Zuma is not to blame.

Anyone who has a degree will have undergone the unpleasant experience of being told, by someone without a degree, that his education is worthless, that life’s experiences are more valuable than book learning, that people who come out of university are worth much less than those who took the opportunity to experience the real world while the university worm was locked away in valueless lectures.  One learns to ignore these stupidities, gaining the understanding that the un-degreed critic simply does not have the understanding to realise the value of the educational experience,  Trying to convince such people of the value of learning to think in a structured way, integrating learning, experience, observation and the valid views of others is a waste of time.  Some un-degreed people have the ability to break out of the mould they have been born into, but, unfortunately, many of them are unable to stretch their minds beyond the slogans, the sensational statements of others of their ilk, the tee shirt summaries, the sound-bite statements of ‘absolute truth’, and actually apply their minds to a situation.  These people are fated to remain ignorant of the realities of life, to be uncritical of ‘what they know’ without ever questioning the validity of it, and unable to go beyond what they were born into.  They are not innately evil, but they are ignorant, and they choose to remain ignorant.  The evil ones are those who use that propensity not to want to know, to gain their personal objectives, to use those people for their own ends.

Jacob Zuma is a product of his background.  He grew up as a herd boy, watching the animals in a field, without ever having had the mental training or the accumulation of knowledge to be able to apply his mental capabilities in a rational way.  He saw the wealthy and powerful people of his environment as models of the life and lifestyle to aspire to.  The village chief in his community was a man who exercised unlimited power, using his hereditary position to influence the recommendations of the elders.  His wealth, although modest in absolute terms, was huge to the eyes of the simple herd boy, whose family could not afford the economic cost of allowing him to gain more than a rudimentary education.  He was influenced by the village thinking, which saw the White man as an oppressor and could not understand how that White man gained his comparative wealth through directed work and the application of learned skills.  To the young boy’s mind, the wealth displayed by the White man was enormous, and was to be gained by the use of power, as was that of the village chief.

The young boy, growing up in the back of beyond in Zululand became imbued by the Black ‘leadership’ belief that the best opportunity for him would be to aspire to the ideals of communism, which held that the assets of the community should be shared by the community, which is, after all, only a slight extension of the tribal system, in which the land is the property of the community.  When he was old enough to act on his own, but not yet old enough to have gained the wisdom, experience and thinking capability of a mature adult, the young Zuma joined the ‘liberation movement’.  Using his native cunning and, no doubt, the inherent ruthlessness of the young, Zuma rose in the ranks of the ‘freedom fighters, to become the head of Intelligence in the liberation army, a position which entitled him to enjoy the benefits of senior rank.  His indoctrination by the Soviet masters of his movement made him more capable in the skills of manoeuvring and manipulating, and his position gave him an ability to gain knowledge of the doings and desires of his peers that would stand him in good stead in the years to come. 

