The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) have missed the deadline set by the Southern African Development Community to voluntarily disarm themselves, it said on Saturday.
In spite of the presence of 20,000 UN peacekeepers, around 50 Congolese and foreign armed groups are still active in the region.
SADC chairman President Jacob Zuma urged the FDLR to come forward and disarm themselves unconditionally.
“The deadline set by the heads of state and government of SADC… for the FDLR to disarm voluntarily or face military action expired yesterday, 2 January 2015,” Zuma said in a statement.
A joint summit by the SADC heads of states would be held in Luanda, Angola to decide on measures to be taken.
“SADC remains committed to the internationally mandated objective of neutralising all negative forces operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including the FDLR, and remains ready to play its fullest part in this regard,” Zuma said.
The east of the DRC has been a conflict area for two decades, French news agency Agence France-Presse reported last month.
Two major wars between 1996 and 2003, were fought with neighbouring countries including Uganda and Rwanda intervening directly or using militias to do their bidding.
Yebo, my friend, you’ve heard the bad news: Eskom is broken because of apartheid. It’s racial. Verwoerd made maths difficult and engineering even more so, hence you can blame it on apartheid. President Zoomer has just had his blindingly brilliant insight and all the libtard media dutifully conveyed this piece of anal-ysis to dem voting masses.
What else can you blame on apartheid? Well, Skoppensboer’s ingrowing toenails come to mind. Also, all the faeces in the Jukskei and the Vaal and all the other rivers may be attributed to apaaaatheid, I’m tellin’ ya, my good man. After all, who taught all these citizens to be so disposed as to not make proper use of the ablutions and the extant sewage facilities? The A factor, what else?
If some non-racial dude propels a chunk of concrete through your car window, as happened to Skoppensboer’s niece the other day, and grabs your handbag or your laptop, you can only blame it on apartheid. After all, said smash-and-grabber would not have been out there smashing and grabbing if it weren’t for apartheid. Like the devil, apartheid is everywhere, luring our upright, ethically pristine citizens into temptation.
Skoppensboer is just waiting for the day when the courts and the police stations and the prisons will give it all up, saying: “Apartheid makes them do it, so let’s set all these innocent victims of that crime against humanity free.” If you think about it, why did the Tukkie rapist, Samuel Msiza do the deed? Skoppensboer can already hear a whole mass choir of libtards, including Jaycup Zoomer, screaming: “Because of apartheid!” He could have stabbed his young, innocent victim once or just klapped her without raping her. But no, because of apartheid – even though he was born into this here beautiful democracy – he had to stab her 22 times and rape her while she was almost bleeding to death.
Why did South Africa’s 10 black serial killers (11 if you include one white drug addict) murder 205 people, if not because of apartheid? The fact that the rest of us do not serially kill or rape or lurk about street corners throwing stones at motorists constitutes no proof that apartheid is not to blame for everything that is going so dismally wrong in our once beautiful but presently soiled republic.
What is the solution to the lingering apartheid problem? As any libtard genius will tell you – all libtards are genii – we are already on our way to solving it by means of: affirmative action, BEE, as well as spending any budget that you can lay your hands on as if there’s no tomorrow. Ditto, when it comes to Eskom. The electricity utility just needs to get rid of any remaining white engineers who got degrees at some apartheid university prior to 1994 and ratchet up the salaries and the spending.
In short, Eskom’s employees need to get their act together over there in Megawatt Park and go shopping! As it is, Sandton City is not too far from Megawatt Park – hardly a ten-minute drive by Bentley – and there are any number of luxury-car dealerships in the vicinity where any soupçon of apartheid in the air might be assuaged by the smell of leather inside a brand-new Porsche, Merc, Bee-Em or Audi. Not to forget the Bentley which is, I am sure, one of the preferred brands for Eskom’s middle to upper management. Last time Skoppensboer looked, the Bentley dealership was also astutely situated within a radius of 10 km from Megawatt Park, in William Nicol Drive. So you need not joke anymore that BMW stands for “black man’s wheels” when, much more likely, Bentley is now the flagship affirmative automobile easily within reach of the average Eishkom exec.
