Thatcher’s death divides

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was an “attractive” woman, who did more to help South Africa to “get rid of apartheid” than any other leader in her time, former foreign affairs minister Pik Botha said yesterday.

Thatcher died yesterday following a stroke. She was 87.

Botha, who served as the last foreign minister of the apartheid government, said while Thatcher was a staunch opponent of apartheid, she “listened”, and “understood” the issues that South Africa faced in abolishing it.

“She and [US President] Ronald Reagan did more to move South Africa to get rid of apartheid and towards a new constitution than any other leader outside the country,” said Botha, who served in the first post-apartheid government from 1994 to 1996 under President Nelson Mandela. He joined the ANC in 2000, but later criticised some of its policies.

The ANC’s tribute to Thatcher differed sharply from Botha’s in its assessment of her role in the dismantling of apartheid.

Though acknowledging that she was a major leader on the world stage, the ruling party said: “The ANC was on the receiving end of her policy in terms of refusing to recognise the ANC as the representatives of South Africans and her failure to isolate apartheid after it had been described as a crime against humanity.”

Botha met Thatcher in the early 1970s when he and other officials were invited to the UK. He later had several run-ins with her, when the two countries clashed on issues such as the Falklands war and the deportation of the “Coventry Four”, a group of South Africans arrested in London while attempting to smuggle arms to South Africa.

But, said Botha, “she helped me in so many ways to keep South Africa going internationally”.

He remembers a “historically critical moment”, on April 1 1989 – the day UN Resolution 435 was to have been implemented in then South West Africa (Namibia). The resolution was a UN-adopted proposal for a ceasefire between the South African Defence Force and the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, and a UN-supervised election in the country.

“[Thatcher and I] met at Windhoek Airport and we heard that Swapo had come over the [Namibia/Angola] border in their thousands, heavily armed,” said Botha.

“Our troops were contained in their barracks, and she said [that] under no circumstances were we allowed to release them to fight the incursion. But she then helped me persuade UN Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar to allow the SADF troops to fight the incursion. If our troops weren’t freed to repel them then South West Africa would not have gone to elections peacefully,” said Botha. “Her death saddens me tremendously,” he added.

ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said: “Her tenure as prime minister redefined British politics and public administration and these impacted greatly on European politics and governance. Long after her passing on, her impact will still be felt and her views [will be] a subject of discussion.”

Former president FW de Klerk said Thatcher was a steadfast critic of apartheid. But, he added: “She consistently, and correctly, believed that much more could be achieved through constructive engagement with the South African government than through draconian sanctions and isolation.”

Social media was overflowing with people writing “Ding Dong!” in reference to the Wizard of Oz song, and posting pictures of themselves drinking in celebration of “Margaret Thatcher Death Day”.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in Brixton, an area of south London in Britain which suffered serious rioting in the 1980s, to celebrate Lady Thatcher’s death. Holding notices saying ‘‘Rejoice – Thatcher is dead’’, about 200 people gathered in the neighbourhood, a hotspot of alternative culture, and toasted her passing by drinking and dancing to hip-hop and reggae songs blaring from sound systems.

‘‘I’m very, very pleased. She did so much damage to this country,’’ said one man brandishing an original newspaper billboard from 1990 announcing Thatcher’s resignation. Others scrawled ‘‘Good Riddance’’ on the pavement.

‘‘We’ve got the bunting out at home,’’ said Clare Truscott, a woman in her 50s wearing a sparkly beret and holding a homemade sign reading ‘‘Ding dong, the witch is dead’’.

‘‘I’m from the north, where there were no jobs, where the industry was rapidly disappearing, and her policies ensured it went more quickly.’’

Brixton was the scene of fierce riots in 1981, two years after Lady Thatcher became prime minister. Carole Roper, a full-time carer in her 50s from north London, said: ‘‘We’re here to celebrate her death.’’

Sipping from a can of beer, she insisted: ‘‘I don’t think it’s vindictive. It’s not so much about the death of Thatcher but what she has done, the policies she introduced to this country.‘‘

Compare the coverage to that when Chavez died – she’s being eulogised. It’s been wall to wall coverage on the BBC, but she did nothing to help the poor people of this country.’’

