The ANC Confirms its Spinelessness

The ANC has held an emergency meeting of its top brass, somewhat stiffened by numerous Zuma lackeys, and has now reaffirmed that it is firmly held in the grasp of the criminal charge-dodging President.

By this display of its complete lack of social and constitutional obligations to the people of the country, the ANC has proven, if any person in the country were still sufficiently obtuse to believe the ANC propaganda that it represents the people, that the top brass of the ANC are firmly in the same basket as Zuma. They have conveniently ignored the facts, that Zuma has retained in his Cabinet a group of Ministers who have repeatedly and convincingly demonstrated their incompetence and their desire to enrich themselves in every possible way at the expense of the people they nominally serve. By this, they have made themselves complicit in the criminal conduct of Zuma – the word is used advisedly, as the breach of the Constitution and of his Oath of Office by Zuma is very firmly a criminal act, which the ANC-dominated Parliament has failed to punish – and so opened themselves to being punished for those acts alongside him, when an honest Government comes into power. What Zuma has done to secure this is not yet known. It is probably a mixture of threat (his criminally-convicted Minister of Social Affairs remains at her post, despite having brought the country to the edge of a crisis, admitted that “we all have skeletons in our cupboards that we don’t want to bring into the open”) and financial inducement, as the Guptas famously made to Mcibisi Jonas (a cash offer of R600 000 to take the job as Minister of Finance and do their bidding).

The top brass of the ANC should enjoy the spoils of Zuma’s victory over right and justice as long as they come. The day of retribution will surely come, and the mood of the people is now such that the process of law might not be quick enough to satisfy the thirst of the people for honest government. For them, the choice seems to be a la the Nuremburg Trials or the fate that awaited Benito Mussolini. It is doubtful that they will be offered an Egyptian solution, or a TRC way out.

It is sad for the average citizen to be labelled with the same tag as Zuma and his cohorts. They do not deserve it. It is bad enough for a White to be asked, wherever he or she goes in Europe, Australia or the United States whether every South African is a crook. It is even sadder for the average ANC supporter to bear this burden, after the hope engendered by Nelson Mandela, after his Party had created the impression that every ANC capo believed in necklacing any opponent or possible dissenter, but it is saddest of all that the average Black must carry the label of incompetent and crook that the conduct of Zuma and his top brass have attached to them. Never mind. We still have the examples of Mcibisi Jonas and Ahmed Kathrada, both men of high honour and integrity, to show that Blacks are good people, no matter their Party affiliation.

The New Ministers Reveal their Characters

Following the tradition of their revered leader, Jacob Zuma, two of the new Ministers have shown their true characters, revealing the people behind the façade, the people who will be making life-and-death decisions for the South African public for as long as they are there.

Milusi Gigaba, the new Minister of Finance, made his character clear in his first address to the South African public only hours after he was handed the most important portfolio. He stated very clearly that he had spoken to the Ratings Agencies to reassure them that the Government would not deviate from the track of fiscal discipline espoused and stoutly defended by Pravin Gordhan, and that he was satisfied with the discussions. Now he has disclosed that he had been informed by Standard and Poors that they would be downgrading the rating of South Africa’s sovereign debt to below investment grade, but had failed to ‘take the public into his confidence’ because S&P had ‘taken him into their confidence’. That downgrade was a matter of the utmost significance to the South African public, who will suffer for years to come the effects of that decision, yet he felt free to reassure the public that the Treasury was in safe hands. Of course, one may wonder why he told that blatant lie. It was a misleading of the public in a matter of extreme importance, one which has already cost investors at least R50 billion. A charitable observer, one who has failed to notice the way Zuma and his ANC has bled the public over the years for their own benefit, might be willing to take his facile excuse at face value. A less charitable observer, one who understands what is happening, might be more disposed to ask how much profit Gigaba and his masters (the Guptas included) derived from their knowledge that the Rand would tank as soon as the truth became known by the uninformed suckers.

Milusi Gigaba has already caused the tourism industry in South Africa, one of the few brighter spots in the economy, to take huge losses by his ill-advised and ham-handed imposition of onerous visa regulations, which have made it much more difficult for foreign visitors to come to this country to enjoy the delights of slums on every main road leading from an airport to any city, as well as to soak in the reverence for (elsewhere) loathed ‘revolutionary leaders’ like Max, Lenin, Slovo and Castro, all names which epitomize the country which Zuma and his ilk are determined to emulate in this once-advanced country. He has now demonstrated very clearly that he is a true Zuma man. He has lied to the public, and the public now has good reason to doubt any words that emanate from him in the future.

