The Nkandla Report

During the long wait for the final Nkandla Report, the long-suffering South African public hoped that the Minister of Police would ultimately present an unbiased report that would satisfy the public demand for justice in this apparently flagrant breach of the duties of his office by the South African President.  That hope should have been informed by the long history of dissimulation, of ducking and diving by the incumbent of that office.  The Tapes affair, in which the High Court issued a clear and unambiguous Order that the tapes recording discussions regarding the withdrawal of some 740 criminal charges against Mr Zuma, which Zuma and his stooges managed to avoid complying with by numerous examples of ducking and diving, spurious appeals and blatant disregard of the Order of Court, should have made the citizens aware that Zuma does not consider himself to be subject to the laws of the country.  His multiple attempts to escape liability for the more than R200 000 000 expended by the State on his private residence should have reaffirmed that understanding.  His fervent denials that he had entered into an agreement with the Russians regarding the building of several nuclear power stations at a cost of more than a hundred billion dollars, clearly contradicted by the publication on the Russian Government website of that contract, should have convinced even the most fervent Zuma fan that he is not a person to be trusted.  However, the gullible electorate, the sucker taxpayers, continued to hope that this President would show himself to be a man of honour.  His final sniggering comments in Parliament that the critics who have demanded an honest response from this man should have disabused any notion of intelligence, education or honour.  He made a point of the fact that some of the critics were unable to pronounce ‘Nkandla’.  This is remarkable, coming from a man who shows his lack of linguistic capability in his repeated abuses of the English language, his use of ‘commy-tea’ , ‘apar-thaid’, rather than Apart-heid’ ( a state of separation) to describe the policy that he claims to have spent most of his life fighting, his frequent ‘koting’ of authorities, rather than ‘qu-oting’ as any competent user of English would say, his comments about the ‘vow-lation’ of rights being only a few examples, now give his critics the freedom to use the same rules against him.

The Minister of Police went to great pains to explain that the cattle kraal is a cultural requirement of the Zulu people, and there, presumably, permissible as a security upgrade.  The swimming pool, at a cost of over R7 000 000 was necessary because the local fire service more than ninety minutes to respond, and is therefore a necessary element in the protection of this beloved President, ignoring the probability that the water pressure and unreliable supply of water could have been improved to the benefit of the entire community, at a lower cost.  The visitors’ Centre, it was argued, was essential to provide security to the visitors.  This, in a private home!  About the only thing that the Minister of Police said that might be considered to be true, accurate and meaningful to any of the many people who sat through this jumbled and meaningless piece of apology for the corruption of the President and the stooges who pander to him, related to the incompatibility of the Police and technology!  Virtually every citizen can relate to that!

It has been clear, since the day that the Public Protector issued her brave report, at the cost of a vicious and continuing attack on her personally and on her office by the ANC, that the President has never had any intention of complying with the law of the land or the finding of a constitutionally-established body for the protection of the public against people such as the President and the numerous corrupt people he and his stooges have placed in public office.  Even the Speaker of Parliament, a person who has the duty to ensure that the Executive accounts to Parliament for their actions, has stated clearly that the State President and the members of the tribal ‘royalty’ are not subject to the same rules as ordinary citizens.  That is a dangerous situation, a condition in which the Executive are elevated above the laws of the country, rather than being subject to a higher standard of conduct, by virtue of the level of trust implicit in the offices they hold.  It is a situation in which the newly-built private residence of a single man is given massive preference in the provision of Police services, firefighting capability and many other services above the entire community surrounding it.  It is a condition that places the comfort and personal enrichment of the servant of the people far above the essential needs of the tens of thousands of shack dwellers around the country, above the food needs of the eleven million citizens, including three million children, who have far less than an adequate supply of food on a daily basis.  It gives a man the belief that he has the right to spend two billion Rands on aircraft, when the economy of the country is going down the tubes, while the rest of the continent is growing.

Brief conversations with all levels of people, from CEOs of large corporations to men working in the gardens or sitting beside the streets in the hope of finding a day’s work to fend off starvation for themselves and their families, render a clear conclusion.  Jacob Zuma has lost whatever trust and confidence he may have commanded, before the People came to understand just what he is, and what his Party represents.

