Philanthrocapitalism Seen from South Africa

Critics of multinational corporate power in the Southern Africa region, the world’s most unequal, are increasingly concerned with the super-exploitative sources of wealth extraction from labor, society, and nature. Historically and especially today under the influence of corporate social responsibility and social engineering by philanthrocapitalists—including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—that power comes dressed up as charity. It is reflected not just in the economy but also public policy spaces—in South Africa’s context, from health care to agriculture to sanitation—and ultimately threatens life on earth due to the untenable implications of leading climate-control strategies. These can be identified from two high profile visits to South Africa—one in 2009, when Bill Gates visited Durban slums, and the other in 2016, when Gates received accolades from the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Pretoria. Resistance narratives against Gates’ ideas spiked at those stages, but the crises his messages addressed continued, in part because of his own orientation to profiting from “false solutions” instead of promoting serious solutions.