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.