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.

Believing your own Advertising

The Minister of Basic Education spent a lot of time and effort in promoting what her Department has done in the past year, leading any seasoned ANC watcher to understand that the real meat of her presentation still to come, the percentage of learners to pass the Matric examination, was almost certain to be worse than the worst of their expectations.  The excuses, that the number of ‘learners’ writing the examination was greater than it has ever been, and the fevered efforts to ‘save’ those who failed in a single grade for the third time, were no more than window-dressing to draw attention away from the appallingly bad results her Department has achieved, results that will scar many youngsters for the rest of their lives, and do much to damage what little of the South African economy that remains in operation after two decades of ANC bungling.  The stark fact is that the Department of Basic Education, despite having a huge budget at its disposal, has managed to allow, or possibly force, almost 30% of people who have given up as much as a quarter of their lives in an attempt to gain an education that will enable them to become useful, productive members of society.  The significantly better results obtained in the Western Cape, 84,7% passing against a national average of 70,7%, proves that the young people of the nation are capable of producing significantly better than is now being achieved.  The only difference between that Province and the rest of the country that means anything is that it is under the competent management of the DA, rather than the cadre-dominated incompetence of the rest of the country.  When the national average of the private schools is brought into the picture, at better than 90% passing, the true state of the inability of the ANC to provide the country with anything approaching an acceptable level of education is highlighted.  One can only wonder when the ANC voters, all of whom are adversely affected by this incompetence, will start to understand that loyalty to the myth that the ANC has built about itself is destructive, almost to the point of being suicidal.

Of course, all of this ignores the fact that the Matric examination passed by these ‘learners’ is at a much lower level than they could expect in most of the world.  What used to be accepted at face value by the Western world as an indicator of a degree of competence is now treated with suspicion.  Even the Bachelor degrees (those gained after study at a University for at least several years, not the Matric certificate now promoted by the Minister as a Bachelor degree) are treated with suspicion abroad, to the extent that they carry very little credibility in an employment situation.  And with good reason.  The Law Society, not many years ago, reported that Ll B graduates were no longer able to use language effectively!  The ‘increased’ pass rate boasted of by the Minister in years past has been bought at the cost of imposing a lower standard in the examinations.  This has hit South African business hard, and probably accounts for the fact that so many of those with new degrees are not employed – they are probably not capable of doing the work that a Matriculant would easily handle in the years before the ANC stamped its personality on the education system.  The ANC has worked hard to compensate for this inadequacy by imposing the BBEEE regulations, to ensure that a proportion of the ‘previously disadvantaged’ are given employment, no matter how limited their capability is to do a decent job.

The incompetence of the ANC to manage the economy of a once-sophisticated country has been demonstrated repeatedly, in the Eskom debacle, which has set back South African development by years, in the inability (unwillingness?) of the Police to stem the rising tide of crime that has threatened to drown the country, in the inability and demonstrated lack of desire of Parliament to hold the State President to the standards of conduct required by the Constitution, absolving him of any liability in the expenditure of R245 000 000 of State funds on his private home (remember the fatuous statement by Zuma that he was not aware that so much money was being spent on his private property?), in the lack of service by the Post Office (the Bryanston Post Office was closed three months ago, without any notification to renters of Post Office boxes, apart from a single notice in the window, put up a few days ago, saying that the persons expecting post could collect it at the new location, which was expected to ‘open soon’, and giving telephone numbers, neither of which are answered), in the Department of Trade and Industry’s inability, after many months warning, to respond to the American Government’s demand for the dropping of an import duty on chicken, failing which South Africa will be excluded from the benefits of AGOA (the deadline given by President Obama was 30 December 2015, but, of course, we saw fit not to respond in time – the ANC Government appears to be totally incapable of acting on time, even preemptively!), with the probable result that many agricultural and other exports to the USA will become subject to import duties in that country, at a time when South Africa needs every dollar of export sales it can achieve, in the Department of Homeland Affairs’ disastrous insistence on a new visa regime, requiring every applicant for a visa to attend personally at the Consulate (there are two in the entire area of China!), resulting in a loss of foreign tourism to the country at a critical time for the economy, in the arrogant and undemocratic, if not unconstitutional behavior of President Zuma in replacing an internationally-acceptable Minister of Finance with an unknown backbencher (unknown except for his disastrous tenure as Mayor, ending in his house being burnt down by desperate citizens – perhaps not a bad example of how to deal with his boss!), and then backtracking a few days later by reappointing Pravin Gordhan, who was himself sacked a couple of years earlier, presumably for failing to rubber-stamp Zuma’s corruption.  The examples are legion.  It is hard to think of one Government Department that has not committed some act of flagrant stupidity or incompetence, and if one adds corruption on a large scale to the list of qualities not desired in a Government Department or body, the only place to look for a righteous man is in the Western Cape.