In the Scottish city of Glasgow more than 300 people gathered to hold their own impromptu ‘‘party’’. Anti-capitalist campaigners shouted, ‘‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’’ while the crowd replied ‘‘dead, dead, dead’’.

Among her old foes many – at least temporarily – laid aside old grudges and paid public tribute to her achievements as Britain’s first female prime minister.

But others did not hesitate to express their continuing disgust and anger at Lady Thatcher’s policies and her (in their words) disastrous, divisive impact on Britain’s industry and people.

George Galloway, the Respect member of parliament for Bradford West and former Labour firebrand, led the charge with a simple Tweet: “Tramp the dirt down”.

It was a reference to a 1988 Elvis Costello song of the same name, a virulent attack on the then prime minister that contains the lines “when they finally put you in the ground / I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.”

Mr Galloway added on Twitter: “Thatcher described Nelson Mandela as a ‘terrorist’. I was there. I saw her lips move. May she burn in the hellfires.”

His Twitter feed quickly became an echo chamber for criticism of Thatcherite policies, which one commenter said were “selling off public utilities, encouraging personal greed and befriending murderous dictators”.

On Facebook, a campaign was launched to take the Wizard of Oz song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead‘ to No. 1. – AFP, additional reporting by Sapa

IN HER OWN WORDS

“I don’t think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime.” – as Education Secretary in 1973. She became Britain’s first woman prime minister in 1979.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” – Quoting St Francis of Assisi, on her 1979 election victory.

“I am not a consensus politician. I’m a conviction politician.” – 1979

“I don’t mind how much my ministers talk, as long as they do what I say.” – 1980

“We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.” – On the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which provoked some of the fiercest union opposition to her policies.

“To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catch phrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” – At the 1980 Conservative Party conference to colleagues urging her to soften her economic policies which were raising unemployment.

“This is a day I was not meant to see.” – To reporters the day after surviving a deadly 1984 Irish Republican Army bomb attack on the Conservative Party conference.

“We have become a grandmother.” – On the birth of her first grandchild, 1989.

“No! No! No!” At the House of Commons in 1990, the climax of an anti-European outburst that moved Geoffrey Howe to quit as deputy prime minister and deliver a resignation speech which called for her to be challenged for her job.

“I fight on, I fight to win.” – In November 1990, after failing to win enough votes to avoid a second round in the Conservative leadership contest. She resigned the next day.

“It’s a funny old world.” – On her decision to quit in 1990. – Reuters

Who gets the Nobel?

: FW De Klerk enjoys the spotlight

This year’s Nobel prize season kicks off Monday with rumours suggesting the peace prize could go to Egypt’s Maggie Gobran for helping Cairo’s poor, Afghan burka opponent Sima Samar or US scholar Gene Sharp.

The first Nobel to be announced this year will be the medicine prize on Monday, when the jury in Stockholm reveals the winner or winners around 11:30 am (0930 GMT.)

Like every year, most of the speculation in the run-up to the announcements focuses on who will take home the prestigious peace and literature prizes.

Nobel Peace Laureates former Polish President Lech Walesa, former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter held a panel discussion at the University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on April 23, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. The 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates convenes in Chicago.

Betting sites have become a popular feature of the guessing game in recent years, with gamers sometimes curiously accurate amid suspicions of leaks from within the award committees.

This year, Coptic Christian Gobran, dubbed the “Mother Teresa” of Cairo’s slums, tops the list of one betting site for the peace prize, with 6.5-to-one odds ahead of the October 12 announcement.

But that race looks wide open this year with no clear frontrunner among the 231 nominees.

Although the peace prize committee never discloses the nominees’ names, former US president Bill Clinton, ex-German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the EU and WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning are known to be on the list.

The head of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Kristian Berg Harpviken, follows the work of the committee and each year publishes his own shortlist of possible winners.

His list includes Sharp, an American political theorist and expert on non-violent revolution; Russian rights group Memorial and its founder Svetlana Gannushkina; and independent Russian media outlet Echo of Moscow and its chief editor Alexei Venediktov.

