South Africa in Crisis

 

The state of South Africa has deteriorated substantially in 2014/5.  The riots, road blocks and vehicle stonings in support of demands for delivery of promised municipal services have spread to running street battles between the Police and illegal squatters who have been evicted from the factory buildings in Jeppestown, a suburb only a short distance from the centre of Johannesburg, with the scenes in the city reminiscent of Homs.  Xenophobic violence has erupted again, with foreign shop owners being beaten up and their shops looted then set alight.  Villagers in a mining area have taken vigilante action, capturing several suspects they accused of committing murders which the Police have been unable to solve, or perhaps had no interest in solving.  The prisoners were tied up, tyres placed over their heads and petrol poured over them.  When ‘confessions’ had been extracted under the duress of savage beatings, the prisoners were set alight and immolated in a manner consistent with the necklacings exhorted by Winnie Mandela.  The Police arrived too late to prevent these executions.  A multimillion Rand Waste Management scheme in Johannesburg has failed to operate as planned (surprisingly?), leaving the streets of the economic capital of the country deep in reeking garbage.  The State President, his multitudinous Ministers and members of the Black ‘Royalty’ of the country are accorded special treatment by the Speaker of the House of Parliament, in flagrant disregard of the Constitution and the Rules of Parliament, and armed Police are called into Parliament to eject all members of the Economic Freedom Fighters Party, while Democratic Party spectators of the pomp surrounding the President’s State of the Nation Address were arrested, driven around for several hours before being released without charge.  The Deputy President ‘informs’ Parliament that the Government has ‘plans’ to correct the mobile disaster that is Eskom, without divulging any details of those plans, leading informed observers to conclude that there are no plans, even though four of the top officials of Eskom are summarily suspended from their positions without explanation, other than that it was necessary to facilitate an investigation of the problems of the corporation.

Any scanning of the headlines over the past weeks can lead only to the conclusion that the country is in a crisis that is deepening by the week, a crisis that the ANC has caused by their incompetent and corrupt management of the economy, yet one which they refuse to acknowledge.

A discussion with a large group of informed businessmen over the weekend elicited the view that the destruction of the economy that is presently taking place, and that will continue to take place, is likely to be so severe during the remaining years of the ANC rule that it will take decades, or possibly even generations, to correct.