Like the collapsing silo of the Majuba power station, Eskom’s problems will look after themselves while we address what every libtard is clamouring for and that is: “redress for the legacy of apartheid”. As the very existence of Eskom’s ugly power stations dotting the country attests to that legacy, it follows that we would be better off without them. We could all have little windmills or solar panels or cultivate electricity-producing bacteria in our bathtubs which would otherwise have been utilised for cold baths anyway.
Talking of cold baths and showers, Skoppensboer has noted that City Power in Johannesburg is threatening to “remotely turn off” the hot water geysers of its recalcitrant consumers in these times of energy scarcity. Caused by apartheid, needless to say.
So Big Brother has, apart from some luxury automotive toys, acquired the technology to punish us for having a quick morning shower while draining Eishkom’s power grid. Which has many more noble uses, such as supplying free electricity in those wards that invariably vote ANC or maybe some energy-intensive factory belonging to a black-empowerment company listed on the JSE.
Some of Skoppensboer’s more radical libtard friends, hanging around the universities where they have the pick of the choir boys and girls, as the saying goes, assure him that the Revolution has not gone far enough. Much more is on the way, and less is more, to quote some apartheid theorist.
Western civilisation is on the way out and we shall return to the pre-apartheid times when everybody was happy, living in huts made of mud and thatch. So Eskom will be a thing of the ugly past and we’ll be rubbing sticks together to make camp fires where we shall be roasting the last skinny rat caught after days of meandering in the veld as hunter-gatherers. Naturally, this will be post-land reform too and the land will have returned to a more desirable pre-apartheid state too.
The only thing that remains is for the University of Cape Town to award an honorary doctorate in political science to Jaycup Zoomer for seeing the missing link between Eskom and apartheid. Most of the cultural-Marxist professors at that august institution must gleefully agree with him and will no doubt support such a move.
We should not neglect transformation, even in the dark.
South Africa’s energy problems were a product of apartheid and government was not to blame for the current blackouts, President Jacob Zuma said.
“The problem [is] the energy was structured racially to serve a particular race, not the majority,” Zuma told delegates at the Young Communist League’s congress in Cape Town.
He said the ANC had inherited the power utility from the previous regime which had only provided electricity to the white minority.
Twenty years into democracy, 11 million households had access to electricity, double the number in 1994, Zuma said in a speech prepared for delivery.
Government was taking action to address the energy situation.
The development of the Medupi and Kusile power stations was being accelerated in order to bring them on to the grid.
“Projects in the region with the potential to produce power in the short term are being assessed and we continue to evaluate options with the intention to maximise all sources of energy including coal, gas, nuclear, solar and renewable energy options, Zuma said.
President Jacob Zuma will host his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, in Pretoria this week.
This visit follows a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza earlier this year. More than 2100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Gaza. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians were killed by rockets and attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.
The war prompted Pretoria to send a special envoy to the Middle East in an attempt to secure peace.
Zuma will receive Abbas on Wednesday, presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj said.
An arms deal critic has said that Tony Blair should have been summoned to testify at the Seriti commission.
Former British prime minister and war criminal Tony Blair should have been summoned to testify at the Seriti commission of inquiry, arms deal critic Terry Crawford-Browne said on Monday.
“Judge Seriti will recall that in August 2012 I requested that the former British prime minister Tony Blair be subpoenaed to testify about the bribes and pressure he exerted on behalf of BAE Systems,” he told the inquiry in Pretoria.
“Regrettably, the chairman ruled that it was premature to subpoena Mr Blair, the man who is widely regarded internationally as a war criminal.”
He said the opportunity of investigating the role of the British arms manufacturer and the Bank of England “in the destabilisation of resource-rich Asian and African countries” was lost. “Not only is Mr Blair remembered for his lies in 2003 about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but he is now closely associated with the wars both in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Palestine,” Crawford-Browne wrote in his affidavit.
President Jacob Zuma established the inquiry, chaired by Judge Willie Seriti, to probe alleged corruption when government acquired, among other hardware, 26 Gripen fighter aircraft and 24 Hawk lead-in fighter trainer aircraft for the air force, and frigates and submarines for the navy. Crawford-Browne said the Sunday Times report of September 28, about bribes allegedly paid to Zuma, highlighted the abuse of state institutions. “Although it may not have been illegal in 1998/99 in Britain or Germany to bribe foreigners, it has long been illegal in South Africa to receive bribes,” he said.