Mugabe and the Credibility of the African Union

 

If there was any residual hope that about the African Union has the desire, the capability and the leadership to undertake any of the crucial work needed to turn Africa into a place where civilised people would wish to live, the performance of Robert Mugabe, in his capacity of Chairman of that body, has confirmed that Africa has far to go, and much to suffer before it can join the ranks of modern civilized nations.

Mugabe is a man who, for decades, has enriched himself at the expense of his nation, once one of the hopes of Africa.  He has brought Zimbabwe to its knees with ‘redistribution of the productive farms’, taking them from the efficient White farmers who built from bare land a capacity to supply huge quantities of food to the rest of Africa, handing them to his cronies, who did not have the ability, or even the desire, to operate them with any discernible level of skill or knowledge.  That single move brought Zimbabwe to the brink of starvation, forcing thousands of Zimbabweans to escape his brutal form of ‘democracy’ by moving to South Africa.  The official figure for Zimbabwean expatriates in South Africa is over 500 000, but the real figure is probably in excess of a million.  Mugabe followed that lunacy with the next, the ‘indigenisation’ of mines and the few productive industries that remained in the country, exciting another wave of emigration.  It should be noted that many thousands of Zimbabweans flocked to Apartheid South Africa before 1994, to escape the despotic rule that Mugabe imposed.  Those refugees obviously believed that South Africa at that time was better than the workers’ paradise that Mugabe claims the country to be.  America provided vast quantities of food aid in the form of grain, which was transported in bulk to Durban, for packing into bags labelled “Gift of the American People – Not For Sale’.  Mugabe did not like this, because America, alongside Britain, is, in his twisted mind, responsible for everything that has gone wrong in Zimbabwe under his rule.  He insisted that the grain be packed in plain bags which he supplied, and he then sold that grain to the favoured people in Zimbabwe, refusing to deliver any grain, free or sold, to areas in respect of which which his Party did not hold a seat in Parliament.  Mugabe, in his recent tirade in South Africa, which was watched with sniggering approval by Jacob Zuma, stated boldly that the previous regime had killed thousands of Zimbabwean Blacks, and dumped their bodies down a disused mineshaft.  The truth of that matter is that Mugabe’s ‘freedom fighters’ slaughtered some 40 000 of their Black Matabele opponents and dumped their bodies down the mineshaft of a mine which had been in operation until some years after the accession to the Presidency of Robert Mugabe.  Now, Mugabe has had the arrogance to declare that none of the people who emigrated from Zimbabwe in recent years has done so as a result of the catastrophic economic conditions he and his Party have brought about.

The rapidly-growing flight of refugees from Africa to Europe must surely be seen as an indicator of an escalating disaster in Africa, one that is perhaps more visible to the World than the flow of refugees from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, Sudan and numerous other countries.  However, while those flows are less visible, they are no less there.

Many people simply accept that ‘this is Africa’, and ignore the bald-faced lies told by Mugabe.  It is true that if you tell a big lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  Anyone with an understanding of what Adolph Hitler and his gang of Nazi lunatics did to Germany and to Europe will recognise that our meek acceptance that ‘this is Africa’ is putting us all firmly on a path to catastrophe on a world scale.  The sniggering obsequiousness of Jacob Zuma, Julius Malema and other aspirant African billionaires, their abject hero worship of Robert Mugabe for the example he has set in his rise to power and obscene wealth by means of corruption and outright theft, and his self-serving stance of hatred of the Whites and the West, must surely be a warning to the world that a cancer is growing within Africa.  The cancer has taken root in South Africa, where the ANC has been single-minded in its support for the corruption headed by the State President and strongly supported by the Speaker of the House of Parliament in her views that he is not subject to the same rules as other citizens.  That cancer will continue to grow, accelerating its destruction of the hope for peace and prosperity in Africa that drove the West to support the independence of the former colonies.  That cancer has the potential to bring the hopelessness of Africa to the West, just as the acquiescence of Britain and the United States to the development of the cancer of the Nazi threat under Adolph Hitler, their desperate desire for ‘peace in our time’ epitomised by the speech of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, plunged the world into a war that changed the lives of millions.  As Roman Herzog said in his first speech as President of West Germany, ‘we must solve the problems of Africa in Africa, otherwise we will have to solve them in Europe.’  Now is surely the time for the Western world to formulate a set of principles to be applied to their dealings with Africa and its dictators, under whatever guise they may hide.

