The Story of Africa

The past weeks have demonstrated many of the problems that have beset Africa over the years.

The Lesotho Minister, after disbanding Parliament to avoid a vote of no confidence in him being taken, escaped to South Africa to ensure his safety.  SADEC was called in to restore stability, and that organization, headed by Robert Mugabe and represented by Jacob Zuma arranged for the elections, which went off peacefully, albeit it under a heavy armed guard of SADEC Military and Police.  The irony of an organisation headed by two of the least democratic leaders in the world ‘ensuring’ the democracy of Lesotho, which the Prime Minister explicitly ignored by his actions against an essential process of democracy, appeared to have escaped the media.

In South Africa, xenophobia enjoyed a continuing resurgence, with the stores of foreigners being looted and then burnt and in one cases, the store owner being doused in paraffin and set alight.  South Africans have come to expect the shifting of blame for the poverty of the nation from the Government, which bears the sole responsibility, to the foreign shopkeepers as a normal situation, but the reversion to the program of necklacing, a favourite of the ANC in the run up to the change of Government is worrying.  In the light of the manifest racism of the ANC and the EFF, South Africans who are not Black must wonder when they too will become targets of this racist behaviour.

This, shortly after Jacob Zuma made a conciliatory speech in Parliament, thanking the Leader of the EFF for his contribution to the State of the Nation debate (in which the two most noteworthy contributions were a demand to ‘pay back the money’ and a clearly racist diatribe about how the majority of the economy is still controlled by Whites, with a demand for nationalisation of mines and banks.  Zuma stated, in his insincere, sniggering, way that Whites are welcome in the country, although he reaffirmed that the problems of South Africa started when the Whites, represented by Jan van Riebeeck, were the source of all the problems faced by the country.  He made no mention of the fact that the civilised and industrially advanced Europeans arrived in a part of the country which was then not occupied by the Blacks who, in any event, were still stuck in the Stone Age, with no industry and no democracy.  The remark, made by the least credible President the country has ever had, left a large doubt in the minds of those who have built the economy and now find themselves to be targets of opportunity for most of the actions of the Government in correcting the problems that the ANC has created.  The rest of the debate, as expected, went nowhere, with the ANC confining their contributions to snide attacks on the Opposition, and with very little real discussion of the parlous State of the Nation, no credible plans being announced to correct the numerous problems facing the economy, other than the bald statement that ‘we have plans’, and a high degree of arrogance being displayed by the ANC in the face of glaring evidence of their incompetence and corruption.  That was followed by the presentation of the Budget, in which every opportunity to correct the high rate of unemployment was disregarded, and the levies on fuel were increased to nearly half of the retail price of petrol.  The Minister of Finance made the usual promise, without plan to cut State expenditure by R25 billion on a total of R1,3 trillion (– less than 2 %!) and to control corruption, without making any reference to the fact that the Presidency overspent by R45 million on travel.  The promises are all as hollow as they have always been, the praise as insincere, the arrogance as staggering and the divorce from reality as far as always.

The whole mess was wrapped up at Mugabe’s 91^st birthday celebration, an affair that cost as much as the gross earnings for the month of half of the population of the country, with the slaughtering of two elephants (an endangered species) and remarks that the remaining five hundred White farmers (also an endangered species, down from five thousand, with a concomitant reduction in the food production) will be displaced by new legislation to ensure that their farms are handed over to the indigenous population.  This is no surprise to the intelligent observer.  The lunacy of Mugabe’s policies have been evident for many years, with the theft of the farms from the people who built them up, to be handed to Party favourites who have no clue about farming, and the indigenisation policy, which requires that mines and other industries be owned to 60% by locals (although, in accordance with the policies of the ANC in South Africa, the ‘locals’ must be carefully selected, not for their financial strength or their ability to contribute to the business, but for their Party affiliation).  The only surprise is that investors do not see the trend.  It is clear that Zimbabwe wants the investment and the expertise, and the Party wants the profit, in the belief that the asset belongs to the Party and the foreign investors have an obligation to provide the funding, the skills, the education and the experience, for no benefit to themselves.  What is even more surprising is that so few people are able to connect the dots, to make the picture that shows South Africa heading rapidly down the path that Mugabe has committed Zimbabwe to.

The summary to the South African situation was provided by the ratings agencies, which informed the Government that they now faced a probability that their rating would decline further. 

It seems that there are some sane people in the world.

Proteas - some Lessons for the ANC

There are some lessons to be learned by the ANC and the ANC Government from the Proteas, the South African cricket team.

·         The Proteas are a team.  They have a Captain who does not impose his ego or his demands, but works together with the entire team to achieve their objectives.

·         They have a plan, carefully worked out in the light of the objectively considered facts.  Their plan is not based on ideology or other irrelevant factors, but on the Facts and on the objectives.  The ANC, in contrast, has a plethora of plans, based on inherited and untested, or, even worse, tested and failed, ideologies.  The plans are worked out, promoted, and then packed away, to be called on before the next elections.  In that way it is seldom possible for an opponent to claim that the plans have been a failure.  There are, of course, exceptions to this rule.  The alteration of the education system has been shown conclusively to be an abject failure, but successive revisions have been described as ‘improvements’, although repeated experience has revealed no benefit, with South African education amongst the worst in the world and the most expensive.  The Black Empowerment is another example of a plan that has failed, and continues to fail even after numerous iterations of ‘improvement’.  It is clear to any intelligent observer that the BEE policies have created a massive brain drain, not only amongst Whites, who are the target of this Apartheid system, but amongst all intelligent people, who can see the probable results of this suppression of enterprise, intelligence and capability.  The result has been the advancement of people with lower skills and abilities, some of them with lower morals, at higher cost to the employer in order to attract even the marginally capable talent, and at a huge cost to the competitive capability of the economy and the ability to develop entrepreneurial capability.  This is not an issue of race.  It is a well-accepted fact that the skills of senior management are developed and honed over a progression of talented individuals through the ranks over a period of decades.

·         The Proteas accept responsibility for their actions and their failures.  They cannot blame their failures on the ‘previous team’ for their actions twenty years ago, and the thought of that is totally foreign to the Captain of the team.  They know that they have a current situation, and they act to achieve their objectives in that situation.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the ANC, who have taken to blaming the acts of the Dutch settlers in 1652 for their failures today.  It is interesting that they have not yet blamed the actions of Shaka Zulu, a bloodthirsty tyrant who slaughtered thousands of ‘enemies’, friends and family on his way to becoming the hero of the Zulu nation.

·         The Proteas have clear objectives.  They do not delay the implementation of their plans while the Captain decides on how to maximise the payoff of their actions, and they do not spend time coming to agreement on who is to participate from that payoff.

