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I must be getting old. Not only because I remember when a prime minister’s financial declaration was treated as a pro forma exercise in trust, but because I now watch Jamaica drift toward a template of governance that South Africans have already lived—and are still trying to escape.

The comparison sounds provocative. Can the leader of a Caribbean island of three million be placed alongside the man who presided over Africa’s most industrialised economy? The scale is different. The scenery differs. But the political architecture—the habits, the responses to oversight, the relationship with accountability—shows a family resemblance that should trouble every Jamaican who still believes that democracy requires more than just showing up at a polling station every five years.

Let us examine the evidence without passion or partisanship. What emerges is not identical twins, but a shared species: the leader for whom the state’s integrity is less important than his own survival.

The First Resemblance: Oversight as an Enemy to Be Neutralised

When the Integrity Commission flagged discrepancies in Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ financial declarations—28 bank accounts, questions about loans, and nearly $500 million in transactions linked to opaque sources—a leader committed to transparency would have opened his books and welcomed scrutiny. Instead, Jamaica witnessed something remarkable: a prime minister filing a judicial review to challenge the very law his government enacted. He sought to test the limits of the accountability mechanism he helped create.

The method is not outright denial but institutional neutralisation. When the Financial Investigation Division needed a new chief technical director, the Government appointed Dennis Chung—a technocrat whose background does not squarely match the law‑enforcement‑experience profile the role suggests. The Government then amended the requirements. The message was unmistakable: the rules can be adapted so that loyalists fit them.

The move to distance Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis from the Integrity Commission, despite her professional qualifications and the precedent of auditor‑general participation, fits the same pattern. Undermine the institution, adjust the personnel, and the ground for meaningful accountability begins to soften.

Jacob Zuma, in South Africa, pioneered a more advanced version of this playbook. When Public Protector Thuli Madonsela released the State of Capture report, recommending a judicial commission of inquiry into his improper relationship with the Gupta family, Zuma did not comply. He did not even politely demur. He fought the report in court. He exhausted every legal avenue to delay, dilute, and delegitimise findings that he had allowed a private family to influence state appointments and contracts.

When the National Prosecuting Authority sought to reinstate corruption charges against him—783 counts of fraud, racketeering, and money laundering—his legal team deployed what South African courts themselves described as “Stalingrad tactics”: successive interlocutory challenges designed not to win on merit, but to delay justice indefinitely. The Pietermaritzburg High Court explicitly warned that Zuma was “implementing Stalingrad delay tactics” and ordered the trial to proceed “irrespective of any interlocutory application.”

In Jamaica, the Integrity Commission has not been able to approve Holness’ financial filings for multiple years. That is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is a red flag. When a public official maintains 28 bank accounts—many of them linked to family, insurance, or dormant arrangements—arranges complex loans between those accounts, and transfers funds from charitable organisations to personal business accounts, and then responds to questions not with straightforward answers but with legal challenges to the bodies asking them, a reasonable person must ask: not only what is being hidden, but how much the system has been reshaped to protect the centre of power.

The Second Resemblance: Capture as a Pattern, Not Yet a System

In South Africa, the Zondo Commission documented, in excruciating detail, how state capture operated under Zuma’s watch. Intelligence services were factionalised and weaponised against political opponents. A “parallel vetting system” operated outside lawful oversight. Public funds—an estimated R1.5 billion—were squandered on clandestine projects, including 293 cars stored in warehouses. The Gupta family, Zuma’s business associates, were given the freedom to choose and fire cabinet ministers.

Jamaica has not reached that scale of looting. The Integrity Commission itself has not found evidence that Holness illicitly enriched himself. His representatives insist that his resources are not linked to public funds, that many accounts are dormant or family‑linked, and that he has declared all assets. These are not trivial points; they matter to how we calibrate the danger.

But the architecture of capture—the quiet replacement of independent oversight with loyalists, the erosion of institutional firewalls—is visible. The assault on the Integrity Commission, the attempt to distance the Auditor‑General, the appointment of a defender of questionable arrangements to lead the Financial Investigation Division: these are the bricks of a fortress designed to protect power from accountability. Capture does not announce itself with a press conference. It arrives through a thousand small, deniable decisions. Each appointment of a loyalist, each judicial review challenging an inconvenient law, each attack on a credible official is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.

The Third Resemblance: The Cult of the Leader

Both Holness and Zuma have cultivated political followings that treat criticism not as democratic contestation but as disloyalty. Zuma’s supporters have chanted “Bring me my machine gun” and framed every legal setback as a conspiracy by unseen forces. Holness does not enjoy the same level of performative aggression, but the dynamic is analogous. The leader presents himself as the victim of politically motivated persecution, and his supporters absorb that narrative entirely.

The danger is not merely that the public believes the leader. The danger is that the leader believes himself.

Not Twins, But Cousins on a Slippery Slope

Are Holness and Zuma identical? No. The scale of alleged corruption differs. The institutional contexts differ. South Africa’s post‑apartheid constitutionalism is more robust, and its courts more aggressive, than Jamaica’s corresponding frameworks. Zuma faced a commission of inquiry that sat for years and produced multiple volumes of damning findings. Jamaica’s accountability mechanisms are younger, weaker, and more vulnerable to political pressure.

But the family resemblance is unmistakable. Both leaders have responded to legitimate oversight not with cooperation but with institutional warfare. Both have sought to neutralise the bodies designed to hold them accountable. Both have normalised the idea that the rules apply to others.

Jamaica stands at a crossroads. The assault on the Integrity Commission, the distancing of the Auditor‑General, the appointment of loyalists to oversight positions—these are not random acts. They are a strategy. And if that strategy is not challenged, Jamaica will not need to look to South Africa to see its future. It will be living it.

The question is not whether Holness and Zuma are similar. The question is whether Jamaica will recognise the pattern before it is too late