A Nigerian duo campaigning against the misuse of religion, Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Mohamed Sa’ad Abubakar, Sultan of Sokoto, are also on it, as is Myanmar President Thein Sein.

Afghan human rights activist, ex-minister and burka opponent Sima Samar is meanwhile also seen as a possible winner, as is Cuban human rights activist Oscar Elias Biscet.

For the literature prize, Chinese author Mo Yan and Japan’s Haruki Murakami share the top two spots on one betting site.

Literature experts in Stockholm have suggested it could be time for the Academy to pick a woman or a North American.

Names being whispered in literary circles include Canadian short story writer Alice Munro — though the Swedish Academy has never given the prize to a short story writer — as well as US author Don DeLillo and Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah.

“One could imagine that it would be an author from North America, a man maybe, like Don DeLillo or Philip Roth,” said Elisabeth Grate, who runs her own publishing house.

“But it would be nice with a woman,” she added.

In line with tradition, and unlike the other prizes, the date of the literature prize announcement is revealed only a couple of days before. But it is traditionally announced on a Thursday, and could therefore come on October 11.

For the medicine prize, Swedish media have mentioned Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka and Britain’s John Gurdon as possible recipients for their research in nuclear reprogramming, a process that instructs adult cells to form early stem cells which can then be used to form any tissue type.

Public broadcaster Swedish Radio also suggested that the nod could go to researchers in the field of epigenetics, which studies nature versus nurture and how genes respond to their environment.

The physics prize, to be announced on Tuesday, has also created some buzz this year.

The discovery in July of a new fundamental particle believed to be the Higgs boson is one of the biggest breakthroughs in the field of physics in the past half-century, and is widely considered Nobel prize-worthy research.

The names of the chemistry prize laureates will be revealed on Wednesday, with Swedish Radio suggesting Svante Paeaebo of Sweden could win for his groundbreaking analysis of ancient DNA.

The economics prize, which has been dominated by Americans over the years, is the last to be announced, on October 15.

Because of the economic crisis, the Nobel Foundation has slashed the prize sum to eight million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million, 930,940 euros) per award, down from the 10 million kronor awarded since 2001. – AFP

FW de Klerk pontificates on inequality and our ‘catastrophic education system’

deklerk_fw — FW de Klerk, former President of South Africa

The outcome of the ANC’s elective conference in Mangaung at the end of the year could have a big effect on South Africa’s future, former president FW de Klerk said on Thursday.

“I do think the choice of leadership in this December can positively or negatively effect our future in the short and the medium term,” he said, speaking at a Cape Town Press Club memorial dinner.

It was important that African National Congress members attending the conference acted in the interests of the country, and not individuals.

“Therefore I think it’s important that, in the context of a party structure, that the conference goers take good account of what is in the best interests not of person A or person B, but what is in the best interests of South Africa.”

De Klerk called for a return to the spirit of seeking reconciliation that prevailed in the country in the years immediately after 1994.

“How can we rise above grabbing and looking for positions and filling your pockets?”

South Africa needed political leaders who could serve communities and “put their hands and their heads together in ensuring we tackle the challenges we face”.

Responding to a question on whether South Africa should not be promoting itself with a massive international “road show”, De Klerk said investors had been frightened by what they had seen happening in South Africa over the past 18 months.

“What has happened at Marikana will make a joke of any road show,” he said, referring to the shooting dead of 34 striking mineworkers by police in North West on August 16.

They were also put off by reports of corruption.

“Investors are put off by factual accounts of the unbridled corruption that is taking place in South Africa. You can’t have a road show unless your house is in order.

“We need to sell ourselves, but we need to get the product right [first].”

Earlier, De Klerk, who turned 76 in March this year, said the main inequality divide in South Africa was no longer between blacks and whites, but between unionised and employed workers on the one hand, and unemployed on the other.

“It is a divide that lies at the heart of our inequality challenge.”

It was also a divide “that the Congress of SA Trade Unions is determined to defend by vigorously opposing any efforts to make the labour market more flexible”.

Another principal cause of inequality was the “catastrophic failure of our education system”.