The ‘revolution’, a rewritten statement of the real history of the acceptance by the Apartheid (a word that, even now, Zuma mispronounces in a way that suggests he did not understand that the policy was one by which the separate racial groups in the country would be free to determine their own separate futures) government that the Soviet threat no longer existed after the ignominious collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, gave Zuma the next opportunity to achieve his aspirations.  The adoption of the principles of communism by the Black movements had given rise to a fear in the minds of the Whites that their way of life, their very religion, would be destroyed by the accession to Government of a Black majority dominated by Soviet thinking.  The Soviets had no real interest in the form of government that would be adopted when their puppets came to power in the newly decolonised African countries.  Their sole interest was in dominating that country and depriving the West, specifically the United States, of any influence in those countries.  They were not benevolent benefactors of those countries, as is clearly seen in the oppression they imposed in their vassal States in Eastern Europe.  They were colonisers in a different form.  The ‘education’, particularly the ‘political education’ they provided to their ‘friends, the freedom fighters’, was necessarily indoctrination in the thinking of the Marxist-Stalinists who were in control, and that thinking has endured in those people and in those who have been influenced by them.  The lack of logic in that thinking, the absolute, unthinking conviction that what they were told is right, can be seen in the strict adherence to Soviet economic theory, regardless of the fact that experience has shown convincingly that it cannot succeed in the modern world.  There is no Communist State that can be deemed successful in economic terms, unless, as in the case of China, there is a liberal admixture of capitalism to the control elements that the Communists developed.  The fact that the collapse of the Soviets in 1989 convinced the Whites that there was no longer a risk and so created the possibility of a rapprochement to the Black movements has been ignored in the modern history of South Africa, with the story of a ‘glorious revolution’ being more palatable to the political leaders of today. In truth, Mkonto we Sizwe was an abject failure in military terms.  The transition from the Apartheid Government to the democracy we have was based on the realisation by the Whites that the policies were wrong and unjust, a realisation that built on a long-held belief expressed in the fact that the National Party was never able to gain the two-thirds majority necessary to change the Constitution, even though the leadership of the Opposition Party was markedly incompetent.  The Black governments throughout Africa have almost all adopted the Soviet thinking in their policies, and they have all experienced the lack of success that thinking was bound to bring.  Those that have been fortunate to gain leadership by capable leaders have adjusted those policies, some obviously, such as the new leadership of Tanzania, some surreptitiously, to avoid being seen to admit to a huge mistake that cost their people dearly.  South Africa was fortunate to have a leader in Nelson Mandela who was able to use his mind effectively, although he was constrained in this by those around him who were less fortunate in this regard, and he espoused Western thinking, modified by the need to correct the failings of the incompetent Apartheid governments which became more and more fanatical in their application of the lunatic theories developed by Hendrick Verwoerd.  When Mandela departed the scene of government, he was replaced by more devout and unthinking communists, and South Africa is now led by a man who applies his communist training and tribal thinking without the benefit of education, exposure to modern thought or criticism, one who has surrounded himself with others of the same persuasion, the same moral standards and the same indoctrination.  Zuma is reported not to read newspapers or books, both essential to the development of the capability to think in a structured way and with input from numerous other thinking people.  He runs on autopilot, a set of ideas derived from his tribal, herd boy and terrorist training, and applying the principles absorbed from his Soviet puppet-masters.  It can come as no surprise that he is obsessed with the building of wealth through manipulation and intrigue, the building of power by pay-off and blackmail, and that he has no conception of how a modern economy can provide an improving life for all citizens.  In Zuma’s book, the gain by one implies the loss by another.  The essential requirement, in his mind, of a decent life is the ownership of land, although it is clear that he has no idea of why that should be so.  The construction of a huge mansion by the theft (to call a spade a spade) from the ‘endless’ coffers of the State is a statement of his personal value, regardless of the fact that this symbol of ostentation is located in one of the poorest areas of his homeland, in which it was necessary to build a fire pool because the average citizen lacks an adequate supply of water sufficient to put out a fire, and the level of criminality is high enough to demand the construction of a Police Station dedicated to his protection.  The purchase of a fleet of aircraft dedicated to his personal (and family) use is essential to satisfy his pretensions to glory as the Head of State of a country which can pay for them (in a continent where the average Head of State has difficulty in affording a car equivalent to one of the fleet available to him), regardless of the fact that the economy of his country is performing so badly that its debt instruments hover barely above junk status, and its economic performance puts it firmly in the company of the worst-performing economies in the world.  He has a need to emulate, or even outperform, Robert Mugabe, who still spouts a line of racist hatred and economic garbage as bad as any terrorist organisation, and whose reign of terror and economic incompetence has brought his once-strong nation to its knees, with millions of its citizens either dead of starvation of economic refugees in other countries. He admires Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has also brought his country to destitution by the application of policies similar to those in which Zuma believes.  He has a desire to name the streets after the great leaders he so admires, such as Stalin, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Samora Machel, Fidel Castro, Julius Nyerere, all of whom are textbook examples of abjectly poor governance, terrorism of their own people and rule by force.  He uses the tool of adulation of dead freedom fighters to inspire hatred of the Whites for their success when contrasted with his failures, without emulating any of good the qualities they may have had.

Taking his background and the self-imposed limitations on his own thinking, one cannot blame Jacob Zuma for the abjectly poor leadership and economic management that have been hallmarks of his terms of Presidency.  Knowing the man and his background, South Africa should have expected those results of him.  After all, one cannot expect a nation in one generation to produce two persons of the class and qualities of Nelson Mandela.  The transition from Mandela through Mbeki to Zuma clearly demonstrated a slide from the top end of the good-bad scale.  We can only hope that Zuma represents the stop mark at the bottom end of the scale, and that his successor will start the climb again.

Zuma still does not get it

All knowledgeable observers are in agreement.  South Africa is in the early stages of a financial crisis.