·         The Proteas are a team.  Each accepts responsibility for the performance of themselves and of the whole team, and they own up to their failures.  The ANC consists of a group of self-seeking individuals, who are together mainly for what they can take from the fact that they are part of a Party in power.  They give no thought to the cost of their misconduct or dissimulation to the people they nominally serve, but, instead, put in a huge amount of effort to hide those actions from the electorate.  Examples are the Chair of the SABC, who hid her lack of degrees, and who reinstated the CEO when he was found to have lied about his qualification (ironically), the Chair of the Independent Electoral Commission, who handed a large profit to her boyfriend, the Commissioner of Police, who chose the route of corruption to enrich himself and bring the country into disrepute and disgrace, the State President, who hangs onto power in the face of a finding by an internationally respected Public Protector that he, in effect, took money from the State to which he was not entitled, a Revenue Service which conducts its business in a fraudulent and corrupt way, and many other.

·         Most significantly, the Proteas are a group of people who command and deserve respect, a claim that the ANC has forfeited many years ago.

South Africans are proud to have the Proteas as their representatives.  Few of them have the same pride in their Government

Xenophobia again!

 

An interesting and frightening development is occurring in the Black on Black race relations in South Africa.  During the recent burning and looting of foreigner-owned stores in Soweto and other areas around Johannesburg, the Police and the Government went to great lengths to explain that the targeting of foreigners was not a sign of xenophobia.  Not too many of the public believed them.  Both the Police and the Government have lost a considerable amount of the credibility and respect they once had, largely, many claim, because they are equal participants in the looting and violence of the ordinary man.  If there is doubt about that, consider the loss of an expensive watch from a collection of Oscar Pistorius, when the only persons who could have stolen it were members of the South African Police Services, or the TV footage of a uniformed Policeman stashing a pack of toilet paper in his Police van while ‘investigating’ the actions of a band of thugs who targeted innocent foreign shopkeepers.  Consider the fact that the entire parliamentary body of the ANC unanimously supported the actions of Jacob Zuma in his expenditure of a large amount of taxpayer money on his palace at Nkandla, not one of these ‘honourable’ Members having the moral courage, or perhaps decency, to stand up to the Party line in protecting the man against the findings of one of the few courageous, honest and decent leaders of a State body.

Now, another band of thugs has taken it into their heads to pour paraffin over an unfortunate shop owner and then to set him on fire, before looting his store and then setting it alight, in an action strongly reminiscent of the ANC-inspired necklacing of Black people who did not want to toe the Party line, during the time when the ANC was just another terrorist organisation.  That is a memory the ANC does not wish to have recalled.  It is a memory of the time when a large proportion of the Black people had not yet been forced to believe that the ANC were the saviours of the nation, of the time when the Party that now claims to represent the Black nation had not yet reached the position in which they could rewrite the history of the nation.  The new group of thugs proclaimed to the world that the foreigners must go.  They ignore the fact that those foreigners they so abhor provide an essential service to thousands of people, a service that those thugs, if they had the mental equipment and the dedication to work that the foreign shopkeepers display, could undertake themselves, but will not, because it is easier to destroy than to build.

One wonders where all of this will go.  South Africa has become a nation of people who disregard the law.  The minibus taxi drivers routinely drive through red traffic lights, or kill each other to grab a lucrative route.  The civil servants routinely take bribes to induce them to do their jobs.  The Police routinely stop drivers suspected of speaking on their cell phones, to extract a bribe, while the minibus taxi drivers go sailing through the red traffic lights.  The ‘investigators’ at SARS routinely impose huge fines on companies on the basis of wrongful claims of transgressions of the VAT laws, using the Reserve Bank to freeze the company’s bank accounts and appointing the company’s attorneys as collection agents, to starve the companies of the funds they need to defend these illicit actions.  The Police routinely use signal disrupters to ‘protect the President’ during speeches to legislative bodies, in a gross violation of the Constitution.  The President routinely approves the appointment of Ambassadors to important trading partners (Japan and Canada in the full knowledge that the appointee has claimed a Ph. D which she did not have, the Minister routinely approves the appointment of the Chairperson of the SABC and the CEO of that body in flagrant disregard of the same dishonesty.

When one looks at a list of the illegality and criminal behaviour of so much of our society, one can only conclude that the Rainbow Nation, the new hope that so many held under Nelson Mandela only twenty years ago, has descended into a State that so many were afraid of before that time, a State of despair, of lost hope, and of hatred.  We must thank the ANC under Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma for that.  One can only hope that the good men and true will once again triumph, to allow the nation to become what Nelson Mandela promised.

Budget 2015 - The South African Quandary

 

The Minister of Finance has delivered his Budget for the forthcoming year, a speech full of words and signifying nothing.

The Budget proposals are remarkable for a number of factors.  It is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic on a national scale.  It fails to recognise the many impediments to economic growth that the ANC Government policies and practices have built into the economy, the huge number of hidden costs and difficulties confronting the entrepreneur seeking to start and to operate the new businesses that should be the lifeblood of the economy.  It starts with the basis of what was done last year, and increases from there, without looking at the real value that each item of expenditure generates, or fails to, or at the real cost of the costs and taxes raised, but simply assumes that they are good and goes on from there.  There is virtually no understanding of the real blocks that are holding back the economy, and assumes that a 1% or 5% increase will not make any real difference.

Let us start with the real question:  Do we need taxes?

It is an almost universal view that taxes are, at best, unpleasant or, at worst, evil.  A tax is money taken from the economy, money that, in the hands of the taxpayers, would probably be applied to the most effective purpose, and then given to people with little understanding of the value or the alternative uses of it who either spends those taxes on items of expenditure that the taxpayer would not himself, or invests them in elements of infrastructure that are needed by the country or a large part of it, rather than by the individual taxpayer.  The taxpayers in Switzerland are willing, if not exactly happy, to pay their taxes because they know that the funds will be applied to purposes that they support and, in most cases, to purposes which will benefit them.  They believe that the money will be correctly used.  That is certainly not the case in South Africa.  Most taxpayers in South Africa, if they were given a line item choice of what expenditure to support and which to reject, would accept no more than 20% of the expenditure that the Government so willingly throws away in the name of the taxpayers.  Those paying the taxes (a class of people substantially different from those receiving the benefits) would reject the expenditure of 47% of the Budget on Civil Servants.  An amount of 20% would be too much for the value these people add to the economy!  They would reject the wisdom of paying social grants to 13 000 000 people (and growing!) with a taxpayer base of 3 500 000!  They would be unwilling to fund the possible R200 000 000 on Nkandla, the R54 000 000 over-expenditure on travel by the Presidency, the R30 000 000 on a fence to the Ministerial Compound in Pretoria (where an adequate fence already existed), the cost of thirty-four Ministries, where the United States has only twelve.  They would not support the high cost of the Defence Force, a body that appears to exist solely for the dual purposes of maintaining the rule of African dictatorships and providing a backstop for the overthrow of the ANC as the ruling Party (what other use has the $5,4 billion expended on munitions in the 1990s accomplished?)  That amount could have solved the education crisis, if there had been political will to do so, with change left over to pay the bribes.)  They would want a clear statement of what the South African Police Services intends to accomplish in the field of fighting crime, also within its own ranks, how the National Prosecuting Authority intends bringing the 748 criminal charges levelled against the President to a conclusion that is consistent with an even-handed justice for all.  They would want to impose a limit of a C Class car on any Civil Servant, with the Range Rovers being sold on public auction for the benefit of State coffers, and they would want the personal bodyguard of the beloved President reduced to three persons, without a need for one of them to trot alongside the Presidential limo a la Barrack Obama.