The second Minister to have shown his true character in the first days of his tenure is the new Minister of Police, Fikile Mbalula , a master of threat and bombast, but, apparently little else. In an address to some seemingly unimpressed Policemen and –women, he demanded that they use the firearms they have been given in the execution of their duty (the word ‘execution’ is used advisedly here), harking back to the heady days of the Marikana Massacre, a highlight in the Presidency of Jacob Zuma. Those with long memories will recall Zuma’s remark, early in his Presidency, that the South African Police Service is not a ‘service; it is a ‘force’. Those words are ominous in a country in which the Police are regarded as the enemy of the ordinary people, in which cars driving innocently past a crashed getaway car on the side of a busy highway are shot at by the Police, using their automatic weapons in the way that any terrorist might do, in which the Acting Commissioner of Police makes a statement that three of the men involved in the robbery at the Office of the Chief Justice have been arrested, only to admit a few days later that they would be charged with offences completely unrelated to that robbery after a man he ‘invited’ to provide a statement, noting that the man was not a suspect, subsequently hands himself in to the Police. (It is, of course, easy to use the Security slush fund to buy an innocent person to confess to a crime that the Police do not wish to solve, with the promise that he will be granted early parole, as has been the custom with other ‘placeholders’ who assisted in diverting the public gaze from the real facts.)

Mbalula has shown clearly that, although he would be dropped like a hot potato in any civilized country in which civilized norms are applied to public officials, he is undoubtedly a Zuma man.

The first week of the new Cabinet has lived down to the expectations South Africans have developed for a Government led by the ANC. The new Ministers join the coterie of criminals and incompetents that have seized control of the country that Nelson Mandela inspired with such hope in the early years of the new democracy. The worries that any ethical and honest South African holds for the future have been intensified.

The South African Ratings Downgrade

So it has happened.
The Ratings Agencies have started the downgrade of South African bonds to sub-investment grade, and the trickle that started more than a year ago, with the Nene Gate affair is starting to turn to a torrent. The government-friendly commentators have explained to the gullible public that the downgrade is of no great significance, and is, in any event, the result of a manipulation by White Monopoly Capital and the (unspecified) foreign ‘agencies’ that are working tirelessly to bring about ‘regime change’ in the country, a loathsome thought that is expressed by ANC spokespersons as akin to a ‘counter-revolution’. They completely ignore the fact that the downgrade implies that most of the largest suppliers of funds to the South African Government, and, by implication, any investment entity in South Africa, such as State-Owned Entities, banks and insurance companies, will be obliged to abstain from such lending and investment, cutting off a very significant part of the capital available to the country to support its programs, and also to dispose of any such investment before the next reporting time. The penalty for holding a South African investment is the substantial decrease in the valuation of such investment, in certain cases to zero, forcing the institution to provide additional capital to remain financially solvent. The only exceptions to this rule are the South African banks, insurance companies and pension funds, which have the right to value South African Government securities at 100% of face value. This right does not, however, extend to the valuation of their own securities by foreign investment entities, which will apply the valuation rules as though the investment by the South African entity was made by that body in the Government directly.

The effects of all this will take a short time to work through the economy. The first effect will be on the Rand, which has already started to feel the effect, within minutes of the announcement of the downgrade. The investors are taking into account the helter-skelter disposal of South African investments, almost certainly to South Africans, as there will be practically no other takers. This will be followed by a dramatic drop in the value of such securities as the investors unload them for whatever they can get, leading to a dramatic increase in the yield on the bonds. Practically no new securities will be able to be sold abroad, cutting off the lifeblood of the economy, and the interest payable on borrowings by the Government and others will increase dramatically, first because of the increase in the rate payable and second because the Rand exchange rate will move down, increasing the financial burden of such borrowers in servicing such loans. It is a not-so-slow earthquake of financial disasters for the country and its long-suffering taxpayers. The Government will attempt to compensate for this reduced flow of funding by imposing strict Exchange Controls, trapping the local wealth built up by years of hard work, imposing investment requirements on pension funds and insurance companies and, ultimately printing more money. The rate of inflation will skyrocket, with 25% pa being a desirable target, in contrast with the 3 000 000% of Zimbabwe, and South Africa will have no friendly neighbours to supply electricity without payment,, a factor which has gone a long way to support the Zimbabwe kleptocracy.

Zuma announced very arrogantly during his State of the Nation Address that he was not concerned by what the Ratings Agencies are saying about South Africa, because BRICS is about to establish its own ratings agency, which would support the BRICS nations. How meaningless that would be is apparently not apparent to the economically-illiterate President. A rating by a unit of a body consisting of South Africa (insolvent), Brazil (insolvent), Russia (Insolvent), China (in decline) and India, the sole rising star in this gang of dictators and economic incompetents is unlikely to carry any weight against the verdict of three established and respected Ratings Agencies. However, it suits his playbook of the evil, grasping capitalist nations of the West, and so truth is a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all by the ANC.