Business confidence has collapsed, and is still heading south at an increasing rate.  The investor world is in agreement that the country is one tiny step away from junk status.  Economic growth has collapsed, with the World Bank and the IMF in agreement that growth this year will be considerably less than 1%, less than half of last year.  The Rand is testing new limits against all other currencies.  The cost of living is skyrocketing, with prices moving up on a daily basis.  Local companies are looking elsewhere for new areas of investment, with the assurance that the South African market is close to dead.  Inbound foreign investment is dying off rapidly, and existing foreign direct investments are fleeing the country.

The only body that sees a different world is the ANC.  Gwede Mantashe, after the State of the Nation fiasco, stated in a TV interview that we are not in recession.  ‘Recession,’ he said in an arrogant tone, ‘requires three quarters of negative growth, and we have not had that yet.’  His one concession to the truth was that telling word ‘yet’.  Even Mantashe apparently knows that South Africa is on a slide under the leadership of the ANC.

Zuma read his normal SONA speech, apparently oblivious of the fact that he now is acceptable as a leader of the nation to fewer than 16% of the population.  He spoke passionately about how some Black soldiers had died at the Battle of Delville Wood, a hundred years ago, after they had been badly treated by the Government.  He raised the point that, fifty years ago, the residents of District Six, which was a slum, were moved to another area to make way for Whites, a development that never took place.  He also referred to the school riots in 1974, including the killing of Hector Pietersen, riots which were instigated by the ‘freedom fighters’ in order to create martyrs in the fight against Apartheid and have since been sold by the ANC as spontaneous outbursts of student anger.  He referred to the fact that the University of Fort Hare, a Black university attended by Nelson Mandela and Chief Buthelezi, is celebrating a hundred years of existence, conveniently ignoring the mantra that the Apartheid Government refused education to the Blacks.  All of these references were undoubtedly a snide racist attack on the Whites and the Party he claims to be White-dominated, the DA, and then he went on to denounce racism and announce a campaign against racism.  It is a sure sign of the duplicity of the man, a clearly racist attack followed by a denial that he meant it.

The speech made the apparently important point, reiterated in his post-SONA interview a day later, that Government plans to cut the costs of international travel while Zuma’s travel budget has been exceeded by sixty million Rand), the size of international delegations (only a fortnight after an eighty-man delegation attended the World Economic Forum at Davos, during which Zuma failed to attend a panel discussion on Africa), the after-budget parties (although SONA is preceded by a praise singer extolling the virtues, imagined or otherwise, of the Great Leader of the Nation) and similar petty cash items.  Mantashe made the point after SONA that not all of these were new.  After all, he pointed out, there had never been any rule regarding the size of delegations!  Really?  Any competent businessman imposes limitations on expenditure, and demands accounting of the results of the expenditure, which has never been done by the ANC Government!

Zuma carefully avoided any mention of:

• the hijacking of the Government by the Gupta family, together with his own family,
• his admission to the Constitutional Court that he had breached the Constitution and his Oath of Office in regard to his own plundering of State resources and in contravention of a binding Finding by the Public Protector, rumoured to be in excess of R150 000 000,
• his subversion of the rule of law in co-opting the Minister of Police to produce a fictitious report exonerating his boss from any liability for repayment of the stolen funds used for Nkandla, using the flimsy excuse offered by all evil men, including the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, that he was following orders,
• his blunder in replacing a standing Minister of Finance with a failed nonentity, which was followed three days later by an about face, all without reason (other than an outright lie) or explanation, although it cost the economy an immediate R500 billion with much more to follow in the form of dramatically-increased cost of borrowing,
• the downgrading of Government securities by the Ratings Agencies, taking them to one tiny step above junk status, which will remove them from the list of permissible investments for most of the organisations that have provided funding to the country and to its banks,
• his breach of a High Court Order that the Government enforce a Warrant of Arrest of al Bashir, permitting him to flee the country while telling the huge untruth that ‘his name was not on a passenger list (!), an outright breach of the legally-binding Treaty of Rome and a flagrant statement of support for a terrorist leader accused of genocide,
• the fact that South Africa’s economic performance alone brought the economic growth of the African continent down from 7,4% without inclusion of South Africa to 4,3% with inclusion, stating that the country faced difficult external economic conditions, of which, apparently, the rest of the continent was unaware,
• the continuing brain drain, of all racial groups, fleeing the disastrous conditions in the country to seek their fortune in other economies, all subject to the same economic conditions,
• the collapse of the mining industry under the weight of trade union demands for uneconomic wages, supported by ruinous strikes accompanied by extreme violence,
• the abject failure of the education system to provide an acceptable education to millions of children, even at the highest cost in the world as a proportion of GDP,
• the continuing disasters in State-Owned Entities, such as Eskom, SAA, SABC, PetroSA,
• the worst drought in fifty years, exacerbated by a total lack of preparation of the necessary supportive infrastructure, even though the drought was known to be on the cards for several years, and by a lack of foreign exchange and economic strength to import the necessary food to prevent widespread starvation,
• the status of South Africa amongst the lowest in the world on indices of
• transparency,
• corruption,
• education,
• attractiveness as an investment destination,
• security of investment, after the country cancelled Treaties in this regard with European countries, the source of most of the foreign direct investment,
• ease and speed of starting a new business.

