The Nkandla Report

During the long wait for the final Nkandla Report, the long-suffering South African public hoped that the Minister of Police would ultimately present an unbiased report that would satisfy the public demand for justice in this apparently flagrant breach of the duties of his office by the South African President.  That hope should have been informed by the long history of dissimulation, of ducking and diving by the incumbent of that office.  The Tapes affair, in which the High Court issued a clear and unambiguous Order that the tapes recording discussions regarding the withdrawal of some 740 criminal charges against Mr Zuma, which Zuma and his stooges managed to avoid complying with by numerous examples of ducking and diving, spurious appeals and blatant disregard of the Order of Court, should have made the citizens aware that Zuma does not consider himself to be subject to the laws of the country.  His multiple attempts to escape liability for the more than R200 000 000 expended by the State on his private residence should have reaffirmed that understanding.  His fervent denials that he had entered into an agreement with the Russians regarding the building of several nuclear power stations at a cost of more than a hundred billion dollars, clearly contradicted by the publication on the Russian Government website of that contract, should have convinced even the most fervent Zuma fan that he is not a person to be trusted.  However, the gullible electorate, the sucker taxpayers, continued to hope that this President would show himself to be a man of honour.  His final sniggering comments in Parliament that the critics who have demanded an honest response from this man should have disabused any notion of intelligence, education or honour.  He made a point of the fact that some of the critics were unable to pronounce ‘Nkandla’.  This is remarkable, coming from a man who shows his lack of linguistic capability in his repeated abuses of the English language, his use of ‘commy-tea’ , ‘apar-thaid’, rather than Apart-heid’ ( a state of separation) to describe the policy that he claims to have spent most of his life fighting, his frequent ‘koting’ of authorities, rather than ‘qu-oting’ as any competent user of English would say, his comments about the ‘vow-lation’ of rights being only a few examples, now give his critics the freedom to use the same rules against him.

The Minister of Police went to great pains to explain that the cattle kraal is a cultural requirement of the Zulu people, and there, presumably, permissible as a security upgrade.  The swimming pool, at a cost of over R7 000 000 was necessary because the local fire service more than ninety minutes to respond, and is therefore a necessary element in the protection of this beloved President, ignoring the probability that the water pressure and unreliable supply of water could have been improved to the benefit of the entire community, at a lower cost.  The visitors’ Centre, it was argued, was essential to provide security to the visitors.  This, in a private home!  About the only thing that the Minister of Police said that might be considered to be true, accurate and meaningful to any of the many people who sat through this jumbled and meaningless piece of apology for the corruption of the President and the stooges who pander to him, related to the incompatibility of the Police and technology!  Virtually every citizen can relate to that!

It has been clear, since the day that the Public Protector issued her brave report, at the cost of a vicious and continuing attack on her personally and on her office by the ANC, that the President has never had any intention of complying with the law of the land or the finding of a constitutionally-established body for the protection of the public against people such as the President and the numerous corrupt people he and his stooges have placed in public office.  Even the Speaker of Parliament, a person who has the duty to ensure that the Executive accounts to Parliament for their actions, has stated clearly that the State President and the members of the tribal ‘royalty’ are not subject to the same rules as ordinary citizens.  That is a dangerous situation, a condition in which the Executive are elevated above the laws of the country, rather than being subject to a higher standard of conduct, by virtue of the level of trust implicit in the offices they hold.  It is a situation in which the newly-built private residence of a single man is given massive preference in the provision of Police services, firefighting capability and many other services above the entire community surrounding it.  It is a condition that places the comfort and personal enrichment of the servant of the people far above the essential needs of the tens of thousands of shack dwellers around the country, above the food needs of the eleven million citizens, including three million children, who have far less than an adequate supply of food on a daily basis.  It gives a man the belief that he has the right to spend two billion Rands on aircraft, when the economy of the country is going down the tubes, while the rest of the continent is growing.

Brief conversations with all levels of people, from CEOs of large corporations to men working in the gardens or sitting beside the streets in the hope of finding a day’s work to fend off starvation for themselves and their families, render a clear conclusion.  Jacob Zuma has lost whatever trust and confidence he may have commanded, before the People came to understand just what he is, and what his Party represents.

Mugabe and the Credibility of the African Union

 

If there was any residual hope that about the African Union has the desire, the capability and the leadership to undertake any of the crucial work needed to turn Africa into a place where civilised people would wish to live, the performance of Robert Mugabe, in his capacity of Chairman of that body, has confirmed that Africa has far to go, and much to suffer before it can join the ranks of modern civilized nations.

