When The Economy Serves The Few: South Africa’s Unequal Deal With The World...

An Economy of Extraction: How South Africa Is Sacrificed for Global Profit - I Dare Say that, South Africa is Just One Example, the Entire African Continent is in the Same Hole of Destruction

South Africa’s economic crisis is not a mystery, nor is it the result of incompetence or bad luck. It is the predictable outcome of an economic system deliberately structured to benefit foreign capital, global powers, and a small local elite—while condemning the majority of South Africans to permanent economic hardship. What is called a “developing economy” is, in reality, an extraction economy designed to drain value outward.

For the ordinary South African, the economy is experienced through unemployment, rising food and fuel prices, collapsing infrastructure, failing municipalities, and a shrinking future. For foreign corporations and overseas governments, however, South Africa remains a profitable playground—rich in minerals, cheap labour, weak bargaining power, and policy frameworks that favour investors over citizens.

Sector by Sector: How the System Bleeds the People

In mining, South Africa’s soil produces immense wealth—platinum, gold, coal, iron ore—yet mining communities remain among the poorest in the country. Workers risk their lives underground while multinational companies externalise profits and leave behind environmental destruction, unsafe towns, and broken promises. Mineral wealth that should fund schools, hospitals, and industrial growth instead bankrolls foreign shareholders.

In energy, South Africans are subjected to endless load shedding and escalating electricity prices, while energy deals increasingly favour private and foreign-linked producers. The people pay more for less reliability, while profits are guaranteed and risks are socialised. Energy insecurity becomes another tool of extraction, crippling local industry while protecting investor returns.

In banking and finance, capital circulates within a narrow elite. Big banks and financial institutions—many with strong foreign ties—extract fees, protect wealth, and starve small businesses, townships, and rural economies of affordable credit. The financial system does not build producers; it protects accumulators.

In retail and manufacturing, foreign-dominated supply chains flood South Africa with imported goods, undercut local producers, and destroy domestic industries. Factories close, jobs disappear, and skills are lost—while profits are exported. South Africa is reduced to a consumer market rather than a productive economy.

Locked Into Bad Deals

These outcomes are not accidental. They are enforced through unequal trade agreements, investment treaties, and so-called partnerships with powerful nations such as the United States, United Kingdom, China, France, and Germany. These agreements prioritise investor rights over worker rights, profit repatriation over local reinvestment, and corporate protection over national development.

South Africa is told these deals are necessary for growth, yet the growth never reaches the people. Instead, the country loses policy space, industrial capacity, and economic sovereignty. What remains is dependency—dressed up as cooperation.

The Lie of Global Wealth

The wealth of the so-called rich and developed nations did not fall from the sky. It is rooted in centuries of African land theft, forced labour, cheap resources, colonial extraction, and continued economic domination. Today, the methods are more polished, the language more diplomatic—but the outcome is the same.

Exploitation is rebranded as “investment.” Control is renamed “partnership.” Resistance is dismissed as ignorance or populism. In this distorted global order, wrong is defended as right, and justice is treated as a threat.

Africa is expected to open its markets unconditionally, weaken labour and environmental protections, and compete on unequal terms—while wealthy nations fiercely protect their own industries and workers. What they refuse for themselves, they demand from us.

This is not a plea. It is a confrontation.

To global leaders, multinational corporations, and local political elites: stop hiding behind political speeches and business rhetoric designed to justify a rotten system. Stop pretending that an economy that enriches foreign interests while impoverishing its own people is success. Stop using complexity and jargon to mask exploitation.

South Africa—and Africa as a whole—does not need charity, lectures, or conditional partnerships. We demand fair trade, real industrialisation, economic sovereignty, accountability, and justice. We demand an economy that serves the people who generate the wealth, not distant shareholders.

An economic system that works for foreign business but fails its own citizens is not broken—it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And that is precisely why it must be challenged, dismantled, and rebuilt.

The time for excuses is over. Either the system changes, or the people will change it.