land redistribution

Planting the seeds of poverty

by Kevin King

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We have a serious crisis in this country. With many millions of South Africans affected by poverty and unemployment, many millions more are expected to be affected. With high food prices already knocking the pockets of every South African, we can expect astronomical prices in the coming years and a scarcity of basic food stuffs. “A scarcity in basic food stuffs? You must be joking!” That’s what I’d say 10 years ago, but no longer. From an agricultural giant and leading world exporter, we have quickly found ourselves in the realm of net importer status. All because the ruling party got it wrong.

After our transition to democracy, the ANC decided that land redistribution was the way to go. And like planting seeds, they drew up their policies and passed a number of bills. These plans were meant to redistribute white farmers’ land to black farmers and to communities which were previously the ‘rightful owners’. Today, many years down the line, these seeds have grown to such an extent that a disaster looms for all. Let me illustrate the ruling party’s end produce.

Decline in commercial farmers, skills lost in 1994 there were some 120 000 commercial farmers but today a mere 37 000 remain. Yes, many of the previously 120 000 commercial farmers were white and transformation needed to take place, but with a sum total of 37 000 commercial farmers today, how many successful, black, commercial farmers have we produced and how many successful, white, commercial farmers has our country lost?

Farming has become “SA’s most dangerous job”. The threat of being the next farm murder victim (almost 4 000 farmers since 1994) and the threat of land grabs have resulted in many successful, white, farmers packing their bags and heading for greener pastures. And many of these farmers have indeed found greener pastures abroad and in other African countries. Congo, Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique are some of the governments who have invited them to farm in their countries on land earmarked for farming.

Other countries such as Gabon, Guinea and Ghana are also in talks. The starving continent of Africa has a huge demand for agriculture, job creation and filling empty stomachs. What better place for these farmers to apply their knowledge and skills. Further up north, Georgia has invited this group of endangered species to attempt to revive their agricultural industry by providing land and equipment. Quoting the Georgian government spokesperson, “South African farmers are some of the best farmers in the world. They have good experience and we would like to see such farms in Georgia. There is a lot of potential here.”

Regarding Georgian farmers who generally struggle to earn a decent living, “They want to set up joint ventures with South African farmers because they think they could raise the profitability and productivity of their farms,” he said. “They are more than delighted to have South African farmers and South African expertise on their farms.”

Meanwhile our government has opposing, often moronic, views to the rest of Africa. The Agriculture Minister, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, last week said the following regarding the departure of commercial farmers from South Africa, “This will not be a threat to food security in South Africa; instead, this will enhance food security in the continent.” This a real irony considering that other countries are trying to do the same thing but by attracting our farmers to their farm lands. It gets more idiotic when she says, “South Africa has skills it can share with other South Africans and with the rest of the continent.”

To an educated mind it would appear that skills are departing with the departing farmers and these skills are to be applied in other African countries indefinitely. Back at home, along with the loss of these farmers and their skills and experience, the former workers of these farms have lost their jobs. From around 1.6 million tax-paying farm workers (mainly black) which were employed in 1994, to around 300 000 in just 16 years.

I challenge anyone to provide me with intelligent reasons on how losing 83 000 commercial farmers and losing over a million jobs are to the advantage of our country and our people.

Demise of profitable, food producing farms According to the ANC itself last year, 90% of redistributed farms do not produce excess food. Farms which once produced hundreds of thousands of tons of produce and employed hundreds of workers now lie idle and are a mere shell of what they used to be. The remaining few black farmers are but a handful and use the land for subsistence farming.

Mismanagement, corruption and the lack of sufficient skills and experience has had catastrophic effects on many farms. To mention one of a thousand examples of farms which are now liquidated/idle/non-producing:

The Zebediela Citrus Estate (Limpopo) – Once described in the Readers’ Digest, “400 million oranges are harvested each year from the groves of Zebediela, the world’s biggest citrus estate. The output is sufficient to provide one orange for every eight people on earth.” This magnificent farm went from riches to ruins in just a few years after being taken over by the state.

Yet the talk/threat of land grabs/redistribution continues.

To avoid looking like a second Zimbabwe and forcibly removing white farmers off their land, the government has now come up with cunning plan to grab land without having to remove the white farmers by force. This plan is called the “Land Tenure Security Bill”. If signed off by the ANC government it will amongst other things, give farm workers the right to keep livestock on the farms where they work, which will be allowed to graze “indiscriminately” on the property.

The bill will also give workers the right to plant their own crops and build homes for themselves and close relatives, from which they may never be removed. Andy Tladi, a black sunflower farmer, says he is leaving to the DRC this year as the bill “gives farm workers a ‘blank cheque’ to do whatever they want to do on land that doesn’t belong to them. The bill is going to worsen the situation for farmers. You are actually going to see workers putting up villages on farms. If you allow 10 people to build houses on a farm, in about 20 years you could have up to 30 families. So how does the farmer continue to grow and invest under those circumstances? I am a black farmer and I won’t be able to handle that. A lot of farmers will fly out of the country.”

The high likelihood of failure for black farmers is a reality. Without the necessary skills and experience, even a successful farm which has been acquired through redistribution most often fails. Then when a rare success does happen, more often than not, there is a lack of backing from government which leads to failure or inability to grow. Steven Mohale, a leading black, tomato farmer in Limpopo, has been battling for years to get government assistance in order to grow his business. But it seems the only help he received was from private banks and white farmers.

To quote an article about Steven in Farmers Weekly, “I’m very disappointed in the way the government treats farmers. It’s high time government stopped insulting farmers. We spend a lot of time with white farmers in this area and almost all are very helpful. People who accuse farmers of bad things are talking nonsense. South Africans need to realise the sector is responsible for feeding the nation and creating employment – and so farmers deserve respect. But government’s attitude doesn’t help.”

