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.