After the first effect has taken hold, the Government, still oblivious to the extent of the earthquake their leader has set in motion, will continue to buy votes by upping the social grants, already a subject of contention after the convicted criminal and incompetent, but favoured by Zuma, Minister Dlamini carefully ignored or three years the explicit Order of the Constitutional Court to develop a means of paying the social grants itself (response by Zuma: Crisis? What crisis? only two weeks before the payment system was to implode). The first days of payment in April resulted in many errors, including non-payment and short-payment to indigent recipients, notwithstanding that the payments were made by the same company using the same database as before, leading observers to ask how often that occurred in the past (bearing in mind that a non-payment for a month of ten per cent of the R1 billion per month – R100 million – invested at ten per cent per annum delivers a bonus of R10 million per annum to the paymaster and its associates). It seems unlikely that such errors were ever reported to Parliament or the oversight Committee, and it is close to impossible that the Minister or her crooked boss would have attempted to check on this. A continuation of this practice by these insensitive people is likely to precipitate an uprising by a large number of the now-sensitised recipients, and there are 17,5 million of them. This payoff by the ANC could easily turn into a huge millstone around the neck of a Party struggling to stay afloat. That risk will increase as the flow of funds to the cash-hungry ANC leadership, now desperate to rake off as much as possible before the crunch comes, declines.

At the same time as this problem starts accumulating to alarming proportions, companies – State-owned as well as private – will start to collapse, starved of cash. Jobs will be lost by the thousands, South African Airways will no longer get guarantees of any value from the Government and will default on its existing loans, some R17 billion of them, and defaults on essential maintenance, already in question, will multipy. The same will happen to the SABC, Denel, MossGas, Eskom, PRASA, Sanral, Transnet and all the others that have been playing fast and loose with taxpayer money, paying finder’s fees to the ANC and overpaying for contracts rigged by the dishonest and incompetent ANC cadres. The banking industry, much vaunted as one of the mainstays of the South African economy, although much vilified by the State President and his unthinking lackeys, will contract, selling off foreign subsidiaries to recover the cash value in them before their ownership brings them down, while increasing interest rates – 21% to 25% is not unknown in this country under a similar Government – and so bringing about a further collapse of the building industry, as well as a dramatic escalation in the number of borrower defaults, which will help to add steam to this perfect storm.

Within a year at the most, the South African government will be insolvent, with defaults on the payment of capital – previously easily rolled over – and interest becoming a reality. The hard work of Manuel, Nene and Gordhan in stabilizing the economy, to the limited extent permitted by their communist leanings, will be forgotten in this increasing disaster. The International Monetary Fund will be forced to step in to prevent the spread of the rot infesting first the rest of Africa and then the rest of the world. South Africa will, once again, become a pariah State, the vision and legacy of Mandela drowned under the discovery of the sleaze that was the ANC under Jacob Zuma. Strict austerity rules will be imposed. Everyone will become poorer, and the country will be set back at least twenty years in its economic development, the hopes of 1994, that the country will be a leader in Africa, will be forgotten for another five decades, and along with it, the struggle to keep alive will increase the racist divide that was anathema to Mandela, but was a hallmark of both the Mbeki and Zuma regimes. The spectre of civil war, on tribal and racial grounds will loom, with a high probability that either China or Russia will provide ‘peacekeeping forces’ in the achievement of the goals that Zuma has been pursuing so avidly.

The chance that Jacob Zuma will live to regret his actions is small. The likelihood is that he, in company with at least several of his co-conspirators, will be hanging from lampposts outside his compound at Nkandla. That is the African way.

What has Gone Wrong with Democracy?

Democracy means many things to different people. To some, it carries the right to entitlement to share in the wealth of all. To others, it means the right to participate in public life without intervention by authorities. To the Speaker of the South African Parliament, it means that questions are discussed exhaustively behind closed doors by the Party elite (an undemocratically selected group) and the conclusion then imposed on the public, without any members of her Party having the right to discuss or criticise it in public. To many people, it implies a moral obligation to participate every few years in the tiresome process of choosing from a list of candidates the person or the Party that will, supposedly represent them in the legislature in the forthcoming term.

And therein lies the problem that is bringing down the principle of democracy, not only in South Africa, but also in many other countries around the world, which nominally espouse the description but consistently fail to apply it. Democracy was intended as a fair means to hand the task to represent all of the people in their constituency in the setting of policy, the passing of laws and the monitoring of those on whom the duty to perform those laws in the interests of the whole community, to representatives of those people. Those representatives are entrusted to do this work competently, honestly and to a standard that would normally be regarded as at least good.

The real facts of the situation are quite different.

The people who are put up for election are chosen, not by the people of the electoral district they are supposed to represent, but by a small committee of senior Party members, each with his own, often unexpressed biases, objectives, misunderstandings and preconceptions, but almost all with the primary objective of securing the supremacy of the Party and of their position amongst the Party elite. The wishes of the electorate are, at best, superficially canvassed to garner a list of topics on which the Party, and the candidate as its representative, can wax lyrical. In many, if not most, cases, those topics and the contrived views of the candidate are chosen by the Party bosses and promoted as the real desires of the electorate. They are, in fact, imposed on the electorate, and they are far from summarizing the real interests and desires of the community which the candidate hopes to represent.

If those candidates are elected, they are sent to Parliament or Congress to collect their grossly inflated salaries, where they jockey for position in the Party to gain a Ministerial position, very often by positioning themselves as experts in a field in which they have very little experience and usually not much real interest. It is rare for a Minister to have the education, training and years of experience to become a real expert in a particular portfolio, and certainly not to the extent that one would expect from a candidate for a senior managerial position in a company dealing in that area.