The problems of Africa are clear to see by anyone with the interest to look.  They are not problems of race or religion.  They are problems of dictators grabbing whatever there is, leaving the people to starve and to provide a fertile ground for extremism in every form.  They are the threat that the rest of the world has to deal with, now under principles, or in the future under arms.

Thought Leaders

In any civilised society, university students are placed in an elevated position.  They are supposed to be above the herd, in terms of their thinking capabilities, their knowledge of events and history far beyond the scope of the courses they are taking, and in terms of their ability to apply reason to what they intend to say before the words are uttered.  They are the leaders of the future, and most of them accept the responsibility that this imposes on them.  That has always been true of South African university students, many of whom have shown their ability, their courage and, sometimes, their foolhardiness in speaking truth to authority.  This is sometimes punished, and, usually, not rewarded, as has been shown conclusively by the thousands of such students who stood up to the Apartheid Police, in demonstrations and in silent roadside vigils in sun, rain and in icy winter conditions.

Occasionally, one such student develops political aspirations, and decides to use his position of putative thought leadership to make outrageous statements, hoping that the unthinking herd will follow his lead.  Often, those who hear the statements, or who are the target of them, understand that the statements are part of the immaturity of the person, the mental incapability to understand the history and the profound meaning of such history or, sometimes, the simple abject stupidity of the person making such statements.  However, at times the speaker is a person who puts such stupidity arrogantly on public display, no doubt with the intention of gaining the notoriety that persons of much lesser learning arrogate to themselves by means of profoundly stupid utterances.

Such a person is the President of the Students Representative Council of the University of the Witwatersrand, Mcebo Dlamini.  That body has always been contrarian, but it has usually maintained a position that might be understood, if not forgiven, on the basis of the immaturity of the members.  However, when Dlamin published a statement on Facebook that every White person had elements of the Nazis in them. Dlamini demonstrated conclusively his lack of intelligence, his lack of capability to understand the lessons of history, and his lack of the discretion that one would expect of a leader of a student body in the previously august body of learning, a body that, at one time, had the ability to claim the moral high ground, at a level well above that of the ANC, which had proved by its actions against its own cadres and against the mass of Black people that it claimed to represent (don’t forget the campaign of cold-blooded murders, ‘necklacings’, carried out under the instruction of Comrade Winnie).  He explained his views in a TV interview, which spoke very clearly of the minimal knowledge he has of the facts of the rise to power of Hitler, even of the timeline.  Dlamini compounded his stupidity by stating that he ‘likes the Nazis, for their organisational abilities’ something that was undoubtedly better than the ANC, but which cannot in any sane society be used as a reason for respect for a group of vicious, self-centred genocidal thugs which drove one of the most advanced and civilised societies in a lemming-like scurry over the precipice to national suicide.  He also admires the way that ‘Hitler brought back the pride of the German people in 1938’, which happens to be the year of the most horrific anti-Jewish actions of that murderous Government.  This is the sort of populist claptrap drivel that one has come to expect of persons like Julius Malema (it is noteworthy that the EFF Wits Branch has come out in support of Dlamini’s comments) and certain senior members of the ANC.  Come to think of it, that could be a description of the ANC and the EFF!

One wonders what course of study Dlamini is undertaking, and what his level of success in those studies might be.  One also wonders whether the University will stand up for what is right and good, and take the logical action of expelling this man.  Evil deserves to be punished, and there can be no doubt that Dlamini is evil.  This will not be censorship.  It will be the excision of a dangerous cancer, one that needs to be removed before it infects the entire society.  It would be comparable with the imprisonment or execution of Adolph Hitler before he imposed his insanity on a noble nation.  If the University fails to take such an action, it would be reasonable to conclude that it endorses his statement.  I personally hope that this will not be the case.  I worked hard to gain my two degrees from Wits, and, until recently, I was proud of them.  The fact that a man like Dlamini can be a leader of the students of Wits deprives me of that pride.  I, as well as thousands of my peers, dread that we, our intellectual honesty and our moral standards should be compared with Dlamini.