The finance minister at the time of the arms deal, Trevor Manuel, should have investigated the alleged bribery and corruption. “Instead, and in gross abuse of those responsibilities, Mr Manuel actively engaged in cover-up of corruption and fraud associated with the arms deal,” Crawford-Browne said. He said the allegations in the Sunday Times, though not new, confirmed the malevolent roles of European governments in fostering corruption in countries such as South Africa.
Crawford-Browne said in 2012 Swedish TV4 exposed the role of newly elected prime minister Stefan Lofven in facilitating payments of R30-million to ANC MPs. The money was allegedly laundered via Swedish trade unions as funding for an industrial training school. “Mr Lofven in 1998 was the international officer for the Swedish Chemical Workers Union and the bribes were alleged to be laundered via Sanco [the South African National Civic Organisation] and Moses Mayekiso.
“This illustrates the extent of corruption in the international arms trade even in squeaky clean Sweden,” Crawford-Browne said. Mayekiso is a former ANC and Congress of the People member who was the Workers and Socialist Party’s presidential candidate. He served as the inaugural secretary general of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA and was among the first leaders of Sanco. Last month, the Sunday Times newspaper detailed allegations that in 2000, Zuma accepted a R500 000-a-year bribe from Ajay Sooklal, a “fixer” for French Arms company Thales.
Zuma apparently signalled his acceptance of the bribe by remarking during a meeting with Alain Thetard, the then-head of Thales’s South African subsidiary Thint, that “I see the Eiffel Tower lights are shining today”.
Thint is one of the companies linked to the country’s arms-deal controversy. In 1997 Thint was awarded a multibillion-rand contract to equip four new navy frigates with combat suites. The claims alleged in the Sunday Times emerged from transcripts a confidential arbitration hearing between Sooklal and Thales over a fee dispute. The presidency said there was “nothing new in the allegations”.
President Jacob Zuma personally negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin to have Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation build nuclear power stations worth R1-trillion in South Africa, the Mail and Guardian reported.
According to the report, President Zuma had started the process directly with Putin at July’s Brics summit in Brazil and then finalised the details of the nuclear pact during his surprise trip to Moscow last month.
The Mail and Guardian quoted a senior ANC leader and a well-placed ANC MP as its sources.
The ANC members said that President Zuma had instructed Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson to sign the deal with the Russians at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference in Vienna.
The president told his trusted ministers and MPs of the deal.
The nuclear R1-trillion deal was announced on Monday by both Rosatom and the department of energy. The department though has since said the the deal had not yet been finalised.
Minister Joemat-Pettersson has been summoned to appear before Parliament’s energy portfolio committee.
The Democratic Alliance has called for the details of the deal to be made public in order to try and exploit it politically.
Blacks themselves give a lot of clues as to what they want or need, especially when they think some politically correct answer is not required. Very few would venture to actually admit to wrong-doing such as the infamous Pallo Jordan of the South African revolutionary movement ANC (African National Congress), or as the American lawyer Michael Smith pointed out – black Americans would rather believe a cellmate than their own lawyer.
Lately a black South African twitter account tweeted that “they (blacks) do not want to be civilized” – something I would actually believe given their extremely limited and limiting continued tribal and communist education. Then quite surprisingly the South African Moeketsi Masola was published saying that he is both “ashamed to be black and a man”. Stories abound here in South Africa of “black diamonds” – a term denoting black people in senior corporate positions they were never qualified for – which (still) allow those white-run corporations to compete for lucrative government tenders. As long as they have a “scorecard” showing black management and ownership, they can still do business with an anti-white government.
The South African government itself is of course virtually 100% black except for a few important positions such as the Department of Trade and Industry Minister which manages the very influential state-owned enterprises of which there are thousands – with more to come. Then you also get the arrogant side where a “shortage” of money is simply downplayed by the possibility of selling “more bonds” to finance an unsustainable welfare state despite not purporting to be “welfare oriented”. South Africa proposes to be a constitutional state similar to America that actually functions like a socialist/Marxist regime behind the “black” curtain. Apparently 40% of parliamentarians are communist (of the old type) and I will not go into the percentage of councillors in municipalities that are illiterate. Municipal finances are in such disarry that something like 90% of South African municipalities get qualified audits.
