under the ANC, where in all cases, all three of these cases, it was highly centralized, highly racialized, and it was a state-driven, you could say a rationalist project. In other words, that there was, some very clever government official sitting in his study room writing plans on what would be best for the country and then implementing that on the people or on the nations or communities. Our argument is that we should do away with these things that characterised all three of these systems, which is this highly centralised race-based system. So the point is not to go back to a previous system, but to say that the current system has too much in common with the previous system and we need to get away from both of those.

So when you look at, um, centralization and decentralization, the Democratic Alliance, the DA, has been pushing for further decentralization and federalization.

Yes.

So for example, the Western Cape, to take a, a pretty obvious example, is better run than other provinces because the DA has been in charge. Is your thesis much along the lines of what the DA is asking for? Because I think you mentioned that there are a number of different options.

Yes. One of the most common questions we get is, so what's the end goal or what's the end game? What is this going to look like? Let's say you succeed. What is it going to look like? And at this stage, we have decided that it's better not to prescribe a particular outcome because it could be one of several outcomes. And we believe that we need to go through that process. And when I say one of several outcomes, I mean, firstly, we need to break this idea that there's only two political systems. And it's so strange that a lot of people in South Africa seem to believe this. In South Africa, there's only National Party apartheid and ANC democracy, and democracy in quotation marks because it's debatable whether it's actually a democracy. If you're not satisfied with ANC democracy, that means you want National Party apartheid. And there's a plethora of political systems. And so what we need to go through at Lex Libertas is do research on the different options. So one is federalism, which is a well-known one. The United States is a federal, has a federal system with the different states, each with its own governor. But then Switzerland has a federal system with the cantons. But there's also other forms of what we call territorial autonomy, like the Scottish. They are part of the United Kingdom, but they have a significant degree of self-government.

They've got their own parliament.

They've got their own parliament, yes. They make their own laws. Do they?

And they have their own budget.

Yes, exactly. And they, to a significant extent, decide what to do with their own tax money. So you have examples like the Nunavut in Canada, you have the South Tyroleans in Italy. There are many such examples all over the world, what they call territorial autonomy, where a particular territory is recognized as something that governs itself.

Quasi-independence.

Yes. And then there's what's often called cultural autonomy. That is a system where, where you recognize that a country is diverse. And for example, there are schools that provide education in different languages. And so the language community should decide how their own schools are governed as opposed to one community.

Would Canada be a good example of that?

Canada as an example with the Canadians and with the English Canadians and the French Canadians. The Scandinavian countries have some very unique, interesting systems, Estonia, Finland, And there are other forms as well. There's just broader recognition of group rights. So in South Africa, for example, on the schools topic, as an individual, you have the right to study in the language of your choice if it's practical, but you as a language community do not have a right to a school that provides education in your language. And so what happens is if, if the schools are shut down, which is what they're trying to do now with the BELA Act, then your right to have education in your own language becomes irrelevant. And so there's not sufficient recognition of group dynamics. And so the point is, is if, to bring it back to the question, what's the endgame? It could be one of different things. And we don't want to be so hasty as to choose one and say, that's where we need to go. We want to go through a process and involve people in that process and say, let's look at all these different systems. And that's something that excites me quite a lot about Lex Libertas. It's a think tank, but it's a, it's a very interactive a participatory think tank. So we're going to organize workshops and get our contributors—

Conferences.

Yeah, conferences and get our contributors to do research and publish their papers. We'll publish their papers and we'll get them to speak at conferences and we'll have discussions about this to get this broad discussion going about what are the different options. And we could say, well, we need to be a federation. That could be the solution, but it could also be something like like the South Tyroleans or the Scottish. It could be different things. And we believe before we— I know the rule is begin with the end in mind, but at this stage, we believe the end is decentralisation and self-governance. And we need to work out which are the different options and how do we get to them and to what extent are these different options applicable to South Africa.

I think this is very relevant and very important for South Africa because, you know, South Africa has 26 languages. How many official languages?

Yeah, 12.

12 official languages.

Sign language.

Yeah. Includes sign language. I didn't think about that. And then, you know, they're all, you know, Mpumalanga has nothing to do with the Western Cape. I mean, they all could be different countries, different planets. So South Africa is ripe for something like this. And I think it's very good that you're not prescribing which way we go, but that we work together with you. We, the population of South Africa, work together with you. To find the right solution for South Africa. But what's happening day by day is privatization by default.