The answer to the question is that we do need taxes, but any dispassionate review would find that the funds raised by the present VAT (at the rate of 14% - those old enough to remember will recall that, when he raised the rate from 3% to 4%, the then Minister of Finance made the commitment that there would never need to be a further increase!) would be more than adequate to fund the necessary requirements of the citizenry.  There would not be a need to increase the fuel levy by 30 cents per litre to a level of nearly 50% of the cost of fuel, nor the levy to fund the Road Accident Fund at an increase of 50 cents per levy, there would be no need to pay e-tolls for the use of roads that were largely built using taxpayers’ money, with more than a third of the amount collected going to some anonymous company is Austria, the contract details with which and the ownership of which have never been divulged.

The removal of the heavy overburden of officialdom, more than half of which is simply a disguised form of unemployment benefit to reduce the official unemployment statistics and to secure the votes of those persons for the ANC, would have the immediate effect of enabling start-up businesses to get going, without the cost and time delay (currently eight months!), and would enable those businesses to start employing people.  The largest constraint on the development of Black-owned businesses is the Government!

Heinrich Himmler stated that, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  That could certainly be applied to the need for tax.

The writer is a Management Consultant, with vast experience in the streamlining of business processes, and with considerable in-depth knowledge of the operations of Government Departments.  She can say with absolute assurance that it would be possible, within a year, to cut the salary costs of Government by at least 20%, without doing anything clever.  Those jobs cut would not result in unemployment.  The application of the salaries paid to those people for one year could easily generate over five hundred thousand sustainable jobs, something that the Government has shown itself totally unable to achieve in its twenty years of misgovernment, with the application of the Multiplier Effect generating at least another four million sustainable jobs within the next three years.  Why has she not done that?  The answer is simple.  An approach to one of the Provinces resulted in a request for a bribe of R1 800 000, payable in cash in advance in order to obtain Provincial Government approval, with the assurance from the bagman that ‘the payment includes the Premier and the MEC for Economic Development’!  That request was refused, and the next two letters to other Provinces are still awaiting a response, after some years, despite reminders and requests for response!

If South Africans are really concerned for the future of their country, it is time for them to demand a clear statement, by line item, of how their taxes are to be spent, and the choice to refuse to support any item of tax they disapprove.  It is time for them to realise just how much money they each pay to the Government, and how little benefit they receive for it.  It should no longer be sufficient for the President to say blithely in regard to Eskom, a State body that has been in a condition of crisis, a condition that would have brought a listed company to the Insolvency Court, since 2008 (seven years for those who can’t calculate!), that “we have a plan”.  The truth is that the Government does not have a plan, or, if there is the vestige of a plan, it does not have any capability or desire to implement it before Eskom, and the country, goes into a terminal collapse.

If South Africans continue to shirk the responsibility of realising that the Government has achieved for South Africa a financial and fiscal state approaching that of Greece, and of then taking action to correct what they have allowed to happen, they must realise that others will take that action for them, in a way that is sure to be less pleasant.  The first signs are already there, in the withdrawal of good companies from South Africa, the cancellation of early plans by international investors to invest in new industries, and the continuing lowering by the ratings agencies of the credit standing of the Government-issued and –backed securities, with the concomitant lowering of the securities of South African financial corporations.  There is not a single negotiating body to tell us of this, as happened in the case of Greece, but the effect will be the same.  Is that what South Africans want?

Islamic Terrorist Cells – South Africa

The revelation from al Jazeera of the request by the United States for details of the ownership of a cell phone number in South Africa to which numerous calls were made over at least a three-month period by an Islamic terrorist organisation comes at a time when rumours are rife that the South African Government has permitted, if not encouraged, the use of one or more military bases in the country for the training of Islamic terrorists.  At the same time, the Government welcomed the arrival of Leila Khalid, a convicted terrorist, to the country on a lecture tour to whip up support against Israel, an event that comes at a time when the relations between South Africa and Israel are at an all-time low, and relationships with the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, all supporters of Israel, are entering a frosty zone, in comparison with the extremely friendly and active improvement of relations with Russia and China.  In addition to that, the word on the streets is that some five hundred thousand Pakistanis now have residence in the country.

Most of these are rumours, but, as the saying goes, there is no smoke without fire.  It is a remarkable turn of events.  The three countries on the South African ‘Don’t Like’ list are the three that have provided by far the largest foreign direct investment into South Africa in the past, and continue to do so at present.  They are also the economic zones that represent by far the largest proportion of foreign trade, in addition to being on the upward slope of the economic curve, whereas China is stagnating and the Russian economy is on the downward curve.  Pakistan and other Muslim countries are hardly a footnote to the South African economy.  One may be pardoned in asking why the country has such a strong drive towards these new friends.

The answer appears to be that Russia and China were always large supporters of the ANC in the days when that organisation was a bunch of terrorists against the country that was trying to stave off Communism.  Becoming respectable Freedom Fighters has not changed the affiliations, as was clearly seen in the offer by the ANC, probably represented by his good friend Jacob Zuma, to Muammar Gadhafi, who provided large funding and other support to the organisation, as well as to other terrorist organisations, at the time of the Lockerbie bombing, and who was invited to stash the cash that he stole from his own country in South Africa, to protect it from the zealous fortune hunters who wanted it to be returned to its rightful owners, the Libyan people. 

The next question that arises is why the West continues to pump money into South Africa, when the facts of its orientation are clear.  If the fact of Apartheid (certainly an abhorrent system of Government, which, remarkably, was substantially similar to many of the new laws in effect in South Africa now, although the new laws do not have the underpinning of religious faith that Apartheid had) was enough to warrant a withdrawal of funding from South Africa in the days of the anti-Communist War / Freedom Struggle, why is the clear support of countries and causes which are patently anti-West not seen in a similar light?  Perhaps the Western economies are waiting for the collapse of the South African economy, so that they can rush in and grab the mining bargains, in the hope that the next Government will be more enlightened, more intelligent, or, perhaps, simply more realistic.  If that is the case, they will have to join a long queue.  A senior executive of an ANC investment company, during a mildly-inebriated discussion on investment strategy in 1997, told the writer that the ANC planned to manage the economy down, so that it could move in and take control of the best assets before it set about the recovery.  It seems that they have been remarkably effective in that, with all the economic and industrial pointers heading firmly south.  However, enlightened observers will have extreme difficulty in believing that the success is the result of intelligent design, rather than seer incompetence and aggressive corruption.  As the economy stands, there is no J-Curve in sight.