In virtually every decision, in the form of a parliamentary debate or, as Minister, in the process of formulating policies and guidelines for future legislation, the Member of Parliament is subjected to the will of the Party. It is seldom that a Member of Parliament is permitted to vote in accordance with his conscience or, heaven forbid, the express will of the constituents. The process of formulating and adopting laws is almost exclusively performed by the (unelected) Party bosses, who are, in almost every sense, an unelected background dictatorship. In some cases, this dictatorship is controlled and dominated by a single person who has the financial clout to call the shots. Almost nowhere is the real will of the people either canvassed or given effect to.

In the process of doing this, the members of Parliament and, more particularly, the Ministers and the President, take pains to elevate themselves above the level of the people they are supposed to represent, by means of large paychecks and substantial benefits, special protective squads of police or bodyguards, large research and gatekeeper staffs and substantial immunity against investigation or prosecution for their misdemeanors. At Ministerial and Presidential level, those benefits and protections are much more extensive, with the incumbents having the ability to defend themselves personally by using the resources and funding of the State, with the result that taking legal action against one of them is almost prohibitively expensive and extremely difficult, in comparison with a similar legal action against a private individual.

In summary, the supposed representation of the average citizen in the legislature is almost entirely illusory, a fabrication of the political Parties and the Party bosses holding their strings. The illusion is designed to give the average citizen a belief that the principle of democracy works for him or her. It works only to the extent that the Party bosses deem it wise to permit a cent or two of funding to leak through from the vast resources at their command to mollify the voters who count. Of course, they are somewhat constrained in their excesses by the limits on the willingness of the taxpayers to hand over their hard-earned income and assets for ‘safekeeping’ by them, but even that constraint is limited and eroded over time by the relentless PR telling them that taxes are necessary, good and in their interests. The people pulling their strings have tens of thousands of well-paid agents and huge publicity potential to convince the unthinking masses that what they are seeing is good, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes. They have hundreds of billions in funding to hide even the most outrageous excesses, activities and expenditures that would earn the CEO of any effective company a quick trip to the Labour Exchange. Examples abound of crazy expenditure and extreme circumvention of control mechanisms, ranging from a donation by the US Congress of $25 000 000 to fund a peanut museum in Georgia, passed in an omnibus appropriation by Congress in the last hours of a legislative session, in order to allow the Congressmen to leave early for their vacations. After all, it was ‘only $25 000 000’. Another example is the payment of nearly R245 000 000 for the constructions of ‘security enhancements’ to the private home of President Zuma of South Africa, who explained to Parliament that ‘he had not noticed that so much money was being spent on his home’. Yet a further example is the awarding of a tender of more than one billion Rands to the step-daughter of the acting CEO of Eskom, the South African electricity utility, and his protestation, when the award was publicized, that he did not know that she was the Director of the company that was granted the highly lucrative tender, even though they lived in the same house. He later reported that, when he had found out about the tender, he had instructed her to resign as Director of the company. Note that he did not instruct her to repay the profits, or to relinquish the shareholding in the company.

The Members who are elected to Parliament are entrusted with the onerous duty of ensuring that the interests of their constituents, all of the people in the ward for which they were elected, are adequately represented. That means, in effect, that their wishes and desires are given effect as far as that is possible, and that their interests, as voters and taxpayers, are well protected. Those are also the duties of the senior management of large public corporations in relation to the shqareholders, all of whom are required by laws or by codes of conduct to have at least the minimum standards of education and training to be able to understand what they are doing and to do it well. It is not possible to appoint a man as CEO of a bank or insurance company without him meeting these requirements as well as qualifying as a ‘fit and proper person’ in terms of honesty and integrity, proven by years of experience gained in a similar position in a similar type of business. That requirement, passed as law by Parliament, is completely disregarded in the choice of persons as MPs, Cabinet Ministers or State President. In South Africa, a semi-literate man was nominated by his party as President. He had not passed the ninth grade in school, had not even a faint glimmering of understanding of economics, and, in circumstances that have been branded by a respected Judge of the High Court as highly suspicious, escaped conviction on a charge of rape of the daughter of a friend, as well as having 783 criminal charges of corruption, fraud and racketeering, on one of which his counterparty in the transaction was found guilty and sentenced to a lengthy prison term, withdrawn by a friend in the National Prosecuting Authority. To make it worse, despite numerous well-founded accusations of assisting certain business associates to dictate the granting of lucrative tenders and loans by State organs, as well as having been found to have benefitted unfairly from the State subsidy of the construction of his home, and having lied outright to Parliament, he was appointed for a second term. Jacob Zuma was not elected, but nominated by his Party to be President. To compound the wrongfulness, he appointed as Minister of Social Security a woman who had been found guilty on a criminal charge of fraud against the Government in an amount of R245 000. If he had been the CEO of Enron, he would today be in jail, and disbarred for life from holding any position as Director of a company. However, he is a politician, and the rules that are necessary and justifiable in businesses, in the considered opinion of the MPs, do not apply to such elevated personages, although the expenditure of trillions each year is entirely within his ambit.