Yeah.

Privatization by necessity and not privatization by design. So the ANC is resisting privatization, but it's happening anyway because South African Airways collapsed, Airlink, Samair, And FlySafair stepped into the breach. It was a natural form of privatisation. You see private security guards, you see private education, you see private fire trucks. I saw a private fire truck the other day, Fidelity fire truck. I was very impressed. And it's happening because the centre cannot hold.

Yep. So I read a very, you could say, alarming study or opinion survey. But realistically speaking, it's not that alarming, and I'll explain why. It was a study by Afrobarometer, and they ask the public in South Africa a variety of questions over a time period, and then, you know, they determine like a graph. And one of the questions is the type of system that they prefer. Would they prefer democracy or military rule? And then how, what percentage say they prefer democracy and what percentage prefer military rule? And now for the first time, the people who said they prefer military rule is bigger than the people who said they preferred democracy.

And which country was the poll done in?

South Africa.

In South Africa.

It's 49% of people in South Africa now say they prefer military rule. Wow. But the reason why I say it's not that alarming is because the military isn't able— it's very alarming to say the military should take over the country, but the South African military is basically non-existent. And then they say that that the people who prefer that is much higher under especially unemployed people and people who live in poverty. And it's because they've lost faith in the system.

They want decisiveness.

Yeah, exactly.

They want a leader.

That's exactly it.

And we don't have any leaders.

They feel that there's nothing, there's a void. And they feel maybe if we get the army to come in, then that will fix the void.

And I think they don't really mean the army. They just mean an individual or group of individuals that are tough, decisive, and get on with fixing the country.

Get the corrupt politicians thrown in jail and so forth. But the problem in South Africa is it's incentivized for the president not to take the appropriate action. Because if Cyril Ramaphosa, he knows who the corrupt politicians are. But if he throws them in jail, it's the end of his political career. They're going to kick him out. So if he wants to remain, that's the problem with the system we're in. If he wants to stay president, he has to ensure that he is an incompetent president.

He has to look the other way.

He has to look the other way.

He has to form commissions and national dialogues and delay everything.

It's not necessary to form all these commissions because they know who the people are that should be prosecuted.

I think it goes further than that. I think he knows who the bad guys are. He knows what they're doing, but they've got things on him.

I think you're right.

They've got a full file on what Cyril Ramaphosa has done wrong, starting with, maybe ending with Palapala. So he's guilty as sin in my view.

Yeah, I think you're right. If everyone has dirt on everyone, then no one is able to do anything about it.

Mutually assured destruction.

Yes, yes. But I think that's the point you made about privatisations. The private security industry is more than double the police and the army combined in South Africa. And so even this notion that, no, if people say we want the army to take over the country, what they really, what I think what they really say is that they are fed up with the system. They want something else. They want decisiveness. But the army cannot take over the country. It's not possible. It's not within the realm of possibilities. If they tried that, then the private security sphere could stop them. And so that's this void or this vacuum that has been created by political incompetence. And that vacuum is filled, as I said, by well-organized communities, but it could also be filled by bad actors.

So I've got a question that I always ask myself and people ask me. Is the ANC incompetent or malevolent? Is it useless or evil?

I think it's both. I had this conversation with an economist. The question was slightly different, but it's another version of the same question. The question is, to what extent are they ideologues and to what extent are they parasitic? In other words, are they just, are they really committed to implementing a socialist revolution or are they just trying to hold on to the levers of power and to sort of suck the state coffers dry?

Come what may.

Yeah, and I think it's both. It's a combination of the two. They are the ideologues. I think the ideologues have gotten fewer over time. And I think the ANC, those in power in South Africa, have become more parasitic in the sense that they're just trying to hold on as long as they can. And very interesting, Hannah Arendt wrote about this in her book on revolution, where she spoke about how revolutions or revolutionist movements are in a sense doomed to— if they succeed with their revolution, they are doomed to fail as a government. And she explains it where she says what typically happens is once this revolutionary movement takes over, it doesn't fail immediately. It doesn't become corrupt immediately. And there are a few reasons why. The one is because it's sort of filled with this excitement of being the government. And so for a while, they sort of pretend that they are a good government and they work hard outside of their nature to govern, to govern responsibly. That's the one thing. The other thing she says is they need to take some time to learn how to steal, how to get access to the right places, how to be corrupt without being caught, or to ensure that the corruption sort of grows gradually so that everyone has dirt on everyone. And so her prediction, I think it was in the 1950s, was that if a revolutionary movement takes over, um, a movement that states we're committed to some form of a socialist revolution, Initially, it might do well, and then over a few decades, you're going to see this sort of deterioration.