A total of 60 percent of those who left school did so without a matric, and those who passed matric did so with an average mark of less than 40 percent.

De Klerk criticised the ruling party’s affirmative action and black economic empowerment policies.

“In the face of increasing national inequality, there is good reason to conclude that the government’s affirmative action and BEE policies have failed to address inequality, and might even have aggravated it.

“This is because most affirmative action and BEE occur in the top 10 to 15 percent of the income pyramid and have little or no impact on the bottom 85 percent of our society.

De Klerk, who served as South Africa’s last apartheid president from 1989 to 1994, called for these policies to be abandoned.

“Shift the accent in affirmative action programmes from race to relative disadvantage,” he said.

He also offered recommendations for the promotion of equality, including a more flexible labour dispensation, accelerated economic growth, and the rooting out of corruption, among others.

– Sapa

South African Communist Party calls FW de Klerk an ‘apartheid dinosaur’

Iafrica.com reports that SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande lashed out at FW de Klerk on Thursday, branding the former president an “apartheid political dinosaur”.

On Wednesday, De Klerk spoke at a briefing discussing the outcomes of the ANC’s policy conference. De Klerk said the spirit of inclusiveness and reconciliation embodied by former president Nelson Mandela was no longer prevalent in the country.

He warned against the ruling party’s national democratic revolution.

“The NDR as a concept is dangerous. A revolution against who? Who is the enemy?”

De Klerk added that the SACP was one of the driving forces behind what he called radical ANC policies.

Nzimande has since hit back, calling De Klerk “a politician who has long reached his sell-by date”.

“All what De Klerk is saying about the SACP is nothing but an attempt at resuscitating the classical, but failed, apartheid ‘rooi gevaar’ tactic which was used by his now extinct National Party and its criminal apartheid regime not only to persecute communists but as part of the whole armoury to fight against the liberation movement,” Nzimande said.

“De Klerk’s latest anti-communist burst is nothing more than rehashing this nonsense, and in fact exposing that the likes of him no longer have any relevance in today’s South Africa, if they ever did at all. Not so long ago he let the cat out of the bag by clearly stating he still firmly believes that the bantustan policies were the correct ones for South Africa.”

Praag.org previously reported that in his concluding remarks on Wedenesday, “De Klerk urged South Africans to be active and engage the ruling party on its policies, because they would shape the country’s future”.

FW de Klerk attacked for ‘defending the white man’

A black South African columnist has just published the following article in the London Guardian, blaming whites for blacks’ continuing poverty under a black government.

FW de Klerk: defender of the white man

South Africa is trying to move on from apartheid. It’s a shame its former president is not

by Justice Malala

The last undemocratically elected president of South Africa, the Nobel Peace laureate FW de Klerk, has in recent months been holding forth on the state of the nation. It’s a familiar view: that South Africa is becoming yet another post-colonial country destined to fall into maladministration, corruption, famine and finally war because the white man has lost political power.

In his utterances, it seems, the only thing that can save the nation from this preordained state of affairs is continued protection of white minority privileges and rights. All attempts to discuss a South Africa that is not riven by the terrible inequalities wrought by apartheid are seen, by him, as a threat to these privileges.

We heard elements of this narrative again this week. “The Mandela and Mbeki era of reconciliation is over,” de Klerk warned darkly. “White males are quite unjustly blamed for the continuing triple crisis of unemployment, inequality and poverty.”

He did not ask South Africans to come together and find solutions to these problems. Instead, he asked them to “get [on to the] playing field and become politically active”. The message is clear: they must fight and stop the ruling ANC’s talk of speeding up measures to stem unemployment and poverty.

These utterances come in the wake of De Klerk’s interview on CNN in May when he claimed that black people under apartheid “were not disenfranchised, they voted”. In this he was defending the heinous homeland system, under which Africans were “cleaned out” from “white South Africa” and confined to impoverished “black reserves”.

It increasingly seems that De Klerk cannot change from the person an angry Nelson Mandela identified during the democracy negotiations in 1991: “His weakness is to look at matters from the point of view of the National party and the white minority in this country, not from the point of view of the population of South Africa.”