It can truly be said that professional politicians are a race apart. That, of course, makes the average thinking voter feel powerless, it makes him or her believe that his or her vote means nothing. And in that, he or she is entirely correct.

What can be done to correct the situation?

Although democracy, as it is envisaged to be in utopia, is not a perfect system, it is true that it is better than any other system. It is the one system, if it can be made to work by the rare individual who understands that he is subject to the sacred trust granted by voters, that can work for the good of the people. That is much more often the case in small communities, where the voters have the opportunity to know the man or woman they trust to represent them, and are able to give them a meaningful feedback on what they want done, and how they expect their community to work. At best, that feedback is by each citizen having a working understanding of the need for legislation and how that legislation must be framed and applied. This is not a perfect system. Errors do occur, caused usually by a lack of complete understanding by the citizens or, less often, by duplicity on the part of the representatives of the people in order to attain their own ends – after all, they are still politicians and believe themselves to be superior beings, and so wiser and more capable of understanding – but usually the crooks and incompetents are weeded out by the citizens, who want to get the best for their buck. In addition to that, it is essential that the citizens do not give too much power to the politicians. They are the representatives of the people, and it is essential that their actions represent faithfully the will of the people. That means that any important decision be explained to the people and justified, both in advance and in relation to its effectiveness in the real world. The politicians must be adequately monitored by persons who are qualified to make a correct assessment, and who are willing to admit to their own biases. And they must be held to account, without exception. Any wrongdoing by a public servant or a politician in the execution of his duties should attract a higher penalty than it would for a private citizen, because they swear an oath of duty to the citizens. Politicians should not be allowed to hide behind their offices, nor should they be entitled to recover from the State the legal fees of their defence if they are found guilty of wrongdoing. There should be no possibility of an administrative penalty as an alternative to criminal prosecution, and any breach of the rules of prosecution, as there clearly was in all 784 criminal cases involving President Zuma, should attract a heavy personal penalty to any person involved in any way, even in the concealment of a miscarriage of justice. Politicians and senior civil servants earn very large salaries, often with a lower level of competence or qualification than would be applied in the real world, and they must be made to understand that they are not merely collecting a salary and driving a government car, but are actually performing an important and sacred duty, entrusted to them by citizens who do not have the ability to check on them every step of the way.

Perhaps, if these recommendations were carried out, the citizens would grow to learn that democracy gives them enormous rights coupled with large responsibilities. Perhaps that would restore the faith that the people should hold in the principle of democracy.

What is Zuma doing?

What is Zuma doing?

Jacob Zuma, by replacing Pravin Gordhan, the Finance Minister who rescued the South African economy from Zuma’s last attempt to capture control of the Treasury, and so open its doors to him and his co-conspirators, with Milusi Gigaba who has proven his loyalty to Zuma and his incompetence in almost every other field, has gained his dream team, at a cost to the South African people that will certainly be calculated at least in the billions. By this move, Zuma has proven conclusively to the world that he has only his own interests at heart.

The question that must be asked is why any elected President of a modern state, even if it has been brought down to a parlous level, would take this risk, or, better said, enter this new certainty. The answers should be clear to anyone who has even scanned the headlines over the time that Zuma has held the top job.

The first and most obvious reason is that Zuma’s term of office as President is limited to two terms. That means that, in terms of the Constitution, Zuma will be compelled to leave office by about the middle of 2019, when the next national elections are due.

Zuma faces numerous personal problems at present. The Court has ordered that the National Prosecuting Authority reinstate the 783 criminal charges against him that were withdrawn by his friends in that Authority in order to enable Zuma to take the office of President. Zuma managed to delay the investigation of the process by means of which the charges were withdrawn by failing to order the NPA to hand over the tapes of the conversations leading to the decision to withdraw the charges. That failure could, in the hands of an honest government, be construed as a criminal act. When the criminal charges are brought, there is a very high probability that Zuma will face very lengthy jail terms for corruption, fraud and racketeering, and he will be in need of a friendly face as President, either to stop the charges, to grant early parole (as he did for the only man tried and convicted on those charges – his opposite number in the offences) or to grant him or to arrange that he has immunity from prosecution. That will not happen if the national election results bear any resemblance to the local government result, with the election of an honest government. Even if the ANC were to pull off a major miracle and gain a winning vote, with Zuma’s replacement as President, it is unlikely that the new leader of the ANC, and so the State President, would want to be tainted with the reputation that Jacob Zuma has, and that will almost certainly imply that the new President will want to distance himself (or herself) from Zuma as much as possible.

In addition to the outstanding criminal charges, Zuma will, in the coming years, face further charges, such as the criminal act of breaching both the Constitution and his Oath of Office in the Nkandla affair – his ‘apology for the confusion suffered by the public as a result of his willingness to repay the money’ certainly does not meet the requirements of the Constitutional Court or exculpate him from the consequences of that act, the Public Prosecutor Finding that a judicial enquiry be held into the involvement of Zuma and others near to him, itself a damning requirement, showing clearly the distrust of the upright and brave Public Protector in the honesty or integrity of the President. Any such Enquiry, if conducted by an honest Judge, unlike the recent enquiry into the Arms Deal, which carefully ignored container loads of documentary evidence to come to a conclusion that whitewashed the ANC cadres, must come to a recommendation to Parliament that the involved parties be sent to the big house.

