My family have been Capetonians for many generations. And they’ve been poor Capetonians, in times when all that stood between you and hunger was community. Perhaps this is why I so loathe the Cape Independence people, and their selfish desire to tear the Cape away from South Africa and turn it into a little Temu Europe. Here’s a piece I wrote about them recently, about how they are trying to pull the same evil trick that Elon Musk is with his fake promise of Mars.
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What do Mars and Cape Town have in common? Is it that they are uninhabitable by ordinary humans, given the prohibitive cost of survival in both places? Is it that both are subject to enormous dust storms, or “the southeaster” as it’s called in Cape Town? Well, maybe. But what they really have in common is that both function as a psychogeographic bait-and-switch for a con game.
The bait-and-switch is a tactic unethical salespeople use to trick customers into buying something they don’t actually want. You’re offered an attractive deal, but once you’ve been lured in, that offer turns out to be ephemeral and unavailable and you find yourself pressured into switching to a less attractive option you would never have agreed to upfront.
In the case of Mars, the red planet has the unhappy role of being the false bait in Elon Musk’s great switch. In The Future of Truth (2024), auteur director and all-round eccentric Werner Herzog writes that Musk uses the idea of colonising Mars as a way to sell more cars. “Musk is sufficiently intelligent to understand that he is promoting a pipe dream, but he’s doing it with the sober calculation that it will secure his reputation … for being a ‘visionary’.”
The idea of Mars is echoed in the notion of the AI utopia the tech empire builders promise. When there are no more jobs, everyone will live in a happy place of abundance dispensed by AI set to Kindly Mode. But this fake promise of Mars as a new Earth, and of AI utopias to come, is just a way to legitimise the exploitation of Earth’s finite and fragile resources so that the technocrats can move from billionaire to trillionaire status.
Framing Earth as necessarily doomed and the AI apocalypse as an inevitability that needs to be managed is an ideological distraction. As Business Insider puts it, “it shifts the focus away from the difficult, heavily regulated work of solving climate change and wealth inequality on Earth in favour of a corporate-led techno-utopia in space”.
And in the case of the AI utopia, it makes it seem like regulating AI is a futile pursuit, leaving the AI companies free to grow unchecked. It also suggests that we shouldn’t worry about protecting human jobs because soon we will all be free of those petty considerations. As with Mars, the impossible, painful journey to get there is ignored in favour of accentuating the dreamt future.
Our very own entirely unironically named CapeXit struggle heroes attempt the same bait-and-switch. The pipe dream they’re trying to sell is the glorious possibility of a “free”, utopian Western Cape, where everything works, we’re all happily recolonised by the West and we’re allowed to enter Eurovision. And if only we all cram into their clown car and agree to journey on down the road to independence from South Africa, this utopia will be ours.
This is just the usual level of grift you expect from South African politicians and starter-kit demagogues who prefer spinning up a con game to doing any actual work. But it’s also, despite the abject failure of those behind the Cape Independence Party to convince anyone to actually vote for them, somewhat revealing about how easily people can be seduced by empty promises.
What you’re actually getting if you fall for their idiocy — and this is the switch — is a way to opt out of responsibility for the country that, for better or worse (with a heavy dollop of worse, it has to be said), we all helped create. You’ll be given the greatest gift you could hope for: a licence to whine instead of having to actually pitch in alongside the amazing number of people, communities and civil society organisations doing their best to push back against the tide of corruption and incompetence that threatens to irredeemably damage our democracy.
In The Future of Truth, Herzog points out that at the back of these questions about nefarious motives and grubby grifting, and specifically about the false promise of a Martian colony, “lurks a single, far more important one: isn’t it an obscenity anyway, rigging up an uninhabitable planet with incredible resources to make it habitable, instead of seeing that our own planet remains habitable?”
This is precisely what is so loathsome about the Cape Clown Party. Instead of helping the rest of us fight back against the obscene failures of government, they suggest we carve a huge chunk out of the country, retreat into a laager rebranded as Temu Europe, and leave our fellow citizens behind to die.
[First published in Financial Mail 01 October 2026]