Did she give an exact timeline? Because this fits exactly to the ANC.

She didn't give an exact timeline, but she said one should not expect the collapse to happen immediately. So it's very relevant reading that now. And if you look at other revolutions, it's the same thing. Zimbabwe was the same. Cuba was the same. It's always the same thing. The revolutionary movement eventually takes over. And there's excitement about that. There's praise all over the world. People are excited about the change happening and the new dawn and all of these things. And then over time, you see just crashes and burns. And then Hannah Arendt's view is it's actually predictable that this would happen.

So in a way, the ANC for a decade and a half, you know, outside of their nature, generally tried to do the right thing. Now, remember, Tony Yingeni actually went to jail for Corruption. But if you extrapolate what Tony Ngieni did to what all these Madalas and these ANC ideologues and gangsters are doing, they all should be in jail.

Exactly. So that's a good example because now the extent of the crisis is far worse than with Tony Ngieni, but far fewer people are actually going to jail. So when the problem was smaller, he was caught and he went to jail for that. Now the rot has sort of stuck or sort of dissipated through the system. It's everywhere in a sense, but you can't see it, or at least the ordinary people, we know it's there, but we don't, we get the information through the media and so forth. But the people who are in the system, they can see it happening around them. And now as the problem has gotten much worse, the response to the problem is much weaker.

So, Eris, you've committed your life to fix South Africa. But you're fixing South Africa in an intelligent, professional way by analysing the different systems, not prescribing an end goal, and working with people, with community, with members to get to that result. How long will it take to have that white paper that says this is where we need to, we need to be?

We want to do much of that during the course of next year, 2026. What we have noticed since we started a few months ago, when we started speaking about this, there were some very interesting internal debates, people writing to us saying, I saw you guys said this, but I don't think this is going to work. I think the solution is this. And so I think we need to go through a process where we get these conversations going and we have debates and discussions, because I think this is the type of thing that a lot of people have thought about, but they haven't really had discussions about this. And that's where a think tank comes in, to get people to talk about these ideas and do some proper research, not just some emotional opinion, but proper documented research. And so we want to spend especially 2026, we've started already, but to start publishing papers on the different political systems and then have conversations about that, workshops, get people involved, get people who are very well versed in these topics to talk about this, to do some research. But then just get our contributors to be part of the conversation and get their opinions and then sort of shape that in a particular direction.

And how are you structuring the funding? Because obviously we need to fund this project. It's a crucial project for South Africa. It deserves funding. How are you organizing that? And what I'd like to do is help you do this.

So the funding model is predominantly through monthly contributions, what people call micro donors. It's people who donate a few hundred rands per month. The good thing about that and the important thing about that is it provides some form of surety in terms of financial planning. And we're growing in that regard, but obviously we need to grow faster because we need to appoint people, we need to get researchers on board, we need to arrange conferences and these type of things. We need to do those 5 things I mentioned. We also have room for people to make once-off donations and we've had Maybe 1,000 people make one soft donation so far, but we also need to open up what we call strategic donations. And strategic donations is businessmen or people who are sort of high net worth individuals who can say, I'm going to take a particular project of yours and I'm going to help you fund that. So I'm going to fund this particular research project or I'm going to fund this conference or things like that. But we have what we call a menu of big projects that we need to go through, for which we're going to need more decisive and more extensive funding. So that's not posted on the website, but if there are entrepreneurs or business people who are interested in that, we'd prefer to have a meeting and sit down and say, here's a list of 10 things that we need to do, and this is what each of them is going to cost.

Okay, so I'd like to have that meeting with you. I'd like you to take me through those, but I'm particularly interested in helping fund some civil disobedience. Yeah, because I'm gatvol with the ANC. I've had enough. I think we need to poke the bear in the eye and pressure them. Do you have ideas of civil disobedience that some of us might fund and get behind?