Mugabe is a man who, for decades, has enriched himself at the expense of his nation, once one of the hopes of Africa.  He has brought Zimbabwe to its knees with ‘redistribution of the productive farms’, taking them from the efficient White farmers who built from bare land a capacity to supply huge quantities of food to the rest of Africa, handing them to his cronies, who did not have the ability, or even the desire, to operate them with any discernible level of skill or knowledge.  That single move brought Zimbabwe to the brink of starvation, forcing thousands of Zimbabweans to escape his brutal form of ‘democracy’ by moving to South Africa.  The official figure for Zimbabwean expatriates in South Africa is over 500 000, but the real figure is probably in excess of a million.  Mugabe followed that lunacy with the next, the ‘indigenisation’ of mines and the few productive industries that remained in the country, exciting another wave of emigration.  It should be noted that many thousands of Zimbabweans flocked to Apartheid South Africa before 1994, to escape the despotic rule that Mugabe imposed.  Those refugees obviously believed that South Africa at that time was better than the workers’ paradise that Mugabe claims the country to be.  America provided vast quantities of food aid in the form of grain, which was transported in bulk to Durban, for packing into bags labelled “Gift of the American People – Not For Sale’.  Mugabe did not like this, because America, alongside Britain, is, in his twisted mind, responsible for everything that has gone wrong in Zimbabwe under his rule.  He insisted that the grain be packed in plain bags which he supplied, and he then sold that grain to the favoured people in Zimbabwe, refusing to deliver any grain, free or sold, to areas in respect of which which his Party did not hold a seat in Parliament.  Mugabe, in his recent tirade in South Africa, which was watched with sniggering approval by Jacob Zuma, stated boldly that the previous regime had killed thousands of Zimbabwean Blacks, and dumped their bodies down a disused mineshaft.  The truth of that matter is that Mugabe’s ‘freedom fighters’ slaughtered some 40 000 of their Black Matabele opponents and dumped their bodies down the mineshaft of a mine which had been in operation until some years after the accession to the Presidency of Robert Mugabe.  Now, Mugabe has had the arrogance to declare that none of the people who emigrated from Zimbabwe in recent years has done so as a result of the catastrophic economic conditions he and his Party have brought about.

The rapidly-growing flight of refugees from Africa to Europe must surely be seen as an indicator of an escalating disaster in Africa, one that is perhaps more visible to the World than the flow of refugees from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, Sudan and numerous other countries.  However, while those flows are less visible, they are no less there.

Many people simply accept that ‘this is Africa’, and ignore the bald-faced lies told by Mugabe.  It is true that if you tell a big lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  Anyone with an understanding of what Adolph Hitler and his gang of Nazi lunatics did to Germany and to Europe will recognise that our meek acceptance that ‘this is Africa’ is putting us all firmly on a path to catastrophe on a world scale.  The sniggering obsequiousness of Jacob Zuma, Julius Malema and other aspirant African billionaires, their abject hero worship of Robert Mugabe for the example he has set in his rise to power and obscene wealth by means of corruption and outright theft, and his self-serving stance of hatred of the Whites and the West, must surely be a warning to the world that a cancer is growing within Africa.  The cancer has taken root in South Africa, where the ANC has been single-minded in its support for the corruption headed by the State President and strongly supported by the Speaker of the House of Parliament in her views that he is not subject to the same rules as other citizens.  That cancer will continue to grow, accelerating its destruction of the hope for peace and prosperity in Africa that drove the West to support the independence of the former colonies.  That cancer has the potential to bring the hopelessness of Africa to the West, just as the acquiescence of Britain and the United States to the development of the cancer of the Nazi threat under Adolph Hitler, their desperate desire for ‘peace in our time’ epitomised by the speech of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, plunged the world into a war that changed the lives of millions.  As Roman Herzog said in his first speech as President of West Germany, ‘we must solve the problems of Africa in Africa, otherwise we will have to solve them in Europe.’  Now is surely the time for the Western world to formulate a set of principles to be applied to their dealings with Africa and its dictators, under whatever guise they may hide.

The problems of Africa are clear to see by anyone with the interest to look.  They are not problems of race or religion.  They are problems of dictators grabbing whatever there is, leaving the people to starve and to provide a fertile ground for extremism in every form.  They are the threat that the rest of the world has to deal with, now under principles, or in the future under arms.