Listening to the lengthy explanation of the Minister of Basic Education about the excuses for her Department’s failures, excuses claimed as achievements, one was struck by the fact that she dwelt so extensively on the care and attention given to the ‘progressed learners’, those who were simply advanced to the next grade up after failing for two successive years.  She was proud to state that some 6 000 of those ‘progressed learners’ had passed Matric in 2015, and she promised increased care and attention to them.  It is hard to understand how 6 000 children (probably young adults by then, who have spent at least 15 years clogging up the educational system) can merit so much attention when the remaining three-quarters of a million matriculants, representing the apex of a pyramid of at least ten million(!) struggling pupils in the school system, are struggling under the grossly ineffective educational system!  Surely the place to start any corrective action is where the bulk of the problems lie? 

That seems to be typical of the ANC policies – find a group that commands a lot of publicity at grass-roots level, and lavish money on it.  The publicity, hopefully, will last long enough to carry the Government over to the next crisis, such as the Marikana shootings, which have now resulted in the construction of R110 million of houses.  Fortunately, the more outspoken of those subject to this sort of publicity-directed action are starting to speak out, questioning the basis on which those few chosen to receive such largesse at the expense of the cash-strapped State have been selected.  The answer is probably that they offer Zuma and his cohorts the best photo opportunities!  One would be forgiven for believing that the criteria for action by the ANC cover first the question of which projects can most easily be skimmed for corrupt purposes, then which will be the best to secure the ANC an election victory (as confirmed by the Deputy State President, Cyril Ramaphosa, when he stated that the most important thing for the ANC is to secure an election victory!)  Any other consideration, such as the good of the country, or the creation of an economic structure in which job-creating investors will feel at home, are of secondary importance.

These chickens will come home to roost, and the signs are increasingly strong that the roosting will take place much sooner than the ANC would wish.  Until then, the flight of Capital, the loss of brainpower and experience, the deterrence of investment, the loss of foreign markets, will all continue, at an increasing pace.

 

It’s Official – The ANC and Zuma are in One Basket

The official ANC statement regarding the disastrous bungle by Jacob Zuma in replacing an experienced and trusted Minister of Finance with one whose record boasts of a catastrophic failure of his leadership as Mayor of Morofeng (ending in a riot and the burning down of his home as the best way, possibly the only way, for the citizens to get rid of him) has confirmed that Zuma is decisive and statesmanlike, only changing his decision after the heads of four of the major banks informed him of how badly he had erred, and with the support of the international financial community, which punished the country by wiping R189 billion off the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.  Of course, Zuma is godlike to many of the senior ANC functionaries, all of them almost certainly in his pocket and dependent on his presence as President for the grossly-overpaid positions they hold with barely any requirement of performance.  He must be God, for he certainly works in mysterious ways! 

This comes as no real surprise.  Zuma has committed bungle after bungle during his time as President, ever one of them covered up by lies and deception by those around him.  One can only assume that the rewards to the senior ANC fellowship must be huge – it would be difficult to imagine that they could hold onto such an incompetent figurehead in normal circumstances.  The great advantage of having had Zuma as President is that it has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the South African Constitution, widely touted by the ANC and its stooges as being the best in the world, is severely deficient in numerous aspects, not the least being its tendency to tolerate repeated flouting by the Executive – the very people charged with protecting it.  If the country is able to survive until Zuma’s next greatest bungle – or act of corruption – finally causes even the ANC to recognize that he is not capable of doing the job, the country may experience the good fortune of gaining a totally new set of leaders.