So that's the fourth thing. So remember, the first was the think tank. The second is local advocacy. The third is international advocacy. And then the fourth is to convert that into tangible action. And that includes civil disobedience. Now, civil disobedience sounds like something that that gives, you know, people some form of a scare, but we've had many examples of that in South Africa. Gandhi was famously with civil disobedience, the ANC, but even more recently, the COVID lockdown was eventually ended as a result of people saying, these lockdown rules are crazy, we're just not going to do it anymore. And the eToll is also a great system, a great example of that, where they eventually stopped the eToll system because people in big enough numbers just said, we're not going to participate.

So for 1,000 of us, me and 999 other friends said, we're just not paying tax.

Yeah, I think what keeps the system in place today is the compliance of taxpayers in general and the private sector, big businesses enforcing these destructive BEE laws and so forth. And if we can get taxpayers and the private sector to use this immense leverage that they have, it's going to have a massive impact. But people are scared to do that because they don't want to be the only one to do it. If it's just you saying, I don't want to pay taxes, then they're going to throw you in jail. And so, but there are legal ways of tax protest, you could say. And we are looking at that, into that. We're speaking with some economists and researchers. One of the ideas that a lot of people have spoken about is creating a trust fund and then getting people to pay their tax money into a trust fund. And then make certain demands. We don't know if that's the best way because the government could still go for the trustees. Yeah. Or they, or they could go for the elderly couple who paid their money into a trust fund and now they get prosecuted for not paying taxes. There are other ways. I don't want to say too much now because we're busy looking into that and researching it. But, but I think there is some real practical things we can do in South Africa.

So sign me up. And the Truth Report family up for one of these great, for some great civil disobedience because enough's enough.

Yeah.

You know, why are we paying tax to a government that wastes half of it and steals the other half? Yeah.

What I should say, I think what we think could work is instead of trying to get this nationwide tax protesting going is to use a particular community or a particular group of people as some form of a pilot project. And say, we want to get a particular community, or you mentioned 1,000 people, for example, and say, within this group, we're going to test this initiative. And then if you can see that it works, then it becomes scalable and you could do it on a bigger scale.

And I think you need to look into technology because blockchain has a manifestation in DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations, and a DAO is the ideal mechanism for something like this. Because you set a DAO up as an algorithmic entity where certain things happen on the basis of certain metrics. So for example, if my 1,000, me and my 999 friends committed our tax money, we're paying tax, we know what the amount is, and the money goes into the DAO subject to The government delivering on what it's promised to our community, our municipality, our country, we release the, the DAO releases the tax money or doesn't.

Yeah. Yes.

And, and technology can be a real friend here.

And obviously you need a proper legal representation. You need to like senior advocates, a legal team.

DAO has no human running it.

Yeah.

It's an algorithm. So how do you see an algorithm? So, so this is like ANC.

This is something else that we need to do is to look at new technology and how could that be used, especially when talking about practical action. And I think there are 3 new avenues that we should look into. There could be more. One is blockchain. Just, it's a complete game changer if people were to use it on a massive scale. But people don't use it on that bigger scale, but it's growing. But what are the potential consequences of blockchain? When we're talking about getting towards a better, more decentralized system.

Blockchain is decentralized.

Exactly. And the second is AI. So AI is still very much in the beginning phase and just looking at ChatGPT and Grok, how much it has developed from the beginning of this year up to where we are now. And so AI is going to open up a whole bunch of things. And then the other is robotics. And I think that's maybe going to be the third of the three, but I had a fascinating conversation with someone recently about how the world could change as a result of this and what could the consequences be if people start using robots. And now that's a scary idea, but the technology is coming, so we should talk about it. We cannot just ignore it. And so we need to do some proper research and we need to do conferences on what, where are these things going, but not just what's going to happen with AI, but more, how can we use this to move towards a more decentralized system? And that's something that I'm very excited about. And We want to do that in the coming year as well.

So Ernst, what's the website for Lex Libertas?

So Lex Libertas is L-E-X, it's Latin, the Latin spelling, lexlibertas.org.za. If people want to support, they can click on the contribute button. And I think what really excites me about Lex Libertas is the idea that it's an interactive public participatory think tank.

Well, I'm a member. I'm going to write a check and I'm definitely going to get behind Lex Libertas and add some very I just want to say you are a national treasure to South Africa for what you do, your commitment, your belief in our country, your love for this country. You know, I have huge respect for you. And my wife describes you as a more measured professional version of myself, which I don't know whether that's— it's definitely a compliment for you. I don't know whether it's an insult to me or not.

Yeah, well, thank you. No, I really appreciate it.

And it's really an honor and a privilege to know you.

Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Definitely likewise.