Government Land in Gauteng – Is the Premier in Fantasyland?

 

In his State of the Province address, the Premier of the Gauteng Province stated that part of the plan to alleviate the critical electricity shortage in the Province, a part of the legacy of the ANC that is in the process of completing the ANC’s plan to destroy the country’s economy, it is intended to install rooftop solar panels on all Provincial buildings.  He declared with a smile that there will be more than eight hundred square kilometres of such panels!

One might be pardoned for expressing doubt about the sanity of this statement.

Eight hundred square kilometres of rooftop, if applied to a calculation of 60% coverage of the land, translates to 1 333 333 square kilometres of land used by the Provincial administration, about 13 300 Hectares!

The cost of the solar panels, about 384 trillion square metres, assuming an installed cost of R1 800 per square meter (ignoring the 40% to 60% add-on for corruption), would cost a staggering R691 200 trillion Rands – enough to buy Eskom, pay the retrenchment costs of the top hundred Managers, and operate the utility for several years!  That is almost enough to buy the nuclear power stations that the ANC has signed up for!

One has only to do the calculations on the savings if 10% of the (useless) Civil servants occupying all of that space were to be fired to realize that the plans of the worth Premier to secure the industrial base of the country can be realised in dozens of different ways.  Of course, we all know that politicians love to make grand statements, but the huge scope of this promise makes the whole address about as credible as Jacob Zuma’s promise that ‘we have a plan’!

 

 

The Failure of Democracy

It is an indisputable fact that ‘democracy’ is failing around the world, with many of the institutions of democracy not meeting the ideals of the system, and even the most ‘democratic’ nations showing increasing signs of at least some elements of dictatorships.  Why is that?

There are many apparent reasons for the phenomenon.

One of the major reasons is the Party system.  Under this system, members of the electorate band together to form a union of voters.  The union then chooses who their representatives will be, and these representatives then choose their delegates who will select the candidates for the Parliament, Congress or other legislative body.  The process of the choice at each of these levels is hardly democratic.  It is subject to influences that have little or nothing to do with the suitability of the candidate to represent that section of the electorate, with the inherent honesty of the candidate, with a proven ability to understand the essence of an argument, with the legal knowledge to take into account the effects of proposed actions on the rights of the voters, or with the economic understanding required to ensure that the policies do, in fact, promote the good of the community as a whole.  It is subject to emotive advertising, which, in turn, is subject to the funding available to the Party, funding which, in the main, comes from organisations desiring to buy favour with the Party which is elected.  The process of election is fraught with many threats to the essence of democracy.  It is almost designed to ensure that the real desires of the electorate, unformulated as they generally are, are frustrated by their representatives.

Once the representatives are in a position to make the policies and laws they desire, the electorate is generally totally removed from the process.  There is no effective control of the laws that are made by those governed.  That is a fact that is desired by those in power, who use the anonymous processes of the formulation of laws and their passing into legislation to create systems and conditions that are desired by those controlling the purse strings.  The only so-called control lies in the re-election process every four or five years, a process which is, once again, subject to the same dictatorial controls as previously.  Until then, someone in the Party decides what the laws or policies will be, and that decision is imposed on the representatives, the threat being that failure to toe the Party line will result in their nomination for re-election next time being reviewed in the light of any dissenting votes.  When was the last time that any representative cast a vote against the Party line in any matter of importance to the Party?  What that tells you is that the ‘democracy’ exists only on paper, not in fact.  The Constitutions of the countries are generally good on paper, but that is where they stay.  In reality, most democracies are in fact dictatorships, controlled by the Party bosses, and the representatives of the electorate are in fact seldom better than stooges for the Party bosses.

In practice, laws are passed by a majority of representatives, most of whom do not bother to read the laws or to understand their purpose or implications.  Laws are heaped upon laws, making a legislative mess, in which the vast majority of citizens are wittingly kept in the dark.  The quantity of new laws passed every year, piling on those already in existence, is such that no ordinary citizen is able to know the meaning and intention of every law, and even specialist lawyers are bound to read and reread the laws applying to their field each time they are confronted with a new set of facts.  That mess is compounded by the fact that most laws permit the Minister (read: the civil servants dealing with the matter) to make regulations which have the force of law, and it is not unusual for these regulations to be retained as internal documents, unavailable to the people affected by them.  To make it worse, the regulations are then read in the light of ‘internal policies’.  As an example, the Public Health Act of South Africa imposes on the Police the obligation to assist a citizen who makes a statement under oath that a close friend or relative is suffering from a serious mental disturbance, taking the affected person to a suitable health care facility.  The Police have a policy that no person may be taken into custody for any purpose, even to prevent the suicide of that person or a threat to the public that may result from the mental delusions of that person, unless that person has actually committed an offence.  The effect is that the internal policy of the Police overrides an Act of Parliament!  In this situation, the legal presumption that the average citizen knows and understands the laws and regulations that affect him is impossible to achieve in real life, with the effect that thousands of members of the public each year breach one or more of the multitudinous laws in existence, and can be punished by the Courts for an offence that he or she did not know of.

The South African Constitution is touted by politicians as ‘the best Constitution in the world’.  The problem with this statement is that the people who make that claim have seldom read the Constitution with intelligence, and even more seldom applied their minds to the real meaning of the detail in the light of the real world.  Almost none of them have read any other Constitution.  It is clear to any thinking person that the South African Constitution bears the fingerprints of the political parties, the Trade Unions and impractical idealists, each one heavily influenced by political theories without any understanding of the real-world working of those theories.  It fails to consider the implications of its clauses and the rights they grant and the obligations they impose when they are confronted by the greed and self-interest of the politicians who will be called on to implement them as they interpret them, or the fact that the implementation will be done at the hands of dishonest politicians and Party bosses who have only their own interests in mind.  While it is a flagrant example of poor legislation, of being written by people with their own interests in mind, the South African Constitution is not the only example of a failure of the basic law of a land to meet the needs of the day.  The American Constitution was drafted at a time when the population of the entire country was about the size of a present-day large city, when transport was by horse and buggy, when a message was transported, sometimes for weeks at a time, by the Pony Express, when Adam Smith was unknown, when the largest company in the country was smaller than any one of the Fortune 500 companies, and when the biggest threat facing the country was a possible invasion by England or France.  Practically none of the conditions facing the country today could have been imagined at that time.  Perhaps the biggest threat to a just Constitution that existed then and still exists today was the fact that big money was able to make its presence known.  The British Constitution is equally defective, largely because it does not exist as a single document or law, but is a collection of precedents and practices and a collection of laws.  No more glaring example of the deficiencies of this system exists than the promise, made by the British Prime Minister during the debates on the desire of the Scottish people to secede from the Union, to ‘allow the Scottish Parliament more power in deciding matters related to Scotland’.  Could this be a democracy?