Zuma read his speech, badly, as though he was going through the motions.  He believes that his hold on the Party is strong enough to enable him to muddle through to the end of his term (remember the FBI’s Mc Carthy and his famous files on Congressmen?) and possibly even longer, by use of his seven thousand-strong personal security force.

After witnessing Zuma’s State of the Nation address, one can be left with only one thought.  Zuma really does not get it, and the ANC will continue to support him for as long as they can, to continue their depredations.  They have no interest in governing the country.  Their only interest is what they can take from it.  Joe Slovo, the leader of the Communist Party responded, in the early years of the ‘new South Africa’, to a question why he believed that the proposed form of government would succeed when all others that had tried it had failed.  “Communism needs capital, and South Africa has that capital.”  “And when the capital is exhausted, what the?”  His famous response was “Then we’ll try another system.”

Cry the Beloved Country.

Getting Back to Basics

Pravin Gordhan led a campaign to improve the Public Service by ‘getting back to basics’.  There is some merit in this thinking, and it could well be applied to Government as a whole.  Here are some suggestions for doing this.

1. Bring a realisation to all levels of Government that the Government is owned by the people, works for the people and is responsible to the people.  This includes everything from the start of the State President’s speech on the state of the nation when he spends many minutes greeting the Speakers, the Members, the guests and, last of all, the people.  This is wrong.  The State President is primarily responsible to the people, and the people should be the audience.  All others are incidental.  When this realisation is firmly implanted in the minds of the politicians and the civil servants, they will understand that arrogance has no place in their actions.  It must be replaced by humility.
2. Make the workings of State accept that what is done can only be done in the interests of the people who are paying for it.  There is place for secrecy in the formulation of policies and laws only in very limited circumstances.  Everything else must be open and above board, with no allowance for closed door meetings, policy formulation by elite groups of Party apparatchiks, no permissions for lobby groups to influence policy formulation without full disclosure and the right of reply by any interested citizen.  There is no place for the preferment of a particular group unless the principles of such preferment and the objectives of it are clearly stated to the public and accepted by them.
3. Gain an understanding that everyone in Parliament is representing all the citizens, not only the voters who support them.  A policy must be beneficial to all the citizens, and must gain the acceptance, at least in principle, of all of them if it is to avoid resistance by those who are disadvantaged.  The readiness of the Whites, for example, to accept measures that will bring others to the same standard will probably surprise the legislators, as will the willingness of the wealthy to assist the poor, if the group that is to be disadvantaged can be brought to believe that it is in the interests of all for the economy to be fully inclusive, and the collective skills, intelligence and experience of all can be concentrated on achieving the accepted objectives.  The current method of blaming the Whites, including Jan van Riebeeck, for all the ills of the country achieves only the alienation of that group, manifested in resistance to the policies and the emigration of skilled persons of all races, depriving the economy of their capabilities.
4. Establish a rule that corruption of all kinds and at every level is not acceptable, and will be revealed and punished.  By its nature, corruption involves at least two parties, and, in many cases, one of the parties is using his or her position of power to offer an advantage to the other party if a payment in one form or another is made.  The only way to prevent that would be to establish a policing and investigative unit under a person of undoubted integrity who does not consider himself beholden to any person for the position, such as the present Public Protector.  That person should be empowered to offer immunity to prosecution to any person who is involved in such corruption if they give evidence resulting in a prosecution, and there must be no holds barred in actions to be taken against those involved in such corruption.  Included in this package could be an increase in the penalties applied against guilty persons who have used their positions in Government to facilitate the corruption, possibly as much as double the penalties otherwise applied.
5. Make the Executive completely accountable to Parliament, with an unlimited question time, an exclusion of prevarication and avoidance of questions, and a requirement that full documentation may be required to support the answers given.  This requirement would include the right of Parliament to give or withhold approval to the appointment of every Minister, Deputy Minister and Director General, or senior executives of State-Owned Entities.  Every responsible Minister must account for reasons for the failure of any entity subject to his or her control to meet its plans, to gain a clean audit report or to issue final accounts timeously.
6. Make the Speaker of the House fully responsible to the House, with the prime purpose not to rely on the Rules, but to give full expression to the principles of democracy and accountability.  This would include banning any preference being given to any member of the Executive or to any Party.
7. Institute a rule that every member of the Executive and every MP must use the facilities provided by the State to the public, including using public hospitals and public transport.  They should, as far as possible, use the same facilities as are used by the public.  Their salaries should be increased by the same proportion as is experienced in their income by the average of all citizens.