Xenophobia and Education

 

Public discussions regarding the causes of the recent outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa have brought several intriguing questions to light.

The most obvious question is that of the leadership vacuum at the head of the Government in South Africa.  None of the persons or bodies that should have been most directly involved in efforts to prevent or stop the violence were to be seen.  Even the Zulu King, who, by his comments that foreigners should leave the country, was probably most directly responsible for kicking off the latent violence, failed to take any effective action, or even any action at all, to stop the violence.  One of his representatives made the remarkable assertion that the King is the direct representative of God, and therefore that anything that the King says has the force of the Holy Word, and cannot be questioned or investigated.  That statement raises frightening possibilities.  The ‘God-King’, as he is known, is able to give any instruction and have it enforced without question, no matter how irresponsible or ignorant that instruction and the understanding and knowledge underlying it may be.  Any intelligent observer would be entitled to question the educational and intellectual capability of the King to fulfil the role that he has assumed, and that has been supported by the laws of the country.  The statements made by the King and his lack of any effective action to prevent a situation that has the potential of escalating to a full genocide certainly give rise to doubt that those questions can be answered satisfactorily.  Equally, the frightening lack of effective action by the President and his cohorts confirm the opinion that the leadership of the country, apart from the tribal leadership of large portions of the community, which appear to be fragmented and uncoordinated, has no clear plan for the country, other than simply retaining office so that they can continue to benefit from the extra-ordinary income flowing from their offices.  The fact that Zuma cancelled his visit to Indonesia to attend to the local problem was lauded as an example of his statesmanship can only be seen as an illustration of the absolute lack of capability of the State President to fulfil the requirements of the office.  The excuses given by the Ministers of State Security and Intelligence are equally lamentable.  Both of those worthies should have known of the trend, and taken effective attempts to defuse them long before it gave rise to the violence and killings.  Given the lamentable state of their portfolios, one must ask what else is occupying their attention.  It is horrifying to think that other developing crises have been at the forefront of their minds during the build-up to the riots.

An obvious shortcoming that should be addressed urgently is the lack of any meaningful education in economic theory.  Calls by apparently well-spoken and educated people to talk shows raised the point that the foreigners do contribute to the creation of jobs by the need for the Department of Home Affairs to document them!  If that is a meaningful source of jobs, perhaps it would be easier to close down the Department and pay the amount that is expended on it directly to the unemployed!  The achievements of the Department are extremely poor, with an application for a Birth Certificate requiring nearly two years, so far!  The callers and, in most cases, the TV and Radio commentators show a remarkable lack of understanding of the chain of economic activity.  Even the Premier of Kwa Zulu Natal made a proposal that the solution to the ‘threat’ posed by the foreign shopkeepers would require an intervention to enable the locals to buy their goods wholesale and thereby become effective as shopkeepers in competition with the foreigners!  One wonders why the foreigners, who face the same purchasing constraints as the locals, should be more effective than the locals.  If that question could be answered, it might go a long way to solve the lack of competitiveness of South African industry as a whole!  Perhaps we need to appoint a foreign shopkeeper as Minister of Trade and Industry, or even as State President, so that he could apply his superior capabilities for the good of the nation!  It appears to be almost certain that the poor education of the bulk of the population is an important factor in the inability of South Africans to earn an income.  One wonders why this should be so, given the huge sums expended on education.  A possible answer lies in the fact that the ANC is heavily committed to a Marxist-Leninist policy, relying on their training in Russia, East Germany and Cuba at the time that they were still terrorists.  It may come as a surprise to the ANC that training in communist theories is very far from education in economics, law and politics.  It may equally come as a surprise to know that Government in a democratic country is intended to be directed to the benefit of the population, not for the purpose of enrichment of those holding office.