If all this is so, is there a country in which true democracy is practiced?  The answer, fortunately, is yes.  Switzerland is a truly democratic State.  Each law is subject to the approval of the people, not only once every four or five years, but as it is passed.  It is not possible for a political Party to sneak a new law into existence under the radar, as happens so often elsewhere.  The politicians are made aware, with the passing of each new law, what the desires of the people really are.

That, of course, shows up one of the major causes of the collapse of democracy.  As a country grows, its citizens become increasingly divorced from the people who represent them in the making of new laws, and from the process, systems and institutions that give effect to those laws.  This is clearly to the liking of the politicians, who enjoy the freedoms they gain from public control of their actions almost as much as they enjoy the increasing scale of the pot of wealth for them to plunder.  How many voters have a month-to-month contact with their representatives?  How many actually know who their representatives are?  And how many of the comments and requests made by the voters to those representatives are actually taken back to Parliament or Congress, to be given effect to?  The answer to these questions is a resounding ‘none’, and the result is that the voters no longer believe that they are able to have any meaningful voice in Parliament or Congress.  They express that belief by ignoring the actions of the legislators on their behalf, and by failing to vote.  The legislation of the country has drifted into the hands of the Party bosses, the dictators who manipulate the laws and the sentiments of the country to ensure their election, using public funds, taxpayers’ money, to do it.  The Civil Service has taken on a life of its own, with only minimal accountability for their actions to the Ministers, and none at all to the public, who pay their salaries.  The State has grown to be a giant grey cloud, overshadowing the tiny, helpless citizen. 

It is no wonder that internal terrorism has grown dramatically, as quickly as the regulations and bodies set up to ‘protect the citizens’ have grown.  The citizens are increasingly estranged from the threatening State which no longer represents them or serves their needs, or gives effect to their desires.

Anglo American – Big Business sees the Light

It has been reported that Anglo American is refusing to hand over 60% of the shares in its New Largo coal mine, the anchor supplier of coal to Kusile power station.  Anglo is willing to sell such shares on commercial terms, but not simply to hand them over to a Black Empowerment partner.  Anglo American is to be congratulated on this stance.  The company has long been an admired corporate citizen, and this refusal to knuckle under to ANC pressure restates the reasons why it has gained its reputation for corporate integrity.

It seems that Big Business is finally growing a backbone, and refusing to roll over under the ANC’s Black-mail.  If we examine the practice of Black Empowerment, it shows up as what it really is – no less than blackmail and theft on a grand scale.  In the vast majority of cases, the Black partners add nothing to the business.  They are parasites, sucking the lifeblood of South African and foreign entrepreneurs and industry, adding significantly to the cost of doing business, and contributing nothing.  It is the civic responsibility of every South African to reject such Black-mail.

In one case, the details of which are known to the writer, the Department of Mines demanded that a substantial shareholding in an operating mine be handed over to one of a shortlist of three Black (ANC) nominees.  When the Managing Director asked what would happen if he chose not to do that, he was told that ‘We will tax you out of existence”.  The mine had been abandoned years before a group of foreign investors purchased it and resuscitated it, investing large amounts of money.  The mine could have been purchased at any time by a Black entrepreneur, who, if he had the entrepreneurial spirit that the foreigners possessed, could have brought it into operation and enjoyed the benefits and the fruits of his efforts.  None did.  The Managing Director told the Department of Mines officials that a sale of a shareholding on normal terms would be welcomed or, if the intending purchaser had any skills, experience or qualities other than an ANC connection to offer, the company would entertain some method of funding the purchase.  He refused to hand over the shares on the normal basis, which amounts essentially to a gift to a favoured person.  Not surprisingly, a couple of weeks later, a notice was received cancelling the mining licence, citing spurious grounds.  That was defeated in a High Court case.  Not too long after, a VAT inspection by SARS took place, followed by an assessment imposing a penalty of R21 000 000 for failure to pay VAT on exports.  That was a clear violation by SARS of the VAT Act, and an objection was lodged against the assessment.  During the waiting period, the bank accounts of the company and all other companies which had a common Director were frozen by order of the Reserve Bank.  An application to the High Court succeeded in having the accounts unfrozen, as the action had been illegal.  Shortly after that success, the Attorney conducting the cases was appointed as Collection Agent by SARS, which required him to hand over to SARS all funds received from or on behalf of the company.  This action effectively deprived the company of the ability to defend itself in law!  A method was found to pay the legal fees, and the Attorney then received a demand from SARS to hand over to SARS all documentation relating to the company.  His reply, that the documentation was protected by legal privilege and so would not be handed over, elicited the response from SARS that they would conduct a VAT inspection of his practice and ‘make his life a living hell’.  He continued the action, which the company won, achieving a retraction of the assessment, followed a day later by an identical assessment for R18 000 000!  The performance continued over the next three years, with the assessment being fought and lifted, and new assessments being imposed every six months for the next three years.  At the end of the process, the investors closed the mine, removed the equipment they had installed, much of it new technology invented by them, and withdrew their investments from South Africa.  They have since made sure that every possible investor they knew might be considering investing in South Africa came to know the full extent of the criminality conducted by the South African Government and its arms.  The loss to South Africa since then has certainly been in excess of several billion dollars of new investment.

The demands made by Eskom for a 60% shareholding by Blacks in New Largo before it will sign a contract for the purchase of coal for Kusile is nothing less than simple criminal blackmail.  It detracts from the public benefit of the public investment in Kusile, adding to the risks of continuing inability of Eskom to meet the power needs of the country, and adds to the cost of that power.  It is the sort of conduct that the public has come to expect from President Zuma and his cronies in the ruling Party.  It is an example of the Nkandla syndrome.  This cabal is prepared to put the economic wellbeing of the citizens of the country on the line for its own benefit.  The policy has had the effect of driving inflation, reducing GDP, adding to the massively high unemployment in the country. 

It is common knowledge that Anglo American is actively withdrawing from South Africa, joining the ranks of dozens of other leading-edge companies which are no longer willing to accept the costs and indignity of submitting to the illegal acts of the ruling Party, so attractively wrapped in the appearance of the ‘good of the previously disadvantaged’.  Paying a bribe to someone for the purpose of gaining a Government contract is criminal and reprehensible, no matter the form it takes.  The sale of 20% of Shell SA to the ANC investment arm, probably to ensure the granting of the Karoo fracking licence is certainly a transaction that screams to any fair-minded person, demanding to be investigated, in South Africa and in its home country.  The appointment of ANC-connected persons to the Boards of listed companies must equally be suspect.