It will be good that the ANC does not recall Zuma, only to replace him with another, unknown, ANC clod.  It would be far better for Zuma to cling onto power until the ANC can be removed, by vote or by revolution a la Arab Spring, and be replaced by a new group, which will, no doubt, spend the first two years investigating the antics of the President and his multitudinous Ministers, and recovering the billions they have bled off the economy.  The ANC has shown, by its unwavering support of Jacob Zuma, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence of his corruption and incompetence, that there is no real difference between them and Jacob Zuma – he is clearly no more than the willing figurehead, the absorber of the anger of the thinking people, to distract them from the people really to blame for the mobile disaster that has brought the once-great country which, under Nelson Mandela, was able to attract the admiration and hope of the world, to its knees, and made it the epitome of the African basket case.

 

The Difference between Anti-Black and Pro-South Africa

It has been said that any negative comments regarding the BBEEE policy of the Government is counter-revolutionary and anti-Black.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is the duty of every South African to hold the actions and policies of the Government up to the light, to judge them according to their effect on South Africa and South Africa’s standing in the world, and to make this assessment known to those who are in a position to affect the policies and actions of the Government.  One’s civic duty as a citizen is not discharged by unthinking support of Jacob Zuma or the ANC, or of any other political Party or leader.  That uncritical support can only lead to a decline in the standard of performance of those Parties or leaders, possibly to the point where expressions of adoration of the Great Leader will become as commonplace and necessary as in North Korea.  Even though one may admire and support a Party or a leader, it remains one’s duty to call them to account fully for their actions and to provide feedback on those aspects that one does not like.  The execution of that duty is pro-South African, and should be recognized and valued as an honest attempt to assist the politicians to do the work for which they are elected.

It is a fact, although seldom recognized by the people, and least of all by those in power, that the Government is the property of the people.  Unfortunately, the ANC Government, as most other governments around the world, either does not know this, or they do not wish to acknowledge it.  They view the people as an unnecessary inconvenience, as a means to gain re-election every five years and so requiring the amount of attention to their welfare that is at the lowest level needed to gain that re-election, leaving them and their fellow politicians free to enjoy their life of luxury while they pander to their egos in Parliament and in the occasional Press conference or the five-yearly Party conferences.  The arrogance of Jacob Zuma in swapping an effective Minister of Finance for an unknown and demonstrably failed politician, in order to achieve his spending objectives is clear evidence of this, and he was supported in this arrogance by Jeff Radebe, previously viewed as an upright and intelligent politician, who declared that the President does not have to account to any other person for his choice of Ministers.

This conduct is completely against the spirit of the Constitution, which has been widely touted, by people who do not seem to have the legal or political qualifications to do so, as ’the best Constitution in the world’.  This claim has been clearly demonstrated as incorrect, as the Constitution does not have the checks and balances necessary to counter the self-serving and corrupt practices that South Africans have come to expect from those in political power over the past twenty years.  Unfortunately, Jacob Zuma is Black, and any criticism made of him is perverted by those with an anti-white agenda to be anti-Black.  Again, nothing could be further from the truth.  Almost every White South African was delighted to have Nelson Mandela as President of the new South Africa.  He was not flawless, but most normal people were willing to overlook the flaws and to support him and his efforts to make South Africa a good place for all.  They believed that he was honest and good.   His policies were also not universally accepted, but any discussion on them related to the plusses and minuses of the policies, not to the fact that he was Black.  Unfortunately, Mandela’s successor was not able to jump over his Black shadow and be the President of all the people of South Africa.  His was not the great spirit of Mandela, and much of what he did reignited the Black-White divide.  Zuma and his cronies have worked hard to promote that divide, seeing in the holding up of a “White enemy” a means to divert the attention of their Black electorate from the increasingly visible failings of which they are guilty.  The policies of Black Empowerment have done much to embitter the Whites, not for the reason that they favor the Blacks, but because they have promoted the benefit of underqualified Blacks at the cost of the economy.  Where Mandela understood that the size of the economy could be increased to give the growth portion, and even a willingly-granted share of the rest, to the Blacks, his successors have adopted the view that the size of the economy is static, and that any increase in the fortunes of the Blacks must necessarily be taken from the Whites.  What Whites believed in 1994, that the new dispensation was a way to harness the undoubted capabilities inherent in the Black population to the benefit of all was ignored and, ultimately lost in the clutter of the socialist / populist rhetoric and policies of successive Presidents and Ministers who could not understand the basic laws of economics that govern every single person in a civilized society.  The communist countries of the world have shown convincingly that communism is not capable of providing a good life for all the citizens, yet the ANC has increasingly adopted communistic principles and practices, perhaps because the practice of those systems give them the opportunity to build huge personal fortunes by using their political connections, inevitably at the cost of the increasingly large numbers of poor, rather than as a product of their innate abilities.  Joe Slovo made the statement in 1995, when, in a television debate with Gordon Mulholland, he was asked why he thought that communism would succeed in South Africa when it had failed convincingly everywhere else.  His reply was that communism needed a base of capital to thrive.  Mulholland asked what would happen when that base was exhausted.  Slovo replied:  “When that happens, we’ll try another system!”