The comments made by and about the Zulu King, a man who holds an hereditary office which is devoid of any traces of democracy, give some indicators of what is urgently required to stabilise the country.  Democracy has failed in South Africa, starting the process under Thabo Mbeki, when he, abetted by the Speaker of the House of Parliament, went to extraordinary lengths to stifle any investigation into the corruption surrounding and driving the Arms Deals in the 1990s.  Jacob Zuma took the baton of autocracy and corruption from Mbeki, running with it and deepening their hold on the fledgling democracy that Nelson Mandela founded.  It is true that the Constitution was deeply flawed as a result of the personal and political interests of the delegates to the Conference that gave rise to it, flaws that have deepened as the ANC used the words of the Constitution to entrench their political support, putting the payoffs to the National Party members into the shade.  It has now become acceptable for the present Speaker of the House to make rulings against the Rules of the House and the terms of the Constitution, and to state explicitly that the State President and the Black royalty are not subject to the rules that apply to others.  The Zulu royal House has existed since the time of Shaka, a bloodthirsty tyrant who built the Zulu nation by means of conquering the smaller tribes, and killing any person who might become an opponent in the future.  That founding is, to say the least, illegitimate.  It is less legitimate than colonialism, and is certainly not an acceptable basis for the management of a nation that is seen by the world as a democracy.

When the riots are over and the damage done, to the foreigners and to the country, a sober assessment must be made of the suitability of the Constitution, the offices under it, and the people who fill those offices, to manage a modern economy.  That will not happen, because the result of any intelligent assessment will certainly be a change to the system that has been so profitable for the hereditary tribal leaders and the ANC.

Xenophobia in South Africa – Who is Next?

 

The wave of xenophobia that is sweeping over South Africa raises a number of interesting questions.

The sudden outbreak of violence against non-South Africans in seven cities widely separated around the country raises a strong suspicion, if not the certainty, that it was orchestrated.  It would seem surprising that so many ordinary people would suddenly take it into their heads to attack foreign store owners, looting and burning their shops and assaulting and killing the owners.  One of the attackers, a young woman, said on television that she would sit at home doing nothing while the foreigners opened their stores and stole the jobs of the locals.  That sort of sentiment could only have come from someone who wished to spread hatred and discontent.  Think about it.  The foreign store owner is a single man, operating a store of about ten square metres in area.  The sole worker in the store is the man, and the reason he has the store is that there is a demand, which no local is satisfying.  No jobs have been taken from locals.  On the contrary, the presence of the store provides a service to the local community which they need, and which they are not compelled to use.  The large number of people who protested the attacks is a good indication that a considerable proportion of the people in the relevant areas accept the presence of the foreigners and appreciate the service they offer.  That suspicion obviously raises the question of who is behind the sudden outbreak.  It seems likely that the instigators of these vicious attacks are members of one of the political parties which have staked their position in the area declaring that South Africa is for the South African Blacks.

The sudden rash of violence occurred at the time that Robert Mugabe arrived in South Africa to make his hate-filled racist speech condemning the ‘colonialists’.  Can it be a coincidence that the violence that broke out at that precise time seems to have been carried out by people bearing a strong resemblance to Mugabe’s teenage ‘war veterans’, who have terrorised the population of that sorry country for so long?  That view is reinforced by the wishy-washy speech by President Zuma, who has established his credentials as a White Hater over and over.  Zuma spoke of the foreigners as being ‘our African brothers’, words that have been used by him and his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, to give the impression to the unthinking Black populace that Whites are excluded as legitimate residents of the country, no matter the length of their South African family tree or the legitimacy in economic and other terms of their presence in the country.  It sounded very much as though Zuma was paying lip service to the principles of human rights that were so much a foundation stone of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation, while, at the same time, preparing the thinking of the thugs for an extension of the hatred of ‘foreigners’ to the White population, which has been so much a thorn in the side of the ANC.