Only by breaking down the perception that politicians, MPs and ‘the leaders’ are above ordinary citizens, and that they have responsibility to their sponsors that are greater than those to the citizens, will it be possible to realise the basic principles of true democracy in an economy that is managed in the interests of all citizens.

Business must work with Government to Save the Economy

The State President has had an insight into some of the conditions that underlie growth in jobs, taxes, foreign exchange earnings and, presumably, corruption opportunities.  He is now calling on business to cooperate with Government in growing the economy.  It might be instructive to him to learn Lesson 101 in Economic Management of an economy, a lesson which the ANC Government has either forgotten or never learned.

The lesson is simple.  Everything in an economy depends on business:  taxes, exports, jobs, all of economic activity depends on businesses of different sorts and sizes.  They might be multinational companies operating huge industries or mines, employing hundreds of thousands of personnel at all levels, or they might be one-man shows manufacturing bead jewelry.  They all have several factors in common.

A business needs labor at a reasonable cost.  If the cost is too high, the business will close its doors, or find a way to do what it does with fewer or cheaper employees, or relocate to a country in which the cost of labor is more affordable.  The Government’s populist stance in promoting ‘worker rights’, a ‘living wage’, compulsory adherence to trade union enforced wages, the promotion of ‘human rights’ which have no relevance to the real conditions on the ground, and its failure to provide qualified employees, in terms of education, skills training, reliable quality of qualifications and similar factors that gain votes but do not help employees to contribute to the activities of the business are all factors which strangle or kill businesses, and keep foreign investors from making an investment in the country.

A business needs to know that it is welcome in the country.  This does not mean that the President should spout his insincere slogans, while undermining ‘Capitalists’ or, even worse, ‘White Capitalists’ at every Party congress.  It means that the Government must make a thorough evaluation of every law and every policy that might deter businessmen.  It must remove the possibility (probability?) that some Government body will act against the business in order to coerce the owner/shareholder into parting with a slice of it in favor of a Party favorite.  It must remove the silent white anting of the business by requiring placement of cadres in senior positions, where they can set about the process of silencing comment from the business about things that the Government might view as unfavorable to it.  It must remove the corruption practiced by SOEs such as SAA and Eskom in demanding a shareholding in the supplier company in order to gain a supply contract.  It must remove the possibility of large fines or penalties being imposed on a company in order to allow a favored entity to acquire the business at a fire-sale price.  It must ensure that no penalization of the company can occur in its dealings with a Government body for any but the most valid economically-driven reasons.  It must cease holding the view that a business is a legitimate target from which to suck the blood in order to advance Party ends.

A business must believe that the costs of doing business are reasonable in the light of the facilities and benefits offered to it for that cost.  The high fuel levy was intended to ensure the availability of good roads, not to supplement the cost of social grants.  If the policy is that the ‘user pays’, that policy must be implemented even-handedly.  That means that taxis must not be exempted from the road tolls, and that the cost of such tolls must be applied to the specific purpose of the users, not to subsidize the living of Party favorites.  The costs of doing simple things under Government regulation or with Government imposed bodies must be reasonable.  This includes such things as registering a company, submitting returns required by Government or paying the numerous levies, fees, costs and other matters, including the cost of land taxes, electricity, water, rail or road transport, or even employing workers.

A business must believe that the assets that it builds up will continue to be available to it, not to fill gaps left by Government incompetence or corruption, such as the attachment of farm dams to supplement the water supply to the areas in which no provision for continuing water supply has been made, no regulation may be passed to require a farmer to hand over half of his farm to wage employees without any effective compensation.  If there is no such assurance of property rights into the future, the business man will either not invest or withdraw from the investment, to the cost of all.

How does the Government find out what business wants? 