Black people, especially in South Africa, agree that they cannot manage the country, but they continue nonetheless! They agree to be token appointments, but continue nonetheless. Recently Matome Letsoalo published an article with the title “African Leaders: Heroes or desperate house negroes?” The term house negro is of American origin (I believe) and he actually describes the President of South Africa (Jacob Zuma who incidentally has zero qualifications beyond primary or elementary school) as such a person or from that “horde”. That he asks how Obama can promote peace while causing war at the same time is perhaps a different discussion because it may have unpalatable answers such as to get rid of those same “hordes”.
That there is an inferiority complex in black people is assured – the question is how does one help these people? – not all of them though – because some are quite self-respecting and self-disciplined. But there are many others that cry for help. Since politics won’t help and neither will religion, the controlling elements in black people’s lives are tribalism and unionism. The interesting thing in South Africa is that unionism (something the anointed future SA President is well aware of) sits on the same side of the table as the government (as an alliance). In fact he appears to be intimately involved in the Marikana shooting where 34 miners died in a hail of police fire because he was most likely a black-diamond Lonmin shareholder.
The last “proper” vestige of influence on the crying masses therefore remains a single concept, i.e. tribal leadership. Unfortunately these “traditional leaders” are making things worse by claiming land they never possessed and monies they did not work for. The kind of land and funds that would have benefitted the individual crying black citizen immensely. But then that requires real (literate) black leadership heroes, maybe even somebody like Prince Buthelezi – not the Malema populist type.
A white Afrikaner woman, Jenny van Tonder, 63, suffered a necklace attack this week as a black attacker, Edwin Mapatha, 57, threw gasoline over her and her car and then set her alight.
Van Tonder has sustained 25% burn wounds over her body. Her face, chest and arms have been burnt and her throat and lungs severely affected.
The “necklace”, a method whereby the victim is burnt alive, usually by also placing a tyre around his or her neck, was popularised by so-called “freedom fighters” from the ruling ANC and South African Communist Party in the 1980s.
A private security guard, Gerrit Coetzee of Special Operations Group, had to arrest Mapatha as the South African Police failed to intervene. In fact, many police officers have been recruited from the ANC’s militia, Umkhonto we Sizwe, whose main war song is “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer”.
Until now, it has not been confirmed or denied that Mapatha is a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
However, the victim is not out of danger yet. She is being treated in a state hospital, Chris Hani Baragwanath, in the black area of Soweto. The hospital was named after Communist Party leader and extremist terrorist, Chris Hani, who was known for his antiwhite views and influence over the Soweto community. It is feared that Van Tonder could be attacked once again in hospital.
Plastic surgeons are supposed to examine the victim. As South Africa has imported a large number of doctors from the remaining communist countries, notably Cuba, and chances are that they will be Cubans.
Black-on-white revenge attacks are a common occurrence in South Africa, as the state television often incite blacks to go out and kill white people. Both the president, Jacob Zuma, and the then youth leader of the ruling party, Julius Malema, have publicly called for the killing of whites and to “make the dogs and cowards run”.
During the notorious “farm murders” elderly white victims are usually tortured for hours before being murdered. Few perpetrators are ever apprehended as police claim to be “overwhelmed”.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has done some “conscious uncoupling” from reality. The term was disgorged by a celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow, to announce a separation from her spouse. In the same breath, the actress bemoaned her gilded, glamorous life, and offended America’s military sacred cow by comparing the cyber-attacks she endures to the experience of war.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has done some “conscious uncoupling” from reality. The term was disgorged by a celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow, to announce a separation from her spouse. In the same breath, the actress bemoaned her gilded, glamorous life, and offended America’s military sacred cow by comparing the cyber-attacks she endures to the experience of war.
As heir to a political dynasty founded by a powerful man, Hillary has received millions of dollars to write books. Over the years, she and husband Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions from both book deals and speaking engagements. Yet in a recent ABC interview, the former “First Housewife” complained about emerging from the White House not only “dead broke, but in debt”: “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to … piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”
Another reality Hillary has worked to deconstruct is Benghazi. Hillary dare not admit that, by leveling Libya, Americans invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted at the U.S. mission in Benghazi had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any U.S. provocation, real or imagined, to expel those who “came, saw, and conquered.” Still less is the former secretary of state willing to cop to having left the post undefended. This scribe has long subscribed to the view that, at bottom, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom had imagined she would run the Benghazi compound like a community center. How better to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a smashing success?