Though De Klerk chooses to appoint himself defender of the country’s white males, they need very little defending. Almost all of the 20 best-paid directors in Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies are white men. This is not to vilify them, but it is a reminder that all of us South Africans need to do something, urgently, about inequality and poverty. After all, just this week the World Bank said South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with the top 10% of the population accounting for 58% of its income and the bottom half less than 8%. “Circumstances at birth are important drivers of inequality in South Africa,” said the bank’s report.

South Africa faces massive problems of unemployment and poverty. The ruling ANC has spectacularly failed the poor after 18 years in power. Under President Zuma things are getting worse: the challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality need a new vision and new leaders. But the De Klerk soundtrack, that South Africa is on the verge of collapse because the white man is allegedly under threat, is tiring and depressing. It does nothing to solve these urgent and collective problems.

De Klerk still believes he is the leader of a threatened white minority. He should learn to think of not just the white males whose survival he so energetically claims to defend, but also of the poor and marginalised who every day stand on our street corners and beg for alms.

That is the complex narrative of a country that has defied stereotypes and had three democratically elected presidents in 18 years; which has avoided racial conflagration; which has given more electricity to more people in the shortest space of time than any other in the world. It is not the narrative of a country whose sole obsession is the survival of a white minority’s privileges.

Original article.

De Klerk, Russian professor on ANC’s revolutionary doctrine

Former president FW de Klerk said on Wednesday he would have fired Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga if he had found wrongdoing on her part in the Limpopo textbook saga.

“If I was president, I would have asked the minister of education to fully investigate and brief me,” he told reporters in Johannesburg.

“And if I had come to a conclusion that the minister of education… failed in a material way, yes, I would have fired her.”

De Klerk said the failure to deliver textbooks was purely a management issue.

“The textbooks were printed… but not delivered. That is tremendously bad management.”

De Klerk was speaking at a press briefing after a conference hosted by his foundation on Wednesday. The conference discussed the outcomes of the ANC’s policy conference.

De Klerk said the spirit of inclusiveness and reconciliation embodied by former president Nelson Mandela was no longer prevalent in the country. He warned against the ruling party’s national democratic revolution.

“The NDR as a concept is dangerous. A revolution against who? Who is the enemy?”

He said the ANC wanted to lead the country using policies which had failed elsewhere in the world.

Earlier, Irina Filatova, former head of African studies at Moscow State University, echoed De Klerk’s view on the NDR.

“The ANC cannot implement this policy. But there will be one aspect it can do, and it can destroy this country. There could be partial land reform, partial nationalisation of mines.”

Filatova said the ANC “obviously believes in this ideology” as it spoke of the unique nature of its developmental state.

“I think that the ANC is a bit lost about the second stage of the revolution. In the 1980s it was so obvious what would happen.”

She said the more the economy failed, the deeper the ANC was going to dig in its heels.

“The more failure[s] there are, the more they will try to use various means, both constitutional and unconstitutional, to keep their following,” Filatova said.

Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation, warned that recent laws passed by the government made the South African economy less free.

Growth had been restricted by the National Credit Act, Consumer Protection Act, and exchange controls.

Louw said the country had changed the economic path it embarked on in 1994.

“Things changed after 2006 and the economy started becoming less free again. If your economy becomes more free you will grow, and if it becomes less free, you will stagnate and contract.”

The economy was stagnating because of the government’s interference in the labour market, making it expensive and difficult to employ people.

In his concluding remarks, De Klerk urged South Africans to be active and engage the ruling party on its policies, because they would shape the country’s future. – Sapa

The ANC’s second revolution (okay, ‘transition’) against whites

by Dan Roodt

South Africa, like Cuba, is the last outpost of communism. Elsewhere in the world, experiments in collective farming and nationalisation have been abandoned as the grim mistakes of nineteenth-century radicalism, issuing forth from the bearded Karl Marx, scribbling away in the British Library.

However, behind Karl Marx there was a capitalist, Friedrich Engels, who bankrolled him and actually paid him to pour forth his books and pamphlets that would sow discord and resentment for more than a century.