The fact that the outbreaks of violence have occurred in so many cities at the same time seems to have escaped Zuma’s attention.  Zuma says that it is wrong to think of the attacks as xenophobia.  They are a manifestation of the people’s need for jobs!  That is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the thugs were filmed carting off freezer cabinets!  Zuma’s contention is perhaps a cause for the very ineffective action of the Police in controlling the violence – only thirty-five people have been arrested during the outbreaks, and at least two of those were the foreign shop owners who were trying to protect their property and save their lives!  There has been no mention of any plan to bring in the Army to fill the presence gap of the Police, although huge sums of money are expended every year in providing peacekeeping services to our brother African dictators.  Apparently, the lives of a few dozen foreign store-owners, most of whom are here legally, are of less importance, or, perhaps, it is necessary to allow the violence to spread unchecked so that the next phase of the plan can be commenced.  Looking at the history of Uganda under Idi Amin, f Ruanda, and of Zimbabwe, it seems to be not unreasonable to suspect that the next phase will be a ‘spontaneous’ spread of the hatred of foreigners to the Whites, who are frequently accused of controlling the economy to the detriment of the Black population.  Zuma has already built a security wall around himself in case there is a backlash, with over 7 000 security personnel who report only to Zuma and who owe their allegiance only to him.  Zuma has also gained control over the proceedings of Parliament, where the Speaker goes to great lengths, even illegally as has recently been demonstrated and confirmed by the High Court, to protect Zuma.  The Speaker has stated that Zuma is not subject to the normal Rules of Parliament!

In a blog some years ago, this writer asked whether the Whites will be handed the same treatment as the Jews in Hitler’s Germany.  The rise of the band of thugs, coupled with the undoubted active propaganda that are behind the attacks on innocent foreign shop owners looks suspiciously like the thugs and the tactics that Hitler used to bring himself to power.  The world should take note of this before a new world war can develop.  South Africa and its allies have the potential to develop in this way, and it seems that the first steps have been taken.

Black Advocates – Equal Opportunity or Government Racism

 

The law and the policy of South Africa is designed to ensure that Black people are given equal opportunity to act in the economy of the country.  There is no profession more committed to that ideal tan the legal profession.  The lawyers were in the forefront of the fight for equality, both Black and White lawyers.  However, it is a concern that there is now a discussion about the preponderance of White advocates in the people used by Government and large corporations in their legal battles.  The Black lawyers are calling for the use of Black advocates to a much greater extent, and for a binding policy to enforce this.

The simple reason for the use of White advocates is that those advocates offer the best opportunity to win the Court action, which is the purpose of the litigation.  This simple reason introduces a range of other considerations.

First and foremost, the Constitution calls for equal opportunities to be available to all qualified persons, regardless of race.  Any Government policy that goes contrary to that intention is contrary to the Constitution.  The Government has progressed a long way towards negating that principle of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ in its BBEEE legislation, which clearly denies White males the opportunity to realise their potential, regardless of the superiority of their qualifications or their capabilities.  It is very clear that the Government is exercising racial discrimination on a broad base, to the prejudice of the economy and of its general population.

The standard of Government education in South Africa is too poor to provide the minimum requirements for an effective advocate.  Unfortunately the fact is that a majority of the people who obtain a good education are Whites, partly because the White population recognises the need for an adequate education and are willing to pay for it.  The Law Society issued a report several years ago that a large proportion of newly-graduated lawyers were not functionally capable of using language, an essential element of legal training and education, adequately.  Many of the university students entering universities need to undergo corrective education in language, mathematics and science.  What chance do these people have of becoming effective legal professionals?

Another important factor is that the home background of the Whites is often more modern and aligned to the needs of the modern society and its legal thinking.  A ‘herd boy, growing up in the rural areas’, as Jacob Zuma proudly claims to have been, is exposed to the tribal systems of ‘law’ and thinking, which are very far from the modern society of the cities, and adapting to a modern system of laws is a big jump in his mental structure. 

A further factor is that the White advocates have gathered experience that enables them to be more effective in the task, experience which can only be gained from years of doing the job, taking on increasingly responsible and complex tasks and learning on the job and from peers.  It is very seldom that an advocate who graduated ten years ago will be as effective in a legal dispute as one who graduated forty years ago and has practiced his profession since then.  A quota system cannot impose that experience or replace it.

The imposition of a formal quota system in the use of legal professionals, reinforcing the informal quota (or even exclusive use of Black professionals) will be another step in the imposition of a new Apartheid, and will be even more damaging to the effectiveness of Government in its work.  Government has an obligation to use only the best legal services available for the job.  That is part of the requirement that Government use its financial resources most efficiently, and that obligation cannot be satisfied if the obligatory use of a less competent Black advocate results in the Government losing a Court battle, with the result that it has to pay legal costs as well as losing the ‘meat’ of the action which, almost by definition, has a value in excess of R100 000 per case.  This is clearly shown by the annual awards by the Courts of damages for wrongful arrest of over R100 million per year against the Minister of Police.