There are numerous other criminal acts, even ignoring the economic sabotage that Zuma and his ANC have wreaked on the country. In any civilized society, Zuma would have been thrown out of office years ago, but in the South Africa that exists today, the Constitution and the bodies established in terms of it is no more than a worthless piece of paper, one that slows the actions needed to be taken to rape the country of the last amount of funds.

The second reason why Zuma has made the moves he did is that he has become addicted to the power of his office and the benefits that flow from such power, not least among them the financial benefits. The Nkandla deal alone scored him in excess of R230 000 000, and the prospect of the Russian nuclear deal will add at least ten billion to that. And there are numerous other corrupt activities that will be added to those figures when the final accounting is done. He will not easily relinquish the glory of jetting in to New York, Addis Ababa and such other places to take his place amongst the world leaders, standing alongside such other notables as Robert Mugabe and Omar al Bashir, both of whom owe large favors dispensed by Zuma using South African tax money.

The conclusion is inescapable: Zuma, in his mind, has to stay in power, now and for the rest of his life. The actions Zuma has taken, not only recently, point to his determination to maintain his grip on power.

Jacob Zuma has a personal security force of 7 000, reporting solely to him. Where else in the world, apart from such idyllic places as Zimbabwe, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela, is a State President in need of such an army? Why in South Africa? He reinforces that army with a stranglehold over the Police (the previous Minister of Police admitted in the Constitutional Court that he lied to Parliament to protect Zuma, and he has been replaced now with another worthless person, previously the Minister of Sport and Recreation, who has shown clearly his racial prejudices, probably in order to prevent the previous Minister from the consequences of appointing a judicially-declared liar and untrustworthy person as the Head of the Directorate of Priority Investigations), and over the Defence Force (don’t forget that he illegally activated over 400 soldiers to protect him, and to make a show of force, at his latest State of the Nation Address to Parliament), over the Hawks, and the National Prosecuting authority. His control of virtually any State entity that manages large funds is clearly founded on the desire to avail himself of a significant portion of those funds, leaving only a 10% commission or finder’s fee to the ANC, while applying the levers of power over those bodies to ensure that his friends and associates gain the lion’s share of the pickings to be made from the contracts issued by those bodies. The fact that the Eskom customers are overpaying for their electricity by at least 30% does not seem to come to his attention, nor that a billion Rand tender has been handed to the step-daughter of the present General Manager, who claims that he did not know of it, although they live in the same house, that the passenger trains do not run because his cohorts have stolen between R14 billion and R23 billion from PRASA, that the poor suffer concern whether they will be paid their social grants because his favored Minister Dlamini insists, against a ruling by the Constitutional Court, on retaining the services of Cash Paymaster Services, a company in which a shareholding of 12,5% (a significant profit generator, in light of the R4 billion p.a. fee charged) remains unexplained, that the General Manager of the Petroleum Fund sold some R23 billion worth of strategic oil reserves at a price significantly lower than the lowest market value in the past 30 years, leaving the country without any fuel reserves, that education in the country ranks in the five lowest in the world, despite costing a greater part of the GDP than any other country, leaving nearly a million schoolchildren each year with a standard of education that is substantially lower than the minimum required in a world where technology is increasingly replacing manual labour.

There can be no doubt that Zuma is working to a game plan that will see him remain at the head of the country when the time comes for him to step down. He does not wish to view the world through steel bars. What will happen to prevent that?

The likeliest scenario sees Zuma precipitating a social crisis, and then using his military muscle to step in and declare a State of Emergency, discontinuing the power of Parliament and the Courts to allow him to manage the situation effectively. He has a good example of this in Robert Mugabe, who has ruled as dictator since he acceded to the Presidency. The timing of the Cabinet reshuffle, the night before Parliament goes into the Easter recess, speaks strongly to that move being made within the next weeks. Zuma cannot run the risk of his manouevres being foiled by Parliament, by attempts to bring a Motion of No Confidence in him, by Constitutional Court actions to force Parliament to impeach him or by moves by the strongly-disgruntled ANC National Executive Committee to ‘recall’ him as President.

When that happens, South Africa will enter a steep spiral of decline in every field, not least the economic. The Rand reacted quickly, dropping 5% in less than an hour.

The only way this disaster for South Africa, Africa and the world can be avoided is for all persons of goodwill to take strong and urgent steps to make their disquiet known to the ANC and to Jacob Zuma in unmistakable terms.