The ANC, like many of the “tenured radicals” at South African universities, loves Karl Marx. The class struggle is their favourite nursery tale. And if you could add that the capitalists are actually white, then it’s no longer Little Red Ridinghood; it’s Little Red Soldiers marching from one conference to the next.

Unlike most journalists and newspaper pundits, I have actually read the ANC’s document on “the second transition”. Not so long ago, the ruling party – maybe we should capitalise “Party” as is communist practice – entertained us on the notion that South Africa was going through a two-stage revolution. Classical marxist theory holds that all of human history advances through a succession of “epochs”, culminating in “the most advanced stage, the classless society, or communism”. That is when people start queuing for bread, potatoes, shoes or waiting ten years to buy a two-stroke-engined car with nineteen-fifties technology.

At one point Cuba was going back to the bicycle. Not that I have anything against bicycles; on the contrary. Quite a few of our BEE moguls and traffic cops taking bribes alongside the roads, bulging out of their blue uniforms, could do with some exercise.

But to go back to stone age economic principles – “sharing” things around the camp fire – is a great leap backwards, if you will pardon the pun. In fact, Mao’s “great leap forward” was another communist cliché floating around the ANC’s Midrand conference yesterday.

According to Marx and Engels, there is first a political revolution, alternately called a “bourgeois revolution”, before the real transformation, the social revolution, begins. In the case of Russia, the “capitalist epoch” lasted only a few months, from February to October 1917, but we need not detain ourselves with such finer details. In ANC parlance, the transition of 1994 when De Klerk fired all his generals and handsupped before the Party’s militia, Umkhonto we Sizwe, was the political or “National Democratic Revolution”.

Until now, the second or social revolution has been chomping at the bit within the Luthuli House stables, ready to propel its bright-eyed, sushi-chomping jockeys into the apocalyptic dawn.

According to Jacob Zuma yesterday, the enemy, the class enemy, to put it more politically correctly, seems to be so-called white males. South African marxists have always confounded race and class. Mbeki, the great black marxist – or should I use the fashionable euphemism, “progressive” – intellectual, used to rave quite frequently about the white ruling class while he was still president. Or maybe Mbeki was just too habitually drunk to realise that putting yourself forward as a victim while you are wearing the crown represents a colossal contradiction.

However, not so long ago I read that 75% of white males over 50 were self-employed. That is only logical as BEE and affirmative action have already swept South African corporate life, not to mention the civil service and municipalities. Most municipalities are now all-black, with whites actually doing the cleaning. Our municipalities must have the most highly educated cleaning staff in the world; apparently some of the people wielding brooms and mops have postgraduate qualifications. But they happen to be white, which is a fatal handicap in the Republic of South Africa.

Younger white males are hanging on in the SME’s where racial headcounts are pursued with lesser fervour. In fact, a survey that I found on the internet yesterday showed that one in four white males of all ages was actually self-employed in 2006. By now the figure must be far higher.

So maybe the ANC, in its racial-marxist zeal, pursuing the Second Coming – wasn’t Mbeki also fond of quoting his favourite Xhosa poet, William Butler Yeats? – is barking up the wrong tree, “full of passionate intensity”.

One of the few people I mostly agree with in South Africa, is liberal historian Hermann Giliomee. I think that is because we both look at the current situation from the vantage point of history. Not… fantasy. He recently told me that he was just glad to have severed all ties with universities. In fact, the universities have become little ANC kindergartens, producing the type of pompous, quasi-marxist “papers” of which the ANC’s latest policy document is but a carbon copy.

We have to acknowledge that race, not class, is what the South African revolution is all about. That is why the white male bogeyman will be brandished, even if most of us white males eke out a measly living doing odd jobs on our computers in SOHOs. For those less familiar with American acronyms, that is “small office home office”. While the BMW-driving, black bourgeoisie are feasting out there, living it up in five-star hotels and bleeding this country dry.

To understand black identity, we have to look at America and a book such as Jared Taylor’s recent White Identity – racial consciousness in the 21st century.