The answer is not that it turns to the Russians or Chinese for advice on how they do it.  The answer is to ask the businessmen!  And the first step to getting a real answer is to ensure that those businessmen trust the Government and the representative of the Government.  It may come as a rude surprise to the dearly beloved President, that businessmen and –women do not trust either the President or the ANC Government.  Most businessmen have experienced the duplicity of Government, the doublespeak and the outright lies.  They have suffered under the campaigns against them to vilify the Whites and the Capitalists in order to curry favor with the trade unions, the SACP and the ‘poorest of the poor’.  Most know that their desires will not really be heeded.  Most know that the speeches that Zuma is now making are no more than lip service, a normal method of sideling the people who are the absolute foundation of the economy while the Government pursues its own desires of enrichment and reelection.

Unfortunately, all businesspeople know from experience that the pious protestations of Zuma are without substance or true intent.  A leopard does not change its spots, and more than the ANC will suddenly put the interests of the people first.

Zuma - The Beginning of the End

Jacob Zuma’s legal team, accompanied by similar teams representing the Speaker of the House of Parliament and the Minister of Police, suffered a humiliating defeat in the Constitutional Court today, a defeat that went a long way to confirming to South Africans that Justice is alive and well in the country. 

Just one day after President Zuma appeared on SABC TV in the company of sycophantic ANC supporters, and announced that ‘the people love the ANC, the people love the President’, the legal counsel representing Zuma was forced to beg, in the most humiliating plea ever seen in a Court case involving the President or the ANC Government, that the Constitutional Court should not hand down a judgment that could be used by the Opposition to apply for his impeachment!  Another counsel walked herself into a tangle of contradiction and confusion before being forced to admit that the President had contravened the Constitution when he requested (instructed?) the Minister of Police to deliver to Parliament the most obvious tissue of lies ever constructed for that august body, excluding any possibility that he had breached his oath of office to uphold the Constitution, a fabrication that was swallowed hook, line and sinker by his tied ANC Members, for whom Zuma must be close to a God to behave in the unthinking and undemocratic manner the President and his Party have coerced them to.  The next embarrassment arrived when the third counsel talked himself into an admission that the Minister of Police had delivered that whitewash report on the instruction of the President, knowing full well that the President was in breach of the Constitution and his Oath of Office, excusing the conduct by stating that the Minister had acted under Zuma’s orders!  That lamentable statement, the equivalent of the excuses offered by the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials, that they had acted under orders, was pounced upon by a Judge of the Constitutional Court, asking if it was the full truth.  After some stumbling, the counsel retracted the statement, saying that it was not his intention to state that, but the damage was done.  The truth is out – Jacob Zuma has bribed or terrorized his Cabinet into doing precisely what he orders them to do, regardless of the rightness of it, or of their duty under the Constitution, the laws of perjury and even of their personal sense of honor.

Judgment has not yet been handed down, but the writing has clearly been engraved in the concrete of Zuma’s office wall.  He is guilty of a breach of his Oath of Office, of is duties under the Constitution and of his duties to the people he claims to represent.  Zuma has admitted in writing that he is no better than an odious slug, feasting on the carcass of the nation that he was elected to lead, and lying repeatedly about it.  The only question that remains is how long the citizens of the country will tolerate this disease in the highest office?

And so the mighty shall fall

Jacob Zuma has capitulated.  He has made an offer to settle the ongoing Nkandla debate by coming to an agreement to ‘pay back the money’. 

What Zuma seems to fail to appreciate is that any payment, no matter even if it is the whole amount swindled by him from the taxpayers, would not undo what he has done.  Jacob Zuma has long been suspected of taking money by illicit means from the citizens of South Africa.  Numerous Press reports, as well as other rumors and detailed accounts of his activities, almost always through front men, have circulated for years, many starting before his ascension to the Presidency.  Many of these acts are alleged to have taken place at an early stage in his career, and many of them have been the subjects of criminal charges brought against him, yet Zuma has managed to avoid the charges coming to trial, it has been alleged, by inducing the National Prosecuting Agency to withdraw the charges, making it possible for Zuma to continue on his path of destruction of the economy of the country and of the Constitutional Rights, which so many of the citizens held so dear at the time of Mandela.