 

Why do I write this Blog? Nicole Stuart explains

I have two main roles in my life. I am a Management Consultant, working internationally to help companies and governments improve the way they do things. Generally, this work results in the client company earning more profit by reducing the wasted costs inherent in many activities, but often the real need is to interact with the world in a more effective and efficient way. Both companies and governments have a set of customers who want good service. This ranges from the sole doctor with a group of ten patients waiting in his waiting room to be seen, through the multinational automaker faced by a massive recall of defective vehicles, to a government body that requires ten months to issue a set of documents to which the public are entitled and which are essential, under law, to perform many of the normal functions of life. My philosophy in my work has always been to attempt to make things better for all involved, for the client, for the ‘customers’ and for the workers who might be displaced as a result of my recommendations. In this regard, I have been remarkably successful, with most displaced workers being offered new opportunities for employment, within their old employers or in new ventures created by my organization. The number of these new jobs presently stands in the tens of thousands, all of them sustainable because we have experts working with the owners constantly to refine their activities.

The second part of my work life is devoted to writing fiction. I have written over fifty books, all of them still selling well in most of the major markets around the world. I have always read widely, since my earliest years. Reading has given me a very large input of thoughts, ideas and ways of looking at the world. Reading has enabled me to visit other people, other places and other times, and to gain some understanding of what I am witnessing. That has worked very well in my consultancy activities, in which I am able to view the ways that numerous people in different places do the same sort of work, to understand that each way is relevant to those particular people, and to evaluate what is best and what less effective in achieving the objective. The consultancy activity has exposed me to many people and the ways they think, their personal viewpoints and experiences. I have found that everyone has something interesting to tell, some fascinating insight into the everyday and the unusual. This exposure has given me a vast pool of thoughts and ideas for my novels, a pool that is constantly bubbling over. Unfortunately, my exposure to other aspects of our world has made me uncomfortable with what we accept, which we do simply because it is so. I believe that we each have an obligation to understand our environment, not to accept what happens around us simply because it is so. We were given brains with amazing capabilities, and it is a denial of our Humanity not to use those capabilities.

Some of the more unsavory parts of the world that I have come to understand relate to politics and to justice. It is no coincidence that many politicians come from the fields of law and religion. Politicians, particularly the less scrupulous of them, are willing to use both law and religion to achieve their own selfish ends, in the knowledge that both fields of learning are substantially closed to the layman. Law is a complex field of study, and it has been manipulated by lawyers to ensure that the less knowledgeable among us are more or less forced to accept what is foisted on us ‘because we say so.’ Although the legal presumption is that every person in a society is presumed to know every law and regulation to which he or she is subject and to abide by them completely, that presumption is clearly a fiction. The number of laws passed each year in most countries is so great that it is impossible for even an expert lawyer to know the detail, so that the average Joe is forced to rely on common sense, an extremely unreliable form of understanding, or on rumor and bullet-point explanations of what the law says. That situation is exacerbated by the fact that each law often delegates the duty of making detailed regulations for the implementation and operation of the laws. Neither common sense nor rumor can protect the layman from transgressing some law or other, probably many times each year. The fact that we generally do not go broke paying the fines or spend years in prison is more luck than good sense.

The other aspect of concern relates to the use of religion by politicians, working on the innate respect each of us has for the pronouncements of men of the cloth. In this way, the President of South Africa declared before an election that his Party would stay in power until the second coming of Christ, yet no-one stood up to denounce this abuse of religion. The same President also informed the voters that, if they did not vote for his Party, they would be punished by their ancestors! Virtually every leader of a nation going to war claims that their cause has the backing of the Almighty, but who stands up to question that? Virtually every dictator claims to have the backing of the spirits for his cause, and almost every senior public representative swears an Oath of Office in the name of God, before proceeding to violate that oath at every turn. Has anyone ever been called to account for taking the name of the Deity in vain?

In all of my books, I attempt to describe some of the things I have learned in an entertaining and, hopefully, informative fashion. Although I want my books to be enjoyed by my readers, I would like them to sit back after reading and digest what they have read. I want their lives to be enriched by my books beyond mere entertainment. I want them to have some new thought or idea, some different set of experiences or exposure, to meditate on in the days and weeks to come.

In my blog, the purpose is more immediate and relevant to a particular situation. I live in South Africa, Germany, Britain and the United States, depending on where my most time-consuming projects are, and I work internationally, with fifteen countries hosting at least one major project. I love each of the countries and the people in them. If you open yourself to people, it is impossible not to like them. However, that does not blind me to the shortcomings I see in them. No single country is perfect, although several come as close to that state as may be possible in an imperfect world. In most cases, the politicians work hard at increasing the imperfections, usually against the real wishes of the citizens. The worst in this regard are the African countries, where the tradition of real democracy is not yet sufficiently deeply embedded for it to become an overriding consideration in the minds of the citizens, most of whom have some tribal tradition in the backs of their minds. Tribal rule is as far removed from true democracy as communism, and it is no surprise that Marxist governments tend to promote tribal contrasts as a means of entrenching their own ideas of a ‘democratic dictatorship’. Although few African countries do not escape this categorization, the one that comes first to mind is South Africa. It is a country that started, under difficult conditions, to establish a democracy, faltering at first under the racist thinking of Apartheid and then again under the dominant Marxist-Leninist policies of the present Neo-Apartheid government of the ANC. In both cases, the idea was to use the differences of the one group against the others as a lever to divide and conquer. I suppose that, initially, the purpose was to obtain and maintain political power, but, in both cases, that quickly degenerated to become an outright kleptocracy, in which political power was used for self-enrichment of those few in control. In both cases it was misguided at best, and almost certainly criminal, yet the rest of the world allowed the situation to develop to the point where the country was reduced to a shadow of what it could have been. The people of the world also pay the price for this, because your success indirectly is my success. The whole population of the world is enriched if at least one part of it succeeds.