In a nutshell: whites, with the exception of a few so-called “right-wing Afrikaners”, no longer have an identity. Blacks, on the other hand, are completely lacking in any European class consciousness. Their only consciousness is one of race. Not being very culturally assertive and preferring English as their means of communication, their only identity is being black, which may be further enhanced by hating whites.

Ultimately, the second revolution is not about poverty, equality, redressing past wrongs or any of the usual clichés offered by the ANC. It is about the black elite affirming its own identity.

Like Narcissus, they are looking at themselves in the mirror, whispering: “I am black, so black.” All other consequences flow from that existential premise and experience.

When I was a student, some of the campus radicals used to call it “black-being-in-the-world”. It had a kind of Heideggerian ring to it.

South Africa is going to pay a very high price for that singular mode of being.

‘Mandela reappointed me’: Basson

Cardiologist Dr Wouter Basson told a professional conduct committee on Tuesday that president Nelson Mandela had re-appointed him to the SA National Defence Force in 1995 because the United States and British governments regarded him as a threat.

Basson was in the witness stand for a second day to fight charges of unethical and unprofessional conduct before the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA).

The charges arise from his involvement in the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Basson testified that a co-ordinating committee and the Surgeon General at the time had been in overall charge of the programme and that he only carried out orders as a soldier.

“His decision was final and I had to see to it that the work was done,” he said.

He said that although he retired from the then SA Defence Force (SADF) in 1992, he was called back in a civilian capacity to oversee the destruction of substances and weapons forming part of the project.

Only the teargas was saved, and several tons of it was handed to the police.

Basson reiterated that his task had been to create a defensive chemical and biological warfare capability for the SADF, but said a limited offensive capability was also necessary to equalise battle conditions.

The SANDF was established after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, replacing the SADF, but incorporating personnel from the SADF, the homeland forces and the armed wings of political parties.

According to Basson, former president FW de Klerk re-appointed him to the SANDF, on a civilian level, to help dismantle the chemical and biological warfare project.

There followed several meetings with the US and British governments, after which former president Nelson Mandela again appointed him, in a civilian capacity, as head of cardiology at the military hospital.

“The American and British governments at that stage regarded me as a threat and wanted to get me under control. The initial suggestion was that they should appoint me and that I work for them as a chemical and biological warfare consultant.

“My role would have been to ensure that technologies that were developed in Western worlds were carried over to developing countries for peaceful purposes.

“The South African government did not like the idea of one of their citizens working for other governments and president Mandela gave orders that I must be appointed in the defence force again in a civilian capacity,” he said.

He claimed that the regulations were bent for a day to allow his re-appointment in 1995.

He was thereafter a member of the SANDF until he started a private cardiology practice in Cape Town in 2003, but had no further involvement with chemical and biological warfare.

According to Basson, he re-enrolled at the University of Pretoria for retraining as a cardiologist to satisfy his colleagues and patients that he was on par as a cardiologist.

Basson reiterated his stance that the 1980s were “crazy years” and that his actions should be seen in the context of the times.

“People did things. Doctors planted bombs. decisions were made in the context of the time.

“Nothing I did was aimed at harming anyone. In fact it was aimed at preserving life and minimising loss of life.

“… I never acted unethically or unprofessionally,” he said.

Salie Joubert SC, acting for the pro forma complainant, accused Basson of “telling half truths” about, among other things, his chemical qualifications to try and remove his training as a medical doctor from his activities while he headed the germ warfare programme.

He put it to Basson that he was reappointed to the SANDF because he had collaborated with Libya and was regarded as a threat which had to be brought under control.

Basson admitted visiting Libya on several occasions over a 10-year period, but said he had no idea what was discussed with president Mandela at the time.

Basson admitted that his training was in physiological chemistry, but said he was appointed to head the project because he had a better knowledge of chemistry than most of his military and medical colleagues and had used that knowledge for the project.

“… Stop any doctor on the street and ask him if he would have been able to do it,” he said.

He denied that it had come as a shock when the HPCSA decided to continue with the professional misconduct charges against him, but said he had thought that he would be able to “get on with his life” after the Constitutional Court confirmed his acquittal in 2005.

The hearing continues.