What the Whites do not like about the present Government in South Africa is not that it is Black, or that it supposedly represents the majority of the Black population, but that it is incompetent and corrupt.  Neither of those characteristics is inherently a quality of Blacks, or of any other population group.  Most Whites would be overjoyed to be able to support a Government of any Party or racial overtone, provided they could believe that the Government was truly and sensibly working for the good of all the people of South Africa.  Most of the Whites who harbored reservations about the capabilities of Blacks in 1994 have been convinced that Blacks are capable, competent and honest.  Unfortunately, the ANC has earned the disapprobation of those people in the time since Nelson Mandela has ceased stamping his qualities on the Party.  Increasingly, the questions that most Whites have regarding the ability of the ANC to govern have been adopted also by many thinking Blacks, of all stations in life, to the extent that a Black driver remarked recently to a foreign (Black) client that “Many of my friends are now convinced that Jacob Zuma and the ANC have started to worship Satan.”

One can only hope that the present crisis in South Africa will lead quickly to the voters learning that voting for personal handouts cannot produce a country in which all can thrive, in which each person is free to achieve his or her potential, unfettered by a political system that awards patronage to the favored few, or makes laws with the main purpose of buying the votes of the beneficiaries of those laws.  We would all love to live in a country where all the people can believe that their Government is working for all of them.  Most of all, Whites and Blacks would love to put in the effort required to build that country for the benefit of all.  There is a huge untapped reservoir of capability and goodwill, waiting for the right politicians to make South Africa a world leader, rather than a declining Third World economy, striving to meet the standards of Zimbabwe.

Meet Nicole Stuart – Author

Meet Nicole Stuart – Author

 

Nicole Stuart graduated with degrees in Commerce and Law, and, after gaining experience in banking, industry and commerce, started work with an international company as a Management Consultant.  She rose rapidly through the ranks, and was seconded to operations of the company in Australia, Britain, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States of America for lengthy periods.  This gave her the opportunity to experience where and how others live and work as well as an insight into a wide array of businesses.  It also helped to lift the veil that obscures our views of other people, and revealed to her the ‘blinkers’ that so many people have, limiting their ability to see things the way they really are.

She has a voracious interest in how things work, as well as in writing, with a considerable fiction and non-fiction output, with over a hundred publications to her name.  She takes pride in basing her writings on a foundation of real life, finding existing conditions that pose real threats, and extrapolating them to produce exciting and entertaining reading, usually with the result that the reader asks “How would I have handled that?”

Her email address is:  NicoleAStuart@gmail.com, and her books can be viewed by clicking here.

 

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Pravin Gordhan is to Compensate for Zuma's Blunder

After making a monumental error in firing Nhlanhla Nene as Finance Minister, bringing about a crash of the Rand against all other currencies and a collapse of world business confidence in South Africa, Jacob Zuma has now fired the unknown he put into the top ministerial position in his government and reinstalled Pravin Gordhan.  No doubt he is hoping that Gordhan will restore South Africa to the luster it once held in the eyes of the investment world.

