In this thought-provoking opinion piece, author and commentator Siya Khumalo challenges us to move beyond rainbow capitalism and symbolic inclusion, and instead build collective and tangible economic power that reshapes the rules of engagement with both the state and private sector.
The Trump and Musk era (and I’ll call it that because Musk commissioned Trump 2.0, whatever his protests now) represents a break from a choreography that had become muscle memory: June would arrive, logos would be recoloured rainbow, and a witch hunt would commence for queerphobic complainers.
Many were cropped, culled or cancelled. It was glorious. Did any of it translate into meaningful financial and material empowerment of working-class and rural LGBTI+ South Africans? Not, but for a few years we were the stars of June, the human virtue signals of an optics-driven capitalism that marginalised no one, polluted nothing and existed for everyone’s good.
The Scapegoat Economy and the Cycle of Inclusion
Then the pendulum swang. Trump and Musk show us how: when financial elites secure access to government funds, they sponsor scapegoats to turn attention from the consequences of their looting. Conservative politics are sold to a public trained to hate us; voters are given false choices between pronouns for non-binary people and tax cuts for billionaires, between gender-affirming care for trans folks and universal healthcare for all, between Jesus and Barabbas. It’s a rigged moral stage: no matter the figure you choose, the real power remains untouched — and the scapegoat still bleeds.
Once conservative politics have done their job, elites pivot back to inclusion. Brands embrace DEI and ESG, NGOs proliferate; inclusive language fosters the illusion of progress. But when economic benefits don’t reach ordinary people, inclusion itself becomes resented. That’s how you get black and Latino Trump voters — people who see progress language as an obstacle to transactional survival. Self-actualisation becomes a luxury only the well-fed can afford.
Public Procurement: The Hidden Lever of Power
So the pendulum swings again. Deregulated capitalism reasserts itself. Its exclusions become visible. New calls for inclusion emerge. New frameworks, new language, new proxies, new tokens. But it’s the same game. The unchanging characteristic of this game is inequality, and there are few mechanisms for bridging the gap between the haves and the have nots that are as structurally powerful as public procurement.
Elon Musk has made a substantive portion of his wealth from public procurement and government subsidies. Again, economic elites land those opportunities by funding political campaigns that scapegoat someone or another for the consequences of that procurement being managed badly, and political parties turn a blind eye because they get a cut and they get votes. This is the state capture handbook. In South Africa’s case, the scapegoat has been “white monopoly capital”, a term pumped into discourse by PR firm Bell Pottinger. It allowed the Gupta’s patronage towards Zuma to be positioned as “radical economic transformation”.
Until ordinary voters are directly exposed to the games played by the Musks and the Guptas, no amount of acceptance and inclusion language (in the business world, in the Constitution) will overturn the human instinct to find a scapegoat when opportunities are scarce. Elites will always fund campaigns like MAGA to satiate that instinct and dodge accountability. For this to stop, every citizen would have to learn to do what elites like the Musks and the Guptas do, but with a greater public benefit.
Turning Government into a Queer Side Hustle
Years ago, I argued that queer inclusion in public and private procurement processes should be formally incentivised within South Africa’s B-BBEE scorecard. In this scenario, public and private entities that make members of the LGBTQI+ community the beneficiaries of their Skills Development spend, or Enterprise and Supplier Development efforts, would receive bonus points.
I advocated for bonus points so that those companies that weren’t ready would lose nothing while those that were would have a more cost-effective route to their compliance targets. This would allow us to develop our community while minimising backlash from those who’d complain we’re shoving the queer agenda down their throats (they shoved the straight one down our throats, but did you hear us gagging?)
But we know that the only blocs government takes seriously, from a procurement and rights perspective, are those who fund political parties. So here’s an experiment I’m inviting queer entrepreneurs to. On other platforms, I’ve called this experiment turning government into your side hustle. It works a lot like how state capture works: an entrepreneur who has a solution that she needs procured by the public sector, funds political parties to champion the procurement of that solution within government.
On the face of it, this is illegal. But it’s how things get done, it can be done legally (through intermediaries, with auditors, media partners and lawyers), and the true test of its conscionability is whether the public more value for money. Most importantly, it would have to be done as a bloc because there’s something to be said about the role of numbers in seeding specific interpretations of legislation into jurisprudence. Right now, we have legislation for disclosing party donors above a threshold; we don’t have legislation that connects the dots to show us what party donors are gaining from their donations to parties.
The ends justify the means, and when we don’t let them, when we pretend to be above this transactionality, we get captured by its inescapable presence and it takes years (and expensive commissions like the Zondo Inquiry) to figure out what happened. A bloc that presents a better template for transparent, auditable value creation in procurement can push the law beyond its form and towards its original intent.
Designing the Table: A Call to Queer Entrepreneurs
A queer entrepreneur once told of how they won a tender on paper — everything met, everything in order. But when they met the client in person, their queerness triggered such discomfort that the deal fell apart. Had there been a scorecard that incentivised the inclusion of queer stakeholders in that transaction, it may have played out differently. Had this entrepreneur been part of a bloc that was known to fund the client’s party, known to participate in a visible, auditable compact backed by a ledgered history of participatory value, the outcome may have been different.
I hope we take this moment in history to experiment with new models for democratising access to public-private partnerships through transparent donor disclosure, community visibility, and outcome accountability. That we entrepreneurs (queer or otherwise) partner with government not through nepotism or shady backroom deals, but through trackable impact and community-first frameworks. If the old economy made queer people disposable, the new one can make us undeniable — but only if we stop asking for a seat and start designing the table.
Siya Khumalo writes about religion, politics and sex and is the author of “The Queer Book of Revelation” and “You Have To Be Gay To Know God“. He is a Mr Gay South Africa runner-up, a Mr Gay World Top 10 finalist as well as a 2022 Mandela-Washington Fellow. Follow him at @SiyaTheWriter.