If you need a reason for the thrashing about of the ANC in order to retain political power, the probable (legitimate) of these items of graft, corruption and influence-peddling is it.  If the DA wins the next election, all of these deals must be investigated as a high priority, in order to put the country firmly in the ranks of those countries that abhor Government-sponsored criminality.  The top ranks of the ANC should be very concerned.

Never Trust a Smiling Cat

President Zuma replied yesterday to the matters raised during the SONA debate, but not really.  Smiling broadly, and sniggering as usual, the President assured the country and the world that everything was fine in the Rainbow Nation, and everything would continue to be fine.  He and his fellow Blacks would continue to love all of their fellow citizens, all of whom are South Africans with equal rights.  Racism does not exist.  Blah, blah, blah.

Any thinking South African, Black, Brown, Yellow or White will know the truth.  Zuma and his cronies are in power first and foremost to steal the country blind.  That has been established as a fact by the finding of the Public Protector, who stated unequivocally that Zuma had benefitted unduly from the upgrades to his private residence.  Zuma still owes the public a statement from him personally, not through spokesmen or ‘investigating committees’, and the public awaits that in March, a year after it was demanded by the Public Protector, without much hope, let it be said, that it will be frank, honest or adequate.  Numerous members of the ANC have been found to have cheated on the public or stolen from the institutions which they were entrusted to manage, and hundreds more will be exposed when a new Government takes over and institutes a comprehensive investigation into the doings of the ANC members now in charge. 

And therein lies the second imperative of the ANC under Zuma.  They cannot afford to allow any other party, except, perhaps the sycophantic IFP, to gain control of the investigative and prosecutorial bodies of Government.  That would be a disaster for those ANC members who have been lining their pockets and their Swiss bank accounts with public money, and who have used their positions of power to gain shareholdings and lucrative directorships in many of the companies that were previously viewed by the public as examples of business honesty.  In that regard, it will be interesting to see how many of the Black directors of listed companies retain those directorships after the change of Government.  The displacing of those men and women will be a testing time for the companies, as it becomes clear who was appointed director for his or her business acumen, and who for their political connections.  That will certainly be a subject for writers analysing the extent of the moral corruption of South African society under the ANC rule.

The State of the Nation furore has highlighted the discontent of a large proportion of the thinking public with the incompetence and corruption that has become endemic under ANC rule, and which has intensified under Zuma’s presidency.  All of the questions raised during the State of the Nation debate remain open.  The rather stupid speech by Lynn Brown, Minister of Energy, was purposely padded with meaningless words and asides to enable her to avoid answering questions about the Russian contract for the nuclear future of the country, a contract which was vigorously denied when it was first reported but which has been published on the Russian Government’s website.  The other Ministers, in their speeches of glorification of Zuma were equally uninformative in answering the many questions that have been raised.  Numerous other matters of grave concern to the country were not raised during that debate, such as the flight of major South African companies, the withdrawal of investment funds by wealthy and average citizens alike, the striking off the list of South Africa as a feasible investment destination by substantial foreign investors, the brain drain, of Whites and Blacks alike, young people with skills who cannot see any future for themselves in this kleptocracy and more mature people with skills and vast experience, who foresee the ultimate collapse of the economy, all people desperately needed in the country, who now turn their capabilities against the country, the abject failure of public corporations like Eskom, SAA, SABC and others, which exist solely by bleeding the public purse, the dishonesty of SARS, which has been used to promote the wealth of the senior ANC members, the rise and acceptance of systems like the new Apartheid, the ascendancy of the South African Communist Party, the radicalisation of the trade unions, which have no clue about how a modern economy works, the massive increase in riotous public protests demanding that their concerns and needs be met now. 

With all the smiling reassurances given by the President in his ‘response’ to the debate, many serious concerns still exist.  The electrical supply remains in a state of crisis.  The use of armed Policemen to remove innocent Members of Parliament remains a serious breach of the sanctity of Parliament.  The use of a cell phone jamming device in the Chamber is a clear infringement of the Constitution.  The arrest of non-demonstrating supporters of the Opposition outside Parliament can only be an unlawful act designed to intimidate people and Parties exercising their rights under the Constitution.  The conduct of the Speaker remains biased and unparliamentary.  The Black Empowerment legislation continues the Apartheid policies against which the ANC claims to stand.  The continuing high levels of incompetence in the public service and the publicly-owned corporations continues to waste both money and opportunity.  The rate of unemployment remains at more than three times the level of most Western countries.  The list goes on and on.

And through it all, Zuma shows his glee.  He has gone from insolvent to staggeringly wealthy, at the expense of the public.  He smiles through our adversity, while he plots the next stupidity.

Garfield said it clearly.  Never trust a smiling cat.

The Forthcoming Military Takeover of Parliament

During the State of the Nation debate, a member of the ANC stated unequivocally that ‘I am ready to die for Jacob Zuma, I am ready to kill for him!’  If that were not sufficiently frightening, the Minister of Justice added the statement that the use of the South African National Defence Force (the Army and other branches of the Military) to resolve issues in Parliament was entirely justified.

This column has been warning of the signs of a build-up of the military solution mentality to solve the difficulties faced by Jacob Zuma and his cronies, such as more than seven hundred outstanding criminal charges and the demand by the Public Protector that Zuma pay back the public funds misused by him in the construction of his private residence.  There can be no doubt in the mind of Zuma that events are moving inexorably to the point where he will, finally, be held to account for the many abuses of power and other illegal acts of which he is accused.  Zuma has a grasp of power that is not able to be accounted for by the excellence of his leadership.  One’s mind is drawn to the example of J Edgar Hoover, who used his position as the head of the FBI to accumulate evidence on numerous persons in positions of power, evidence which he used in a calculated way to benefit himself and to achieve his objectives.  What the source is of Zuma’s hold on power is the subject of much speculation, but he has managed to hold onto the reins of power, and to entrench himself in the position of leadership of the Party and of the Nation, to the extent that many of his followers seem to be following the example of the dictators of North Korea, in praising him almost to the extent of worshipping him.

It is clear that an attempt to unseat him as the President of South Africa carries a grave risk of the Military being called in to ensure that Zuma will remain, as the worst President South Africa has ever had.

The warnings are clear.  The time to act is before the event occurs.