All of this is not to say that there are no excellent Black advocates.  There are, and they should be retained in exactly the same way as the excellent White advocates.  However, the requirement that Black advocates should be used because of a quota system, rather than their legal and Court excellence, can only result in the standard of legal representation of the State declining even further.  Before the advent of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, an advocate had to earn his or her place in the legal profession the hard way, by achieving good results in all of the courses leading to the law degree, including examinations in English, Afrikaans, Dutch and Latin as background knowledge essential to an understanding of the law and the legal precedent cases, and by doing excellent work over a long period of time and so gaining a reputation that would attract further and more responsible briefs.  There can be no reason why a Black skin should be a reason to sort-circuit this process.

Whites and Foreigners in South Africa

The recent escalation in attacks on foreigner-owned businesses in many cities in South Africa are a predictable result of several factors, all of them promoted by the ANC and its allies.

The first factor, of course, is the extreme poverty of many people, particularly Black people, which results from the abjectly poor economic policies of the ANC Government, coupled with what seems, more and more, to be a policy to downgrade the mental capabilities of the electorate by providing one of the worst educations in the world.  A very large proportion of the populace is not equipped to participate in a modern economy, even with the forced advantages that the BBEEE policies provide them.  The ANC Government has intentionally removed many of the structures of education and training built up by successive Governments to keep the capabilities of the populace, or, at least, a part of the populace at a level near to that of Europe and the United States.  The Nurse Training College, the trade skills training centres, Medunsa, and many other places and systems of training have been dismantled and are now needing to be built up again, under management that has been shown repeatedly to be lacking in capabilities, skills and experience.  The people whose skills could have been brought to an employment-capable level have been left to fend for themselves, and the economy has gone into a nose-dive as a result, with skilled contractors being imported by virtually every organisation, such as Eskom, at huge cost and at huge dislocation, and, as is clearly evident, under the management of people who are more interested in driving expensive company cars and filling their Swiss bank accounts for as long as they hold the position, rather than promoting the objectives of the organisation or the community.

The second factor is that the Government and its organs have been directly involved in promoting discord between the Blacks and the Whites, as is evidenced by the recent spate of anti-colonialist statue removal demonstrations.  It can be no simple coincidence that these demands arose at about the time of the State Visit of that prime example of the Black destruction of democracy, Robert Mugabe, who spoke of digging up the remains of Cecil Rhodes, while his protégé, Jacob Zuma, sniggered his enjoyment in the background.  It seems to be clear that the present policy of the Government is to stir up hatred between the Black population and the Whites, as is evidenced by a series of television shorts and programs aired by the SABC ‘documenting’ the atrocities committed by Whites throughout Africa, such as the killing of the Hereros in South West Africa in 1908 (!) and the ‘anti-racism’ advertisement, aired several times per day, listing ‘Whites Only’ signs from Apartheid days, with a brief comment at the end of this inflammatory advertisement hat Nelson Mandela said that to hate is learned, and to love can also be learned.  Remarkably, nothing is said of the thousands of Whites who stood against Apartheid at the risk of imprisonment, or of the fact that the National Party was limited to less than a two-thirds majority at every election by White voters.  It is clear that a large proportion of Whites were against Apartheid from the inception.  Even Jan Smuts, a South African Prime Minister and one of the founders of the United Nations, is on record as having warned the National Party in 1948 that their racial policies would be a move that they would regret in years to come.  However, those facts have all been ignored in the rewriting of history to favour the ‘freedom movements’, and the truth has been perverted, just as Robert Mugabe now arrogantly claims that the British and the Whites were responsible for the slaughter of 45 000 members of the opposition tribe, their bodies being dumped down the shafts of mines, when it is a documented fact that those mines were in full operation until more than a year after Mugabe came to power.