In a fit of “estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids,” Hillary and two sisters in the Obama administration—“humanitarian hawks” Samantha Power, then a member of the president’s National Security Council, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then Ambassador to the United Nations—launched a “war of the womb” that left Libya in shambles.
All along, our globetrotting hegemon evinced little respect for regional powers and their right to handle their own affairs, in-house, so to speak. On behalf of the African Union, South African President Jacob Zuma had brokered a deal with Libya. By the Telegraph’s telling, the AU had “outlined a political solution to end the fighting in Libya based on an immediate end to attacks on civilians and a ceasefire which would be monitored by a credible international organization. The ceasefire would lead to a transitional period and culminate in elections.” Col. Muammar Gadhafi agreed. Judging from what befell Libya, Hillary and her harridans would have none of it. They refused to give peace a chance. War it was. The rest is history, as is Libya.
Who can forget Hillary Clinton’s blood-curdling cackle, “We came, we saw, he died!”, when tidings arrived of the actions of her thugs of choice in that country? Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, the Libyan rebels to whom the U.S. had taken a shine intercepted Col. Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte, dragged him from his vehicle, and lynched him then and there. Hillary’s ululations were a perfect complement to the rebels’ harangues of “Allahu Akbar.”
The focus of Hillary’s next blood-inspired hoedown was to be Syria. She had wanted to arm rebel forces there. Obama objected. Or so she tells readers of her latest, I-did-it-my-way memoire. A story broken by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), almost 2 years back, implicated Hillary’s Syrian soul-mates in the massacre of over 90 Alawi and Shia villagers, “predominantly women and children.” “Rebel atrocities,” relayed National Review’s foreign correspondent, were “being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities.” As president, count on Hillary to devise a creative casus belli for the “humanitarian” invasion she hankers for in Syria. For if she has learned anything from Benghazi, it is not that America ought to divest from democratizing the word, but that our country needs more Green-Zone fortresses everywhere.
Whether this strong-as-a-horse politician was concussed or cowering, in the waning days of 2012, we will never know. Mrs. Clinton was scheduled to testify in December “before the House of Representatives and Senate foreign affairs committees on a report on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.” She was a no-show.
But on CNN, love is in the air. Viewers have expressed a belief that Hillary would restore the country to the Clinton years of peace and prosperity. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, as well as a Sudanese pharmaceutical company that turned out to be the main manufacturer of medicines and vaccinations in Sudan. And he strafed the Serbs in 1999. Stateside, Bill butchered 76 men, women and children in Texas. Alas, so long as Hillary steers clear of another Waco, and confines her murderous sprees to killing far-away people from high above—few boots on the ground—her countrymen will consider her a peacemaker.
While prosperity during the Clinton years was due less to Clinton-economics than to Reaganomics and a Republican Congress not yet completely comatose—in fairness, Bill does grasp something about prosperity. “This is good work,” he famously said about Mitt Romney’s much-maligned work at Bain Capital. Hillary, conversely, has no economic acumen. “There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries,” she grumbled at the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2012. According to economist George Reisman’s cogent analysis—and contra Mrs. Clinton’s crushing ignorance—“a highly productive and provident 1 percent provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent.” As for Obama’s putsch for a North-Korean style health care: Instead of aborting it, Hillary will guarantee that Obamacare reaches full-term gestation.
Another wily fox called Bill (O’Reilly) has defended Mrs. Clinton’s riches as capitalism’s reward for hard work. Not quite. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others. Although she has pudding for brains, Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has made a living in the honest, productive, non-predatory and salutary ways of the free market. Paltrow’s affluence, unlike Hillary’s, is a reward for assets she peddles to people who choose to purchase them.
An example of leadership stability? Royal family of Denmark
by Johann Theron
Leaders traditionally do not classify themselves. This allows a sort of evolutionary anticipation towards emerging scenarios which makes identification of the “next” leader difficult. In this sense leaders are a lot like entrepreneurs because they essentially come from “nowhere” to upset the status quo to the detriment of some reigning power or corporate interest – or a prior leader. Normal people do not really care who the next leader will be, because they know instinctively that such a person will act in their interests. Therefore, in the normal flow of things, leaders will (theoretically) follow on each other seamlessly because followers will by definition accept them.