SONA 2015 – The Illegal Repression Continues

At the opening of the second day of the Debate on the State of the Nation Address, the Democratic Alliance requested the Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces to explain an explanation of why the Presidential Security Detail was checking persons entering the Chamber.  The Presidential Security Detail is a unit which has displayed its contempt of South African laws by transporting the President, Ministers and other high-ranking members of the ANC at speeds considerably in excess of the national limits, by forcing their way through traffic, sometimes firing shots in the air and generally behaving in the manner of hooligans.  They are heavily armed, and appear to consider themselves above the law in practically every respect, a matter which should not surprise anyone, given that they are under the protection of a President who has frequently shown a complete disregard for the Constitution and many other laws, as well as for Orders of the High Court and the Public Protector.

There can be no doubt that the process that will lead to the military takeover of the Government of South Africa is gathering speed, urged on by the clear signs that the public, as represented by the Opposition Parties are becoming unified, not in their policies, but in their disgust of what Zuma and the ANC are doing to the country and the people.  The more extreme of the opposition, the Economic Freedom Fighters, has stated in Parliament that they intend to take power in the country, no matter how it will be necessary to do so.  They have even used the word ‘revolution.

In the light of this, the President and the ANC is visibly moving towards armed control of the country, displacing any persons in the Police, the Revenue Services, the National Prosecuting Authority and other units of control, wherever those persons show a tendency to ignore the instructions of the President and the ANC and choosing to follow what the laws and their oath of office dictates.

What does this mean for foreign investors and for White businesspersons?  The writing is clearly on the wall, not only in the minds of thinking persons, but in the words of the President.  The proposed banning of land ownership in the country is only the first small step.  There can be no doubt that the next steps will be taken, following the example of the most-admired Robert Mugabe, whose polices, soon to be emulated by the ANC, have brought a strong country to its knees.  South Africa will soon be sliding down that slope towards the disaster that awaits it, joining the ranks of other admired countries, such as Mozambique and Namibia.

SONA 2015 – Cellphone Jamming in Parliament

It is now official – The National Intelligence Agency was responsible for the plot to act against the word and spirit of the Constitution by jamming the cellphone signals from the Chamber of the House of Parliament.  The Speaker of the House has also made the damning admission that she and her co-Chair of the sitting, the Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, knew in advance of the joint Sitting that the device would be operative.  She, however, denied that she understood what the jamming device would do.  However, she claims that she knew that the media would not be the ‘target’.  These startling revelations are even more concerning than the fears originally raised, that the jamming had been done at the instance of Parliamentary Security.

When the DA raised the matter at the outset of the Sitting, the Speaker evaded the question, saying repeatedly that the Secretary would see to the matter.  Only on the third attempt to assert the rights of the Members of Parliament did she grudgingly agree to have the device turned off.  At no time did she give any indication that she was aware of the use of the device.  This can certainly be deemed to be tantamount to a lie to the Members of Parliament, a serious offence, as well as a breach of a duty she has undertaken on behalf of the nation.

Now, at a Court Hearing in the matter, the admission has been made that the National Intelligence Agency planted the device, and the Speaker admitted at a pre-debate conference that she knew of the illegal activity and, by implication, that she and the Chairperson of the NCOP condoned this illegal conduct.

The NIA has absolutely no right to be active in the affairs of Parliament.  That alone would be cause for a Judicial Enquiry into the matter.  However, it also raises the question that has cropped up in the past.  What exactly is the National Intelligence Agency doing against the citizens of South Africa?  There have been numerous rumours over the years that the NIA is more active in protecting the interests of the ANC than caring for the safety of the public, and this matter gives considerable credence to that.  It is certainly a matter of vital public concern that the activities of the NIA now be subjected to an in-depth scrutiny by an independent body.  On the basis of the ANC’s steamrolling of the Get-free, do not go to Jail ticket to Zuma in respect of his illegal conduct in the Nkandla affair, it would most certainly not be acceptable to have this conducted by a Parliamentary Committee, unless the Committee were to have a non-ANC majority.

The next question concerns Zuma’s knowledge of the planting of the illegal device, and whether he either condoned or instructed it.  Of course, Zuma, who has raised the excuse that he did not notice that R246 million was being spent on his private residence (!), will repeat the exercise.  However, even if he was not directly involved, it falls within his area of responsibility and, in any law-abiding democracy, he would be forced to resign.  However, the events at the beginning of the State of the Nation Address have demonstrated convincingly that South Africa is not a law-abiding democracy.

This matter, coupled with the forceful ejection of all Members of the EFF from the Chamber, in complete breach of their rights as Members of Parliament, by armed Policemen, also in complete breach of the laws of Parliament and of the Constitution, promises to offer many reasons for Zuma to step down from the position of trust that he holds.  Unfortunately, South Africans have little hope that right will prevail, unless the Constitutional Court is brought into the matter.  The harm done by Zuma and Mbete, and all of their cronies, to the country is inestimable.  It is a clear indication that the Rainbow Nation that was the hope of the world when Nelson Mandela was President, has slid down the slippery slope of dishonesty and corruption, to a point where it is now almost impossible to describe the nation as a democracy, and where many investors now view it as just another failed African basket-case economy.

 

 

SONA, Jamming and Terrorism

One of the many acts of terrorism perpetrated by the ‘liberation Party’ that the ANC has worked assiduously to expunge from public memory is the series of ‘necklacing’ carried out by ANC cadres to ensure that the Blacks presented a united front against the Apartheid regime.  Necklaving was the brutal practice of a crowd of ANC sympathisers grabbing an innocent civilian, stripping him or her naked, tying their hands and feet with barbed wire, putting a car tyre (the ‘necklace’) over them, dousing them with gasoline or paraffin and setting them alight, to burn to death in a gruesome display of ‘democracy in action’, witness by a jeering crowd of the supporters of the ‘freedom movements’.  Those acts must remain as a statement of the extent to which the ‘noble’ ANC will go to gain and hold onto power.  They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a statement of democracy.  They were cold-blooded murders in the name of politics and power, a series of acts which, in any rational mind, would exclude the perpetrators from any position of authority or influence in a civilized society.

Why raise necklacing now?

The reason is simple.  The murder of a person who might speak out against the policies and aims of the Party is, in essence, no different than the beheading of ‘non-believers’ by the Islamic militants, or the jamming of cellphone signals in Parliament, to prevent the truth of the actions and non-actions of Members of the ruling Party from escaping into the public.  It is in the same category as preventing the broadcast of scenes of Policemen illegally entering Parliament, the heart of democracy, to evict all Members of a Party that was demanding the giving of an account by the President of his abuse of the powers of his office, and the simple corruption committed by him.  It is akin to the arrest of supporters of the Opposition outside Parliament, when they were doing nothing other than what the supporters of the ruling Party were doing.  It is a simple brutal suppression of the expression of any view other than what the ruling Party would want the world to believe.