By agreeing to ‘pay back the money’, Zuma, no doubt, hopes to avoid the potential huge damage that may accrue to him and his Party during the trial by the Constitutional Court in an action brought by the EFF and the DA.  He also hopes, no doubt, that this gesture will bring a reversal in the swelling tide of criticism against him and his Party for their continuing abuse of the Constitution and the Office of President, clearing the way for the Local Government elections to be held later this year.  One hopes that the ever-patient electorate that has returned the ANC to power in each election will, at last, realize that the collapse of the South African economy, which has brought destitution to a large number of citizens over the years that the ANC has been in control (if one may be pardoned for using ‘control’ as a description of the chaos wrought on a previously-strong economy by mismanagement, corruption – as a purposeful aim of those in power or as a bye-product and by the imposition of laws and regulations that cannot be read as anything other than a new Apartheid) must be laid squarely at the feet of the Association for Corruption and Nepotism.  Jacob Zuma is the figurehead of the Party, and a willing leader in the actions it and its top brass have taken, but the leaders of the Party must also accept responsibility for their role in what he has done, and permitted to be done.  Each one of them, the leaders, the Members of Parliament sitting there on an ANC ticket to represent the people is, in reality, doing no more than rubber-stamping the actions of Zuma and his Cabinet, and is complicit in the corruption, the mismanagement, the dishonesty that have become the hallmark of Government in South Africa. A brief overview of the highlights is as follows:

• The Minister of Justice is one of the obvious culprits, for his shameful whitewash of Jacob Zuma’s enrichment in the Nkandla scandal. 
• The Speakers of the House of Parliament, every one from the time that Thabo Mbeki steadfastly refused to allow Parliament to debate the Arms Deal to Baleta Mbete, who has stated, in contravention of the Constitution, that the State President is not subject to the same rules as any other person, who called the armed Police into the House to evict all members of the EFF for disrupting Zuma’s speech of denial (disregarding the Rules in that many of those MPs had done nothing wrong), again in breach of the Constitution, who permitted (or ordered) that freedom of speech and communication of persons within the House were denied by jamming of signals into and out of the House, an extreme breach of the Constitution, must all accept responsibility for the breakdown of the economy, of racial harmony and of democracy in South Africa. 
• The Minister of Public Enterprises must also stand in the dock, accused of the disastrous mismanagement of SAA, SABC, Transnet, Eskom and the numerous other State-owned enterprises that have been permitted to bleed the economy while they destroyed the infrastructure that had been built up over many years, in addition to applying racist procurement requirements that are clearly in breach of the Constitution. 
• The Minister of Basic Education must plead guilty to a charge of depriving millions of pupils of a decent education and destroying the industrial and business base of the economy, even though she has finally admitted that she is presiding over a system that is in a state of chaos, a fact which has been clearly documented in the media over many years. 
• The Minister of Higher Education must be arraigned for his catastrophic insistence on using the universities as an alternative to unemployment, bringing about a sharp decline in the international value of South African degrees, a virtual collapse of university finances and a collapse of the intellectual base of the country, while hiding away in Parliament to avoid facing the angry students. 
• The Minister of Public Works must plead guilty to the charge of failing in his duty to manage the Department that handed out the funds so freely for the construction of Nkandla. 
• The Minister of Finance must be charged with the unreasonable use of the draconian powers entrusted to SARS, used illicitly to enforce the closure or sales on favorable terms of several mines and other businesses, as well as consenting to the misappropriation of funds by top ANC members and guiding the economy firmly down the slippery slope to junk status. 
• The Minister of Minerals and Energy is certainly complicit in the transfer of huge assets at steep discounts to ‘the formerly disadvantaged’, a family that arrived in South Africa in 1994, is resident in Dubai, and can, by no stretch of the imagination, be described as ‘disadvantaged’, unless, of course, they believe that their support of the members of the ANC and their families can be described as a ‘disadvantage’. 
• The Minister of Justice must be held to account for the shameful mishandling of cases, such as the murder of Anni Dewani, for the chaos that prevails in the ‘justice’ system, for permitting Zuma to free on medical parole (against the testimony of doctors) his close associates, like Shabir Sheik to live a life of ease and leisure. 
• The Minister of Trade and Industry must pay for the huge costs brought on the country by the BEE policies that he so actively promoted in the interests of ensuring that the ANC elite and in the process of introducing a new Apartheid, while destroying whatever shreds of racial harmony his colleagues left behind. 
• The Ministers of Homeland Affairs over the years must explain why they worked so hard to destroy the tourism industry by bringing the country and its passports into such disrepute that it is now an ordeal for a South African to travel abroad, and then followed that up with the unreasoning imposition of insane visa regulations.