One good example of seamless leadership is perhaps the Danish Monarchy where no internal conflict or change of leadership has occurred in more than a thousand years. The British Monarchy is also approaching the same sort of life span although they are being challenged from time to time by irritants like Ireland and Scotland. There are not many examples of non-family seamless monarchies that survived the test of time, but one great example is perhaps the United States of America where it seems that for at least a few hundred years some form of stability and even predictability has been achieved as far as leadership is concerned.
Not much is known about tribal leadership since Western tribes all but succumbed to the higher form of organizational capacity utilized by Western nations to achieve such stability. But at least in Africa which is still immersed in the doldrums of tribalism, a lot of real-life examples have been quite noticeable. Who could forget Idi Amin and later the infamous Mugabe where leadership transition from Ian Smith became such a disaster? Since Mugabe does not transition to the next seamless leader, one can readily assume that any leader surviving the death of Mugabe would turn out to be a disaster as well.
The interesting thing about Ian Smith is that he remained in Zimbabwe until he quietly passed away; thereby signaling that he literally gave his life to his country. The well-known General Erwin Rommel also gave his life to his country and apparently General Patton did too.
Leaders are distinguished here as those that
simply come and go;
those that fit into a comfortable seamless transition without martyring themselves;
those that lead and die for their country and
lastly those that kill everyone else to stay the leader.
Clearly Zuma is not a tribal king so his legacy is not really family-oriented, but oriented towards his king and his king’s legacy. Even Nelson Mandela was not the tribal king and he remained a subject of a (different) king that now votes for the opposition to the political party he personified. This raises the interesting question of who exactly made people that were no tribal kings, “kings”?
There are no transitions applicable in these cases; there is no entrepreneurial emergence because the original kings remained in power; they did not die for the cause but they did kill or were involved in killings to get into power. Such people are highly attractive to international power-brokers that represent – in all likelihood – the onepercenters of the world (for want of a better classification).
It implies therefore that Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma are not leaders and neither is the ANC’s so-called leadership seamless, despite their 100-year existence claim. It merely indicates that some other onepercenter decided that it may be beneficial for the time being, to push the ANC for his or her own benefit. With the unfavorable outcome presently described in the newspapers, the time left over for the ANC has been redefined.
Whereas the citizens of Denmark themselves are safe, only the tribal “leader” can claim to be safe, or at least have “no stress”. While puppets like Mugabe and Zuma feels safe because their followers are killing each other, Danish people move around the world unscathed.
But since new real leadership is about to emerge thereby exposing the rigid “old” patriarchal double standard systemic fault lines, a new phase in South Africa is in the wind, and new ideas are being proposed while bad historic examples are exposed.
To make it clear – it is time to embrace a new leadership.
Ever since Britain started getting seriously interested in South Africa after the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1866, there have been at least two conflicting views of the country. Throughout the twentieth century too, South Africa has borne the brunt of the Western ideological revolutions, all the way from colonialism and so-called “white supremacy” to contemporary political correctness. In fact, in the aftermath of the Mandela funeral, one could almost speak of the West’s religious devotion to black Africans who are being endowed with all the capricious amoral innocence of Greek gods.
More precisely, South Africa has been the theatre of an “epistemic war” if I could be excused such a French-sounding term. Apart from the very palpable shifts in demographic, political, economic and military power towards South African blacks, locals are also acutely aware of how the Western world view is no longer the dominant one in South Africa.
A few years ago I spoke to a liberal, anglophone, Jewish woman who lived in Johannesburg but who had some connection to the huge Baragwanath hospital in Soweto, one of the proud achievements of the former Afrikaner-led government. Within the Afrikaner mind, blacks had wanted not real political power but hospitals, schools, universities and jobs which is why they put so much effort into constructing such public institutions. Those institutions are currently being derided as having been entirely useless and a sop, or an insult to blacks, especically to the divine black leaders such as Mandela.
