Democracy ANC Style and Cadre Deployment

The Policy Conference of the Association for Nepotism and Corruption has clearly stated the view of the Party on what democracy means to it.  One of the decisions of the Conference was that any Member of the Party who takes the Party to Court to uphold his or her rights under the Party’s Constitution will be subject to immediate expulsion from the Party!

This decision is a very clear statement of the meaning of democracy to the Party.  Any person who dares to go counter to the decisions of the leaders is a pariah, and not suitable to be a Party Member!  Those with any knowledge of history will see clear parallels, to the Nazi Party in Germany, which rose to power on the basis of terror and thuggery (do you notice the similarity?), and to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, which sought to maintain that power by the use of strong censorship of the Press, by a network of spies and informers, by lying about the state of the nation, and by a rigid control of what people thought and did.

The development is not surprising.  The ANC is struggling to keep hold of power, as a rising numbers of people, particular the Black Middle Class, come to enjoy a place in the sun, to enjoy the standard of living that comes with better education and the development of real skills that make them valued employees.  These people are starting to realize that the policies of the ANC are not well suited to the management of a modern economy, that the ANC is still living in the dream of Communism, a dream that has become thoroughly discredited during the past three decades.  One cannot blame them for their belief.  Many of the leading lights in the ANC gained their insights and beliefs under an education in Communist Russia, East Germany or Cuba, where the objective of the sponsoring governments was not so much to educate them as to brainwash them!  Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Finance, is an avowed Stalinist, a belief system that is clearly evident in the fiscal policies of the ANC, which are aimed at State control of anything of interest.  Under the ANC, the numbers employed by the State are ballooning, creating a massive problem in the future for any competent Government, and one which the highly incompetent ANC will certainly not be able to master.  And do not forget – one of the mantras of the ANC is ‘all power!’

The Secretary General of the ANC, in a radio interview during the Conference, defended the principle of ‘Cadre Deployment’, stating that it is not unusual in ‘Western systems’.  In a somewhat surprising ‘endorsement’ of the political system in the United Sates, he pointed out that when a new Party comes to power, all the senior officials are replaced by Party nominees, ensuring that the views of the Party would be upheld in Government.  What he failed to say was that the new officials are generally highly-experienced and competent people, unlike the ANC cadres, who generally have no qualifications other than Party membership, and that the replacement of officials is only in the top posts, unlike under the ANC, where, it seems, the prime qualifications for employment in any meaningful position in Government relate to Party membership.  There can be no doubt that the ANC is enforcing the rules of the Association for Nepotism and Corruption! 

An overriding impression that one gains by speaking to Black people is that the ANC is dividing into two groups – one group consists of the super-wealthy who have gained that status by exploiting the policies of the Association for Nepotism and Corruption, together with the super-poor, that group of people who, through ignorance, largely propagated by the amazingly ineffective education system, continue to vote for the ANC, regardless of the inability or unwillingness of the Government to bring them into the Middle Class.  The countervailing group consists of those who, by their own efforts, have been able to move themselves upward into a comfortable economic position, and recognize that they will be able to continue that upward progress under any system of Government that is not what the ANC is trying to move toward.  These are the people who are against the ANC and what it now stands for.  When one analyses this situation, it is clear that the ANC does not wish to rule over an educated nation!

The opening of the Congress marked a clear anti-white stance by the ANC, with the failure to sing the second half of the National Anthem – Die Stem, the former national anthem of South Africa.  The closing of the Congress, with the President’s speech delayed by nearly an hour in what is becoming a clear pattern of disrespect for the Party Members and the Press, as well as a statement of the ANC’s inability to do anything on time, was marked by a generally unenthusiastic applause, giving the lie to Zuma’s upbeat summary of the proceedings, a summary that played down the defeat of his strongly-advocated proposal for a ‘Second Transition’.  The audience present, in unison with the media audience, was clearly less than impressed by the showcasing of the ANC, a repetition of the remarkably transparent joint Press Conference attended by a smirking Zuma and several uncomfortable members of the top brass of the ANC during the Malema drama, during which Zuma attempted to give credence to his claims that therre was no leadership struggle within the ANC.  The body language of several of those present demonstrated how untrue that claim is.

For those looking for signs that the Association for Nepotism and Corruption is starting to unravel, there can be no doubt that the coincidence of the ANC Policy Conference with the complete inability of the Department of Education to comply with a Court Order to distribute the school textbooks in Limpopo Province was a complete exposure of the incompetence of the Government under the ANC.  The juxtaposition of the proud boasts of the performance of the ANC with the startlingly clear evidence of its incompetence could not have sent a clearer message to any thinking person.