The third factor is that one of the organs of Government, the King of the Zulus, made a public statement that foreigners were taking the jobs of locals, urging those foreigners to return to their countries of origin.  The fact that the Leader of the Zulu nation made this statement is noteworthy, particularly against a background of statements by Zuma and his cadres that the ‘problems of South Africa started when Jan Riebeeck came to the Cape’, clearly a statement that the Whites are foreigners, whereas the Black nations are not.  That ignores the fact that the Blacks are just as much immigrants as the Whites, having migrated from the north via an eastern route, to massacre the then-indigenous races of the area.  The statement also ignores the massive advances that the Whites and other ‘foreigners’ brought to the country.  Shaka Zulu, the national hero of the Zulu nation, was a murderous despot living in a Stone Age society when the Whites arrived in the area, yet he is glorified, ignoring totally the thousands of deaths of Zulus at his command.  History has been rewritten, and the credulous population, without the education to allow them to know better, is being exhorted to act against those who are not one of them, regardless of what they have to offer.  South Africa is going down the same road as Uganda did under Idi Amin.  If you have any doubt about that, ask one of the Indians who, as part of the mainstay of the Ugandan economy, were massacred, the survivors being driven from the country at the behest of a lunatic dictator.  Those Indians took their skills and work ethic to other countries, depriving Uganda of them, just as the Whites and other non-Blacks have been, and are being, driven from South Africa.  The economic and developmental results are clear to see in Uganda, as in South Africa.

The lack of public order, taking its example from the leaders of the ANC, who see that it is easier to take than to earn, is a major factor in the current attacks on foreigners.  This lack of effective policing is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the TV cameras arrive at each new looting well in advance of the Police, and by the ineffective Police action at each looting.  Is it really the case that a Policeman is slower than a looter carrying three trays of beer?  One could reasonably expect that at least ten or twenty looters would be arrested at each crime scene, yet the Police seem to be unable to do any better than to arrest a foreign shop owner who shot someone in the process of protecting his property and his life!  Of course, given the example of the extremely expensive arrest and extradition of Shrien Diwani and his subsequent acquittal after preparations of several years for the trial, it is perhaps understandable that the Police are reluctant to take action to arrest and bring to trial a simple looter and arsonist, particularly, probably, when he is doing no more than to give effect to the exhortations of his King.

Certain ANC-biased commentators claim that the attacks are a means for the starving poor to obtain food.  It is remarkable that the film clips of the attacks on foreigner-owned stores show the looters running off with crates of beer, the Police stealing packs of toilet paper!  One of the foreigners asked the obvious question.  ‘If they are stealing to feed themselves, why don’t they break into local-owned stores?  Why are foreigners being targeted?’  It is clear from the fact that the looting is taking place countrywide that the actions are being centrally controlled.  Is it a policy of the ANC, in contradiction to the statement of Thabo Mbeki that ‘South Africa belongs to the Africans’, (a statement that implicitly excluded the Whites), now to remove the non-South Africans, perhaps also excluding the Whites from the permitted group?  It certainly seems to the observers that this is the case.

The dissolution of the rule of law, upheld by well-trained and effective Policing, to the current state of mob rule, of hints given to the racist extremists by the President, of wishy-washy attempts by Government bodies to regain control of the country from the mobs, supported by statements by the President that show his unwillingness or inability to lead a law-abiding country, is an extremely worrying development.  The continuing slide of the country’s economy and the demolition of the excellence that had been built over decades is likely to continue, notwithstanding the statement by Zuma regarding Eskom that ‘We have plans’.  The public is entitled to know what the plans are, if, in fact, such plans do actually exist.  They are entitled to have a full elucidation of such plans in a public forum, such as Parliament, rather than the sniggering statement of omnipotence that Zuma made during his State of the Nation address.  If the Government does not have realistic and effective plans, ones that can stand up to public scrutiny and comment, that is a cause for huge concern.  If the Government does actually have plans, but is unwilling to make them public, that is cause for even greater concern.  Unfortunately, a rational analysis of public statements, evaluated in the light of events, makes one believe that the Government does have plans which have the objective of taking total control of the country, in the way that Stalin did in Russia, but which have no more than political and self-enrichment objectives, and which ignore the plight of the citizens of the country.  It seems more than likely that South Africa will continue to follow the lead of Zimbabwe.