The point is, however, that since the black takeover in the country “they have changed the frame of reference” as my liberal Jewish friend put it. But she wasn’t really speaking in general terms, referring to the broad sweep of history and politics. First and foremost, she was speaking in medical terms. What she was saying, was that with the new order had come a new way of looking at healthcare, at patients and the function of a hospital. In short, the age-old belief systems of Africans have been reasserting themselves and “success” is no longer measured in white or European terms. That is why, when whites decry the deterioration of the state hospital system, as well as standards of professionalism and hygiene there, blacks are quick to retort with the ubiquitous cry of “racism”. After all, blacks are now in charge and they make the rules and set the standards against which a hospital, a school, a university or even a government will be measured.
It is really hard to understand the hullabaloo over President Zuma’s expenditure on what amounts to a private Zulu homestead or kraal at Nkandla. Compared to the billions being frittered away in corruption and unauthorised expenditure, the R240 million (about $20 million) involved seems almost paltry.
It is a truism of historians and philosophers alike, that one’s assessment of a situation – any situation – depends on one’s perspective. Not so long ago I read a paragraph by French political philosopher Alain de Benoist wherein he said:
… I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. I am a philosopher, a theoretician, and I fight to explain my world view. And in this world view, Europe, race, culture, and identity all have roles. They are not excluded. But mainly I am working in defense of a world view. Of course, I am very interested in the future and destiny of my own nation, race, and culture, but I am also interested in the future of every other group.
That all sounds very interesting, but somewhat abstract. To the Afrikaner farmer who is being attacked in his or her home by a group of blacks who had imbibed some form of “medicine” or muti to make them invincible, the quesion is one, not of philosophy but of survival.
At a more mundane or political level, the clash is one of perspectives, even a traditional fight between the left and the right. In South Africa, any statement expressing concern over the future of whites or their well-being is almost always characterised as “right-wing”. Blacks are simply too good-natured and inherently moral ever to commit evil on a significant scale against whites.
This is also the foreign perspective. A Marxist theologian in Germany or a pro-white militant in America would concur that whites “have no place in South Africa, at the southern tip of a black continent”. On the other hand, the Afrikaner perspective is quite the opposite. They feel deeply rooted in South Africa and reject the “black supremacism” of both the foreign whites and the anglicised, superficially Westernised blacks who see them as being “not indigenous” to the country or the continent.
For most of the twentieth century, there has been a perspectival war around the notion of whether Afrikaners or whites really “belong” in South Africa or not. Once, I was shocked to see the former leader of the opposition, Tony Leon, being bluntly told by a BBC announcer on the programme Hard Talk that he was a “white politician” and that South Africa had always been “their country” – meaning that of the blacks – even in former centuries when their numbers were limited to about a million, nomadically drifting through parts of a mostly unpopulated territory twice the size of France.
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History, as the ruling ANC politicians usually put it in their quasi-communist way, is “a terrain of ideological struggle”. Needless to say, whites have lost that ideological struggle – or the perspectival war over the past – hands down. It is now better to kiss the feet of Mandela’s bronze colosssus than to voice your own opinions or interpretation of history.
Faulkner, that strange author from the American South who uses the “N word” in his novels but depicts his own Southern whites with relentless cynicism, once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So there will always be a feud over history, everyone’s history.
But looking at the future of South Africa, or even our present safety in a physical sense, it also depends on one’s perspective. To foreigners and overseas correspondents in South Africa, this is Mandelatopia, a liberal democracy with same-sex marriages and universal suffrage – although cannabis is not yet quite legal. According to this view, which is based on a very superficial “multicultural” reading, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity”, as it is stated in our incongruous constitution, replete with rancour and affirmative-action clauses.
Many whites, especially women, have a sense of impending doom. The crime, corruption and general sense of lawlessness portend worse to come. Usually, they are not arguing against the dominant ideology with its illusions of democratic bliss. Rather, they intuit some kind of typically African implosion or civil war during which whites will be punished for all the evil they have wrought in their zeal to “uplift” and “civlise” blacks, admittedly ridiculous notions within the present context.
To the pessimist or the more intuitive analyst, South Africa’s future represents the “chronicle of a death foretold”, or many deaths, if you will pardon my paraphrasing the fetching title of Gabriel Márquez’s little novel. It will be Zimbabwe on a much vaster scale, and much bloodier. It is already much bloodier, and ultimately the country will be ethnically cleansed of its Caucasian undesirables, probably to universal acclaim.