There is some hope that this may work, to a small extent, but it is clear that huge and long-lasting damage has been done.  The world has now had solid evidence that South Africa is run at the whim of a capricious and solely self-interested man.  The only reason for the change back to what might be perceived as competent leadership of the Finance portfolio can be that Zuma was facing a revolt from his multitudinous Cabinet Ministers, all of whom, no doubt, understand that the huge salaries and perks they enjoy were finally on the line.  Zuma’s arrogance in making the announcement of Nene’s firing, and the subsequent comments by Minister Radebe that ‘the President is entitled in his discretion to appoint and replace Ministers’ must have long-term consequences throughout the international investment community, and his hasty back-stepping is almost as weak as his original decision.  Gordhan must have been involved in the discussions (if indeed there have been discussions) regarding the acquisition of the new Presidential aircraft and regarding the ongoing support of the Board of SAA in the face of the continued illegality of the racialist and economically retrogressive policies it is pursuing.  Gordhan was at the helm at the time that Zuma was bleeding the poor of the country dry to fund the monument to his ego that is Nkandla, as well as during the build-up to the undoubtedly corrupt Russian nuclear deal.  He held the portfolio at the time that Eskom was building down to the near-collapse of the electricity supply of the country.  He was instrumental in providing continuing funding to the frequently-insolvent SAA.  He was the head of the South African Revenue Services at a time that it was involved in corrupt and illegal activities.  It would be folly to assume that Gordhan will suddenly see the light and reform his ways to become the sort of honest politician that South Africa deserves.  It is much more likely that Zuma has grasped at the Gordhan straw for two reasons:  Gordhan has gained a reputation for his ability to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the diminishing taxpayer base, and he has some reputation at least for being one of the best of a series of incompetent Ministers of Finance. 

Unfortunately, the ability to squeeze tax out of the public is one of the least desirable qualities needed in the South African Government, particularly at a time of galloping collapse of the economy.  Remember the smirk on Gordhan’s face when he announced that the Budget had, for the first time, exceeded one trillion Rand?  It did not seem to occur to him that the removal of that huge sum of money from economic use, to be applied to buying the votes of the bloated and ineffective Civil Service and undertaking projects that would most easily bleed off funds to the ANC and the Party favorites, would hasten the economic decline that the ANC seems to have been determined to achieve.  Gordhan’s return to the post seems to be a warning to taxpayers that the squeeze will be tightened dramatically, if the questionable solvency of the country is to be retained, at least in the short term, until the miracle occurs that the ANC hopes will pull it back from the brink.  It seems also to be a warning, if such is still needed, to all businesspersons that the downward spiral of the country will continue, increasing in steepness year by year.  The move toward China and Russia will continue, at the cost of worsening relations with the West, from where most of the country’s foreign funding flows (for the present – the future in that regard seems bleak).  The move to favor Blacks in every way, regardless of their ability to contribute effectively to the economy, will continue, regardless of the very clear injunction in the Constitution to treat every South African equally, regardless of race.

The recent days have demonstrated very clearly that Jacob Zuma, and by implication, the ANC, are prepared to sacrifice South Africa, all South Africans, to feather their own nests.  They are willing to pursue their lunatic and discredited economic and social policies, regardless of their patently negative effects.  One can only hope that the investors who, in the past have been willing to overlook the many failings of the country in the interests of gaining an extra 1% on their money, perhaps influenced by the lingering view that the South Africa that Nelson Mandela aspired to still exists, will now see that the country is managed by a kleptocracy.  If those investors wish to support the dream of Mandela, they must understand that their best hope is to withhold investment in the country until economic sanity once again prevails.

 

Zuma – Preparing for a Dictatorship?

 

The sudden and, in retrospect, unsurprising move by President Jacob Zuma to remove the sole independent voice in his Cabinet from office, and replace him with a failed ex-Mayor of a minor town has had repercussions that even Zuma in his arrogance probably did not foresee.  Nhlanhla Nene was the sole voice of anything approaching reason in the top ranks of Government, a man who stood up to Zuma, to deny his supposed right to spend R4 billion on a Presidential aircraft, to refuse to endorse a transaction by South African Airways that would probably have driven that failed State entity to demand another R60 billion support from the State with the main motivation being to provide further self-enrichment opportunities for the favored of the ANC, and to deny Zuma the payoff opportunities that he is claimed to have negotiated in respect of the unaffordable build of the Russian-sourced nuclear power stations.  There are, no doubt, numerous other extravagances that were prevented by Nene, who seems to have been one of the very few ANC glitterati to understand economic principles, and who was prepared to be an honest man in the face of a seemingly unending stream of Zuma and ANC corruption.

