Democracy in Action ANC-Style

Benjamin Franklin famously described democracy as two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.  There can be no better example of that view than South Africa, where a large proportion of voters are unemployed, live on social grants and are led by tribal chiefs and kings, one of whom has recently been jailed for culpable homicide, arson and other charges arising out of his ‘disciplining’ an errant subject.  And the proportions will be skewed even more in the years to come, as the large number of youth reach voting age without the prospect of employment in the rapidly-collapsing economy.

Contrary to Jacob Zuma’s fatuous and demonstrably erroneous statements during his January 8^th speech to the ANC brainwashed, the abjectly poor state of the economy can be laid squarely at the feet of the ANC.  Zuma made the bald-faced statement that the ANC Government had achieved success in the education of the youth, totally ignoring the fact that the Matric results, even on the basis of a lowered standard, had declined by 10% in 2015.  He claimed as a major success the fact that the ANC was rescuing a large number of failed students, by means of ‘progressing’ them to the next grade when they had failed twice, ignoring the fact that a disproportionate expenditure was lavished on 10 00 learners (or should they be called ‘non-learners’?) and their presence in the class of normally-performing learners was almost certainly a mill-stone around the necks of the rest of the class, as well as the teachers, to achieve a passing grade for 6 000 of them, out of a total of nearly a million matriculants!  Even by the wantonly distorted standards of ANC mathematics, a proportion of 0,6% cannot be held out to be a huge success, particularly when the failing of those students was almost certainly a result of the continuously-changing curriculum, the poorly-qualified teachers and the lack of modern standards in the schools they attend.  Zuma’s allegation that the present economic situation in South Africa, a desperately poor situation even by the standards of the Third World, is the result of the ‘stealing’ of land by the Whites from the Blacks should also be held up to the light of truth and history.  The fact is that only a very, very small proportion of Blacks were ever commercial farmers.  Most of their farming activities was at the lower end of the subsistence scale, and the loss of their land, however it occurred, could have had little effect in bringing them to destitution.  The land was acquired from them by the Government of the time, or by the Whites who wanted it to farm on an economic scale, by purchase.  In most cases the calculation of the price was on no less fair a basis than the ANC has enacted in recent years for the reverse process.  In addition, the land acquired by the Black ‘farmers’ under the land restitution process has, in most cases, reduced in productivity very dramatically, with over 90% of those farms failing within three years.  On top of that, the land was, in most cases, held under the tribal system, with the chief or king (unelected and having no qualification for leadership other than birth into the ‘royal’ family or patronage by that family) deciding who could use the land and how it should be used.  There was very little private Black ownership of farms at the time the Whites acquired that land.  In such a situation, how could the acquisition of the land by the Whites have thrown the Blacks into destitution?  The only way that could have occurred was by the Blacks being moved from a situation of subsistence farming (which could not stand up to the rigours of the modern world, as has been amply demonstrated by the mass movement of such people from rural areas to the cities) to a situation of employment, for which they had received no education or training, as is exactly the situation for a large proportion of the rural Blacks today, 21 years after the advent of the ANC to the feeding trough.

Zuma had the nerve to state publically that the ANC would continue to work hard to stop corruption, ignoring the fact that he disregarded a finding by the Public Protector that he had benefitted wrongly from the State expenditure of R246 000 000 on his private homestead, and then compounded that breach of the Constitution by inducing the Minister of Police to make a rigged finding that he had not benefitted in any way!  It is well-known that a mainstay of the activities of the ANC and its senior members has been to benefit unfairly from corruption, as is evidenced by the granting of a large turbine contract to Mitsubishi after the ANC had acquired a 25% shareholding in the local operation of that company and been given a $1 000 000 ‘finder’s fee’, by the fact that the ANC acquired a 25% stake in the local operation of Shell, which was then granted an open-ended exploration licence to frac in the Karoo, after a huge and well-founded public opposition to that activity, by the strongly-supported effort by South African Airways to switch a lease contract for five Airbus aircraft from that company to a locally-owned leasing company, to be set up for the purpose, and by numerous other examples of large-scale corruption, of which no Police investigation has been made (except for the case of the Nkandla corruption!), and no convictions of guilty parties have ensued.  No thinking person would believe the statement of Zuma, but the audience of ANC supporters applauded!

To compound that, Zuma stated openly that the ANC supported the Chapter 9 (of the Constitutions) institutions, naming, among others, the Public Protector!  The disdain, amounting in many cases to outright hatred, of Zuma and numerous other functionaries of the ANC for the office of the Public Protector has been well documented over the term of Zuma’s Presidency, yet he now declares the ANC support for it!

Zuma stated that he supports the demands of the university students for no fee increase, a demand to which he acceded only after the students had staged a march on Parliament, and his Minister of Higher Education, as well as Zuma, had hidden away from the students, preferring to make the climb-down by means of a security-guarded Press Statement!  A fine example of leadership from the rear!

Zuma went on to state that the ANC policies support service delivery (an area of failure of governance that has instigated thousands of riots and demonstrations), honest and efficient government (!), good education (against a backdrop of falling Matric passes, low examination standards and rating of the level of education at 183 out of 187!).

Zuma held up as examples of good leaders Shaka and Moeshoe, both of whom have been documented in history (the real history, not the ANC version fed to gullible children) as bloodthirsty tyrants equal in their genocidal practices to Adolph Hitler (6 000 000 deaths), Josef Stalin (60 000 000 deaths), Mao tse Tung (more than 100 000 000 deaths) and Robert Mugabe (40 000 deaths), all of whom have been openly praised by members of the ANC.

And through it all, the ANC supporters, egged on by the Party plants in the crowd, applauded.

Zuma made another concession to ‘democracy’, ANC-style, by informing the world that the Branches would now draw up a list of three candidates, for whom the Members would then be permitted to vote, to become representatives of that Branch.  One wonders what democratic processes would be applied to the selection of those three candidates, particularly in the light of cancellation of many Provincial congresses, ANC Womens’ League congresses, and ANC Youth League congresses, until the Party leadership had a chance to assure themselves that the outcome of those congresses would meet the desires of Zuma and his cronies.  This style of ‘democracy reminds the educated and thinking observers of the story about the concern of the Soviet leadership when they found that the results of the upcoming election had been stolen!

As Benjamin Franklin said, democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for supper.  There can be little doubt, regardless of Zuma’s lip service to non-racialism, as to who, in Zuma’s twisted thinking, plays the role of the lamb in South Africa today.