And that is part of the message of many of my blog articles. If we work together to overcome criminality, prejudice and partisanship, we can make the world a better place, a much better place for all of us.

I hope that my books and my blog will play a part in that. I hope that, by giving you a view of the facts and of an alternative way of understanding them, I can encourage each of you to take a step in the direction of a better world for all of us.

I would love to hear from you. If you send an email to me at NicoleAStuart@gmail.com, I will send you a list of my books with a brief description of each, and notify you of new books and blog articles as they are published. I will never use your email address for any other purpose.

The Role of Government in the Creation of Poverty

South Africa has been following the precepts and rules of the Leninist-Marxist system of government since the ANC came to power, simply because the leaders of the ANC were indoctrinated in that system from an early age, and do not know any other system. The one exception to this was Nelson Mandela, who came to power as a dedicated communist, but had the good fortune to enjoy an in-depth discussion with the President of Vietnam, a country which had suffered under that system for many years, until an enlightened government came to power, and set about unwinding the evils that had been imposed on it by the unthinking rulers over man years. Mandela, an educated and thinking man, understood what he was being told, and attempted to revise the policies of his Party. Unfortunately, Mandela was an old man, and tired, and the lessons he tried to impart to his successors did not take root. That is not surprising if you understand Thabo Mbeki, a man who was capable of astonishing stupidity in the face of all the fact about HIV/AIDS (remember his famous speech that AIDS was a syndrome, and you cannot contract a disease from a syndrome? Mbeki was the man, the lauded ANC leader, who condemned hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens to a gruesome death because he was unable to understand some simple scientific facts). Mbeki was also hungry for power, as proven by his maneuvering to avoid answering to the South African Parliament about the extensive corruption in the Arms deal of the 1990s, and there is strong evidence that he benefited personally from that deal, although a Commission of Enquiry went out of its way to ensure that the evidence proving this was never presented. Mbeki set the lowest standard for governance in South Africa, and he was ably followed in this by Jacob Zuma and his cohorts.

The Minister of Finance, who is supposedly at war with Jacob Zuma, the President, stated flatly in his 2017 Budget speech to Parliament that the average growth in GDP achieved since the ANC came to power in 1994 has been only 1%. The population has grown at a rate closer to 3%, with the result that a once-thriving economy has been brought to its knees, yet the Government has been unable or unwilling to stop the slide. That they do not know enough economic theory to understand why this is so is evidenced by the repeated attempts to bring down ‘White Monopoly Capital’, which is supposedly bleeding the country dry, to expropriate without compensation all farms (presumably White-owned) which have changed hands since the arrival of the (White) colonists in 1652, with persistent rumors that the expropriation without compensation will be extended to banks, insurance companies, mines and other forms of entrepreneurial activity. The ANC has been unable to explain how this will achieve any improvement in the lives of the ‘poorest of the poor’, a mythical sub-class of (Black) ANC voters who do not have any adequate understanding to be able to distinguish a politician’s promises from reality. There have been numerous attempts to create a spark of life in the economy, all of them doomed to fail by the lack of even a glimmering of understanding of economic reality.

The only way to succeed is to focus on the winning attributes. That means business, industry, commercial agriculture and mining, with the minimum requirements being the provision of a high-quality education, removal of the dead hand of bureaucracy from the field, cutting back dramatically on every aspect of the government that does not contribute actively to the objectives of growth and wealth creation (not the variety generated by patronage!), and allowing the creators of wealth to decide on the allocation of it.

The result will certainly be more very wealthy people - Microsoft employs more than 10 000 millionaires - but also a much greater number of people making their own way into the middle and upper-middle classes.

South Africa is proud of the fact that it pays social welfare grants to 17 000 000 people! We should be ashamed of this. At least half of those people are capable of making their own way in the world, and would be delighted to escape the trap of being charity cases. What is holding them back is the hatred of 'monopoly capital', whether White or other. An economy needs capital to function, and it needs to leave the income that will grow into the wealth that becomes capital in the hands of the people who have proven that they know how to handle it - the entrepreneurs, the businessmen, the miners, the commercial farmers and the industrialists. Taking ten billion Rands per month (the amount of tax money that is channeled to the poor in the form of social grants) from the economically active results in thousands of billions of Rands of potential investment in job-creating activities being lost.

Unfortunately, the communist theory, liberally laced with patronage profits derived from supporting the ANC, militates against any of this real-life logic being incorporated into ANC policy.