This column has warned several times in the past years of the inevitable outcome of allowing a man like Zuma free reign.  It has spoken of his deep admiration for Robert Mugabe, whose main achievement has been the destruction of the once-strong Zimbabwean economy in the process of amassing enormous wealth for himself.  Mugabe has retained power, even in the face of his dismal economic and democratic performance, by buying the support of power brokers and a band of thugs, and Zuma has copied this pattern, taking the ANC with him.  It has warned of the political manipulation by Zuma in the process of escaping 749 criminal charges, of defeating an unequivocal finding by the Public Protector that he enriched himself in the construction of his homestead at Nkandla at a cost to the taxpayers of over R240 million.  It has spoken of his clear determination to place himself above the Courts in ignoring the Order to hand over the Spy Tapes, and in ignoring the clear Order of the High Court to place a wanted criminal, Omar al Bashir, under arrest, by assisting him to flee South Africa.  It has discussed the statement by the Speaker of the House of Assembly, an Office charged with the clear duty under the Constitution to ensure that the Executive is held to account for their conduct.  That stooge of Zuma, clearly in awe of the man who is the fountainhead of her fortunes, stated clearly that the President is above the Rules of Parliament.  She has also breached the Constitution in bringing into Parliament a Police force to expel the entire elected membership of the Economic Freedom Fighters, regardless of the fact that a good proportion of those Members of Parliament had committed no breach of the Rules.  She is guilty of an act not very far from a coup d’etat in instructing a military-style force to stifle the legitimate demands of a duly elected political Party to obtain an explanation from a rogue President of his alleged corruption.  It has discussed the building of a security force of some 7 000 people around the President, people who are solely accountable to him and who cannot be overseen by any democratically-representative body.  It is difficult to envisage a need for a private security force of that size except in the context of an illegitimate grasp of absolute power.

And, in all of this, the ANC has been heavily complicit.  Numerous examples have been publicized of the positioning of the ANC to benefit from large State contracts, ranging from a stake gained in Mitsubishi, prior to that company being awarded a lucrative contract to supply electricity generation turbines  to Eskom, against the strong recommendation of a panel of Eskom experts, to the gaining of a stake in Shell South Africa, prior to that company being awarded an ‘exploration license’ to drill the fraccing wells in the Karoo, against the advice of numerous national and international experts in the field.

Where is all this going?

The answer lies in the fact that Jacob Zuma’s tenure as President will come to an end in 2019, even if, by some miracle, the ANC retains a majority in the election in that year.  It is clear that neither the ANC nor Jacob Zuma will willingly forego the huge cash flow that presently comes to them as a result of their political dominance, nor will they willingly hand over the power to investigate their actions since 1994 to any of the increasingly hostile Opposition Parties, whose first action will be to prosecute and jail those that can be shown to be corrupt, and to use the funds recovered from them to rebuild the economy to something near to what it should have been.  Following the Mugabe model, if the ANC is not able to gain a majority sufficiently large to amend the Constitution to permit Zuma a lifetime Presidency, the next alternative will be to declare a state of emergency, to permit Zuma and his stooges to retain control of the country and the seemingly unending flow of wealth that it can bring.  The Dictator to whom we will all answer will be Jacob Zuma, a man who will be placed above all criticism.

This is not fantasy.  Look at the people Jacob Zuma admires, and from whom he has learnt.  The list is large.  Muammar al Gaddafi, Mao Tze Dung, Robert Mugabe, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Shaka Zulu are prominent on that list.  And every one of them gained and held onto power by brutality, by seizing power by subterfuge and by force.  Every one of them gained huge wealth at the cost of their countrymen.  And every one of them brought their countries to their knees, leaving behind a legacy of destitution, despair and destruction of the ideals of democracy that men like Nelson Mandela gave their lives to build.

The citizens of the world must be aware that a force for evil is reaching fruition in South Africa, a force that has the potential to destroy the freedom of so many citizens of the world that has been built, at huge cost, since the Second World War.  They must take action now to make their concerns known, by depriving every part of the Zuma Empire of the flow of funds that is his sole reason for being there.  They must broadcast their concern to everyone who will listen, to ensure that the lies being spread by the South African Government are not swallowed as the truth.  Zuma and the ANC present a problem to the world that is at least as serious as that posed by the Apartheid system.