Thinking South Africans have been subjected to many instances of the rewriting of history to a form that suits the ANC.  They have been subjected to an insidious brainwashing over two decades of ANC rule.  In many cases they have succumbed, at least in public, to the pressures.  Businesses have come to understand that if they do not toe the Party line, they will be excluded from Government business.  Individuals have come to understand that any statement critical of Party members will result in them being targeted by SARS, the SAPS, the SARB or any of the numerous bodies stacked with incompetent but loyal cadres, who hold their jobs and receive their inflated salaries by the favour of the ruling Party.  Twenty-seven per cent of the employed people in South Africa receive their salaries directly from the Government (read ‘the ANC’), and many, if not most, of them can be relied upon to do what the Party wants, not what is their constitutional and democratic duty.  The Policemen who invaded the sanctity of Parliament to expel the EFF during the State of the Nation Address must have known that their actions were unconstitutional and outright illegal.  The fact that they did so, that they, Policemen and the upholders of the law, will no doubt be explained by the claim that they were following orders.  The trials of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg established clearly that ‘following orders’ in the commission of a crime is not an acceptable excuse.  Hopefully, the Courts in South Africa will not feel compelled to follow the Party dictates, and excuse the perpetrators.

Amongst the perpetrators who should be brought to trial in this extremely serious breach of the Constitution are the Speaker, the Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces and the President, who, in interviews after the event, discussed the actions of the EFF in a way that demonstrated clearly that he at least condoned the actions, if he was not an instigator.  As the leader of the Nation and supposedly prime upholder of the Constitution, his silence and lack of speaking out during the discussions regarding the illegal jamming of cellphone signals and the subsequent illegal expulsion of all Members of the EFF from the Chamber, speaks volumes of his failures as President and his unsuitability for the position.  The same is true of all other ANC Members present at SONA, and the subsequent failure of all members of the ANC disqualifies each of them from any position of leadership in South Africa in the future.  It is clear that being a member of the ANC is more important to these people than upholding the democracy they claim to have fought for, some of them by necklacing the people who were claiming the right of freedom of speech that the President and the ANC, even now, refuses to accord the people of South Africa.

It is of interest that numerous academics and talk show hosts have started to question the motivations behind the proposed new laws announced by the President during SONA.  Some have even gone to the extent of questioning the second agenda behind these proposals.  It seems that these daring people are, at last, willing to put themselves at risk in exposing the corruption of the ANC, joining the tens of thousands of thinking South Africans who discuss these things in private.  The next step is for the discourse to become public, and for the official Opposition to become more vocal, within Parliament and in the media, in protection of the rights of the individual and the limitations on the rights and actions of the Executive.

The Americans have a saying:  I may not agree with what you say, but I am willing to die to protect your right to say it. 

It is a great shame that the President, the Speaker and the ANC do not subscribe to that essential element of democracy.

 

Wrong Thinking

The plan announced by the State President to remove the right of ownership of land by foreigners is not only remarkably stupid, in terms of the message it send to foreign investors, that they are no longer welcome to invest in South Africa, but also totally illogical in terms of the thinking behind it.

The reason stated by the President is that millions of South Africans do not own land, and the ownership of that land by foreigners is depriving them of the right to own the land in their own country.  That reasoning is faulty in many respects.

·         There is nothing to prevent a local from owning land, apart from the cost of buying it.  A man from the Eastern Cape or Soweto is just as entitled to buy land as the foreigner.  The fact that three per cent of residential property is owned by foreign citizens is not relevant in this regard.  The chances are that the Soweto man or the Eastern Cape woman does not do so is purely a factor of their ability to pay for it.  Perhaps Zuma or his cronies have their eyes on a prime property in Bishops Court or Sea Point, and see this as a way to prise those properties loose from reprehensible foreign ownership.

·         The conversion of a right of ownership to a long lease will not have any effect in making the property available to South Africans.

·         The main effects of depriving foreigners of the right to own properties for which they have paid will be to encourage them to withdraw their investment(s) from South Africa, and to discourage them from visiting the country, and, in turn, reduce the possibility of them making an investment in South Africa.  The country can certainly not afford either of those effects.

·         The President stated that the example is one set by ‘other countries’, but he neglected to state which other countries.  It is not the pattern set by the United States, Great Britain or Germany, all of which have demonstrated their observance of the principles of democracy, although Mozambique, that model of democratic and economic excellence uses the system.  When will Zuma and his cronies start to understand that the principles and practices of Marx and Stalin are not the ones we should be modelling our future on?

·         The President keeps harping on the need for the Black population to own land.  Why?  Under the tribal system, they do not own the land, and never have.  Any person, Black or White, can buy a piece of land if that is his or her desire, and start to farm on it.  Surely, the efforts and funds of Government would be more fruitfully directed to assisting them to do that.  An interest-free loan for ten years would go a long way to assisting aspirant farmers to acquire the land they aspire to, and to make it produce food for the nation, rather than the sterile granting of land to groups of people who then allow it to degrade, making once-good farms no longer productive.  It is a proven fact that people place on something only the value of what they paid for it.  A grant of land, to the vast majority of people, has little value, and gives no incentive to make it productive.  And let us get away from the idea that a true man must own land.  That is a fallacy that has been inspired by the politicians, to give them a lever to use in their bid to use tax money to buy votes.  Any expenditure, in any organisation, from a company to a Government, can be made only on a reasoned evaluation of its likelihood to produce an economically-justifiable result.  South Africa is in desperate need of jobs and food.  Assisting any aspirant farmer to turn his or her dreams to reality will achieve both ends, and a failure to achieve success will carry the penalty of repayment. 

·         The President errs when he believes that ownership of land is an aspiration only of Black people.  There are tens of thousands of Whites who would be delighted to have the opportunity to own a small farm, and they would put their hearts and souls into making them productive, generating jobs and producing food.  If those are the true desires of the ANC, change the laws from the reverse Apartheid that now exists, and give all people a chance to contribute to the economy.

One important factor that the President has not discussed is who will own the land of which the foreigners are to be dispossessed?  If it is the Government, that will represent a drift towards centralised management of the economy, a communist principle that has been discredited throughout the world, but which appears to be a central desire of the ANC.  If it is to be handed to private persons, a whole new set of questions arise.  Who will those persons be?  Who is likely to want to purchase a property that is subject to a fifty or ninety year lease?  And how much will the price be?  And to whom will it be paid?  Will the future land rates be based on the purchase price paid?  The possible answers are frightening.

In this little part of the plans that the President has for the future of the country, it is possible to see a much broader picture, of centralisation, or exploitation for political ends, of dissimulation and political manoeuvring, and of incompetence on a staggering scale.

One can only hope that the electorate will see the light, that the poor people, who are being held in poverty for political purposes, start to understand that their best interests are not well served by the President and his cronies, before those who pay the taxes that are being squandered by the ANC Government, decide to do something to stop the drift from the ideals of Nelson Mandela towards the kleptocracy that the South African Government has become.