Depending on one’s point of view, South Africa is either a “problem that has been happily solved” or a disaster in the making. Looking at the past, especially the nineteenth century when indigenous whites were as weak as they are now and were regularly massacred by blacks, as well as the history of postcolonial Africa, I am not macho enough to cast all caution to the winds and believe in the foreign male fantasy of a South Africa that is some kind of Switzerland or Singapore, clean, tolerant and law-abiding.
There being no common ground in this war of perspectives, no rational debate will take place either. I am inclined to trust those “womanly” truths that are as unspeakable as they are likely to come to pass.
Hundreds of EFF members gathered in the Polokwane police station foyer on Thursday to support their leader Julius Malema ahead of his court bid to have the charges against him dropped.
Malema’s supporters held placards and banners indicating which regions of the Economic Freedom Fighters they came from.
They also blew vuvuzelas and some waved knobkerries as they chanted songs against President Jacob Zuma.
“Muso wa Zuma reya o menola”, meaning “we will unseat Zuma’s government”, they sang.
Traffic was bumper to bumper, with streets around the court closed ahead of Malema’s appearance in the Polokwane Circuit of the High Court in Pretoria.
The expelled ANC Youth League president faces charges of fraud, corruption, money-laundering, and racketeering.
It is alleged that he made nearly R4 million from corrupt activities.
Malema is out on R10,000 bail. His four co-accused, who are his business associates, are out on bail of R40,000 each.
On Thursday, the EFF leader is expected to make representations to the judge in an attempt to have the charges against him dropped.
The State alleges that the five misrepresented themselves to the Limpopo roads and transport department, leading to a R52m contract being awarded to On-Point Engineering.
According to court papers, Malema had business ties with Lesiba Gwangwa, one of the co-accused and a director of On-Point Engineering.
Malema’s Ratanang Family Trust was an indirect shareholder in On-Point.
The department paid the company R43m. According to the charge sheet, Malema substantially benefited from this payment, using it to buy a farm and a Mercedes-Benz.
If the charges are not dropped, Malema’s trial would be heard from September 30 to October 31 next year. – Sapa
The President of the Republic of South Africa, His Excellency Mr Jacob Zuma last night, 25 November 2013, arrived in the Republic of Ghana for the State Visit, taking place from 26 to 27 November 2013 President Zuma will have official talks with his Ghanaian counterpart, His Excellency President John Dramani Mahama in which they will discuss, among other things, political, economic and security cooperation.
The visit is expected to strengthen the already existing cordial relations between South Africa and Ghana which date back to the period of ANC and SACP terror directed against South Africa.
The State Visit will also afford the two Presidents an opportunity to assess progress regarding the implementation of the seven Agreements/Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) that were signed during the State Visit to South Africa by the late President of Ghana Dr John Atta Mills in August 2011.
Furthermore, the Presidents will be able to endorse the Action Plans agreed upon by both Ministers of International Relations and Cooperation and Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration respectively during the 3rd Session of the South Africa-Ghana Permanent Joint Commission on Cooperation (PJCC) held in South Africa on 5 November 2013.
In terms of trade and investments, Ghana represents a major export market for South African goods. In 2012, South African exports to Ghana were estimated at R5 billion and the imports from Ghana at R1, 9 billion and the bulk of which was crude oil.
South Africa is the 14th largest investor in Ghana with investments amounting to more than R64 billion between 2003 and April 2013. There are more than 80 South African multinational and small scale companies registered in Ghana.
President Zuma is accompanied by the Ministers of International Relations and Cooperation, Ms Maite Nkoana-Mashabane; Trade and Industry, Dr Rob Davis; Transport, Ms Dipuo Peters; Energy, Mr Ben Martins; Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Ms Tina Joemat-Peterson; Science and Technology, Mr Derek Hanekom and Police, Mr Nathi Mthethwa
President Zuma is also accompanied by a business delegation.
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What else can you blame on apartheid? Well, Skoppensboer’s ingrowing toenails come to mind. Also, all the faeces in the Jukskei and the Vaal and all the other rivers may be attributed to apaaaatheid, I’m tellin’ ya, my good man. After all, who taught all these citizens to be so disposed as to not make proper use of the ablutions and the extant sewage facilities? The A factor, what else?