The Association for Nepotism and Corruption

The ANC is an organisation that was founded with noble objectives.  The Communist backing of the ANC brought about a shift in the policies to achieve those objectives, and produced in most Whites in South Africa a well-founded fear that any accession to power by the ANC and those it claimed to represent would inevitably result in South Africa falling into the pit of poverty and oppression that, for many years, was the fate of African nations that gained their freedom from ‘colonialism’.  If the objectives had been separated from the Communist threat, they would certainly have enjoyed a very much greater support from the Whites throughout the country, a situation that, paradoxically, led to a prolongation and intensification of the system of Apartheid that worked so strongly to the disadvantage of all South Africans, Black and White.  The increasing influence of the South African Communist Party and its close ally, COSATU, in the political life of South Africa shows, once again, that the desire for power is so strong in most politicians that they are prepared to sell their souls, and the souls of the citizens, to gain and hold onto that power.

This factor has become chillingly enhanced by the sliding into the previously noble organisation of the African National Congress of the ‘New ANC’ – the Association for Nepotism and Corruption.  Looking back, one should have expected that ‘payback time’ would come.  As one prominent ANC leader said in 1994, “I didn’t go into exile so that I could be poor!”  Indeed, the Whites expected that there would be some element of payback, but few expected that those who would have to pay the cost of this payback would be the poor, the unconnected, the average Black citizen.  Many Whites believed that there would be no possibility of a decent life under a Black Government, and showed their belief by moving to another country.  There, they would have to restart their lives, and they did so with the customary gusto that is expected of White South Africans.  As an Australian said in the 1980’s, it was easy to see who of the arriving passengers were South Africans – their feet were a blur of movement!  It is sad that the talents, skills and energy of these many tens of thousands of people were lost to a country that sorely need them, but their decision to seek a future in a country other than their homeland has been largely vindicated by the events since that time of hope.

The thriving economy that was South Africa has been brought to its knees by the actions of the few hundreds of political leaders who have seen that the credibility of the ANC gave them a licence to exploit the system.  Hardly a day goes by without a demonstration by the voters who put the ANC into power, demanding that they be given the rights that they were promised at the dawn of democracy.  Any thinking person knew, in the months leading up to the Black majority Government, that the promises that were being made, and the scenarios that were being believed by the Black voters, were not in any way realistic.  Many Whites simply believed them to be the hyperbole that makes politicians one of the despised classes of humans.  However, few understood that the Black voters, deprived of the experience of democracy throughout their existence, would not see these promises for the vote-grabbing lies that they were.  Unfortunately, that is still the case.  And, as the country slides deeper into the morass of incompetence that is the result of the Nepotism that so strongly characterises the New ANC, the demands grow, the poverty increases and the hope of a brighter day dims.  As this process gains pace, those at the top of the New ANC are becoming aware that the pie is getting smaller, and the time to grab a slice of that pie is becoming shorter.  They compensate by spending ever-larger sums of public money so that their share, the percentage that they skim off the top of the contracts that are handed out, is becoming larger by the year.  Whereas the most noticeable piece of Corruption during the time of Thabo Mbeki was the Arms Deal (a very amateurish piece of fiddling with the public coffers so that selected members of the New ANC could steal an estimated $120 million), it is now commonplace to see expenditures of R29 billion on freeway construction so that the members of the New ANC could steal an estimated R54 billion – the total amount of the Arms Deal! – over the next 20 years, R300 billion on refurbishing the transport sector that the New ANC sold out to China as scrap metal (for a paltry commission on the sale), R200 million to re-establish a nuclear capability (one that South Africa had in excellence prior to the ANC), and many more.  A question that is now usual when Government announces a major item of expenditure is “Who is getting the cut?”  The proposed ‘Second Transition’ is being recognised for what it really is – an admission that the ‘First Transition’ did not achieve what the electorate wanted when they voted to put the old ANC into power, and a shifting of the grounds for comparison of what has been achieved with what was expected.

Is it not time for the People of South Africa to see what the New ANC is doing?  Is it not yet the time for a groundswell of public opinion to make itself heard so that even Jacob Zuma and his cronies in the New ANC come to understand that the wealth of the country is not theirs to appropriate to themselves?  Is it not time for the People to say to the Association for Nepotism and Corruption that they want honest and competent Government?