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 91st 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.
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