These people are only a microcosm of the rot that prevails throughout the Government, built up under the ‘expert’ management of the ANC.  An exhaustive analysis of the extent of that rot and of the people who are responsible for it and who must be brought to account in the interests of truth, justice and democracy would cover thousands of pages and will tie up the Courts for decades, but that analysis must be done, to ensure that the citizens of South Africa regain the freedoms, the rights and the democracy that Nelson Mandela promised, and to ensure that the conditions that the ANC has brought to the country can never, never, and never again, be repeated.

African Union as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council

The prospect of the African Union becoming a Permanent Member of the United Nations raises many doubts and fears.

The AU has consistently failed to demonstrate that it represents the many citizens of its nation members.  It has, to a very large extent, been a well-fed, foreign-funded discussion group to enable the Heads of States in Africa to hatch plots to rob their citizens of cash, assets and rights, with practically nothing being done to solve the many large problems confronting the continent, from autocratic leaders who flaunt their ability to disregard their constitutions and the laws of their country, to the abject poverty that is growing apace throughout the continent, while said leaders are gaining in wealth all the time. 

The latest failure of the AU to ensure peace in Burundi, in contravention of its resolution to send a peacekeeping force there to protect the citizens, is a flagrant example of the inability, or unwillingness, of the continent’s leaders to do anything to prevent a wrong developing into a genocidal crisis, or, even worse, into a continental scale war.  The example set by Rwanda of how this can happen was simply ignored.  One wonders what incentives were handed to the leaders involved to look the other way.  However, Burundi is only one of a long chain of denial of the rights of the citizens, which the AU professes to hold dear.  Rwanda is another example, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Sudan, Nigeria others, not to mention the crippling droughts that are killing millions in large areas of Africa, without the AU doing anything more effective than expressing anguish for the suffering of the ‘ordinary people’ affected and calling for foreign aid to feed the citizens (ignoring the fact that the present President of the AU diverted US foreign aid to sell it, for his own benefit, to members of his Party while depriving the Opposition areas of food, while it should have been initiating programs years ago to prevent the development of the conditions that have caused those problems.  The same criticism applies to the AU in its lack of action to prevent the religion-based civil wars affecting many more millions.  The only peacekeeping actions undertaken under the AU have been subject to rumors about how much has been promised, and paid, to leaders of the nations supplying the peacekeepers, with Robert Mugabe again being involved in this way, and even those peacekeeping actions have demonstrated the absolute incapacity of those nations to do anything meaningful in the field.

A consideration that should be of great concern to the citizens of the world is the likely composition of the body that will make the decisions driving the actions of the AU should it gain Permanent Membership.  They will include the likes of Robert Mugabe, a man decisively linked to genocide in his own nation, to election rigging, to the collapse of the previously strong economy of Zimbabwe, and to the promotion of inflammatory statements regarding Western countries, Omar al Shabir, a man who is the subject of a Warrant of Arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (which many of the AU member nations want to abolish, because it ‘targets only African leaders’ – as though they have not earned that), Jacob Zuma, a man who arrogantly ignores the findings of organisms of the State founded under the Constitution to control the excesses of his office, who simply disregards Orders of the High Court (to prevent al Shabir leaving the country, to hand over the tapes recording the discussions leading to the dropping of 749 criminal charges against him, who is likely to be prosecuted on those charges by any new Government not under his control, and who has waged war against the participants in the economy in South Africa in the interests of handing over a large slice of that economy to private interests while, no doubt, pocketing huge bribes in the process, Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, who has pushed through an amendment to the Constitution permitting him to retain his grasp on power for another five years, who is suspected of huge corruption during his term of office, and who is now suspected of genocide of his own people but who remains uncorrected by the AU, by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has imposed a draconian policy of silencing any opposition to his rule, extended indefinitely when he orchestrated a change of the Constitution limiting the Presidential term of office in 2005, which effectively bars any reporter who criticizes his Government from access to the proceedings of the AU, and who runs the country in a totally undemocratic way, and Hifikepunye Pohamba, President of Namibia, a country which views the North Korean style of Government as worthy of emulation.  There have been reports of the corruption of numerous of the African Presidents, including Angola and Nigeria, of genocides carried out in several African countries within recent years, and of other aspects of dishonesty, criminality and lack of adherence to the rules of democracy to which those countries claim to adhere. 

One must ask the question:  “Do we really want to hand over the functioning of the United Nations to an entity that is controlled by incompetents, men who place their own interests highest on the list of priorities with those of the people only a very distant second, men who are the political equivalent of the Mafia dons?