In conclusion, it is clearly obvious to someone with a little bit of intelligence that we are heading for disaster. In fact we are already looking at a disaster if you look at how the majority has suffered in the last decade or so in terms of poverty, unemployment and starvation. Billions of taxpayers’ rands have been pumped into redistribution projects and this money has literally been flushed down the toilet, not to mention the millions stolen by corrupt, ANC linked officials. Now billions more has to be spent of which another 90% will be wasted. With calls for 100% nationalisation by Julius Malema, we could be in for even more serious trouble. At this moment I do not see much hope for agriculture in our country and in turn not much hope for the economy and our people.

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White genocide, full-blown communism looming in South Africa

by Alex Newman, New American

While most of the world refuses to acknowledge what is happening in largely communist-controlled South Africa, the non-profit group Genocide Watch declared last month that preparations for genocidal atrocities against white South African farmers were underway and that the early phases of genocide had possibly already begun. In the long run, Genocide Watch chief Dr. Gregory Stanton explained, powerful communist forces also hope to abolish private-property ownership and crush all potential resistance.

According to experts and official figures, at least 3,000 white farmers in South Africa, known as Boers, have been brutally massacred over the last decade. Many more, including children and even infants, have also been raped or tortured so savagely that mere words could not possibly convey the horror. And the problem is growing worse, international human rights monitors and South African exiles say.

The South African government, dominated by the communist-backed African National Congress (ANC), has responded to the surging wave of racist murders by denying the phenomenon, implausibly claiming that many of the attacks are simply regular crimes. Despite fierce criticism, authorities also stopped tracking statistics that would provide a more accurate picture of what is truly going on in the so-called “Rainbow Nation.”

In many cases, the murders are simply classified as “burglaries” and ignored, so the true murder figures are certainly much higher than officials admit. The police, meanwhile, are often involved in the murders or at least the cover-ups, multiple sources report. A white South African exile living in the United States told The New American that when victims are able to defend themselves or apprehend the would-be perpetrators, many of the perpetrators are found to be affiliated with the ruling ANC or its youth wing.

Experts are not buying the government’s cover-up. “The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental,” said Dr. Stanton of Genocide Watch during a fact-finding mission to South Africa last month. It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes, he added — especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. “We don’t know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation that will try and determine who is planning these murders.”

Indeed, most honest analysts concede that the thousands of brutal killings and tens of thousands of attacks are part of a broader pattern. And according to Dr. Stanton, who was also involved in the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and has decades of experience examining genocide and communist terror, the trend points toward a troubled future for the nation.

“Things of this sort are what I have seen before in other genocides,” he said of the murdered white farmers, pointing to several examples including a victim’s body that was left with an open Bible on top and other murder victims who were tortured, disemboweled, raped, or worse. “This is what has happened in Burundi, it’s what happened in Rwanda. It has happened in many other places in the world.”

Speaking in Pretoria at an event organized by the anti-communist Transvaal Agricultural Union, Dr. Stanton also slammed the effort to dehumanize whites in South Africa by portraying them as “settlers.” The label is meant to paint Afrikaner white farmers — descendants of Northern Europeans who arrived centuries ago — as people who do not belong there.

It is the same process that happened prior to the infamous genocide against Christian Armenians in Turkey, Stanton explained. The dehumanization phenomenon also occurred against the Jewish people in Germany under the National Socialist (Nazi) regime of mass-murderer Adolf Hitler, well before the Nazi tyrant began implementing his monstrous “final solution.”

Unfortunately, South Africa might be next in line, experts believe. “Whenever you have that kind of dehumanization … you have the beginning of that downward spiral into genocide,” Stanton noted, adding that the situation in South Africa had already moved beyond that stage. The next phase before extermination, which began years ago in South Africa, is organizing to actually carry it out.

“We are worried that there are organized groups that are in fact doing that planning,” Stanton continued during his speech. “It became clear to us that the [ANC] Youth League was this kind of organization — it was planning this kind of genocidal massacre and also the forced displacement of whites from South Africa.”

Genocide Watch raised its alert level for South Africa from stage five to stage six — the eighth and final stage is denial after the fact — when then-ANC Youth League boss Julius Malema began openly singing a racist song aimed at inciting murder against white South African farmers: “Shoot the Boer” and “Kill the Boer.” Described by the anti-genocide group as a “racist Marxist-Leninist,” Malema has also been quoted as saying that “all whites are criminals” and threatening to steal white farmers’ land by force.

“This is the kind of talk that of course is not only pre-genocidal, it also comes before crimes against humanity,” Dr. Stanton said, urging everyone to remember that they are all members of the human race. “Those who would be deniers, and who would try to ignore the warning signs in this country, I think are ignoring the facts.”

There is also increasing “polarization,” where the target population — white farmers in this case — and even moderates are portrayed as an “enemy,” Stanton explained about the march to genocide. And that phenomenon is ever-more apparent in South Africa, leading Genocide Watch to classify South Africa as being close to the final stages of genocide in July of this year.

The issue of land distribution, which has become one of the key drivers of the downward spiral, is also among the greatest concerns. The white minority in South Africa still owns much of the land despite ANC promises to redistribute it to blacks. But the re-distribution that has occurred — like in neighboring Zimbabwe — has largely resulted in failure.

Despite the atrocious track record so far, extremists including elements of the ANC-dominated government are now hoping to expropriate land from white farmers quicker, with some factions even arguing that it should be done with no compensation at all. And the communist agenda, like virtually everywhere else where forcible land redistribution has been adopted, has even broader goals.

“Whatever system of land tenure is adopted in South Africa, the communists — in the long run — have in mind to take away all private property. That should never be forgotten,” Stanton warned, noting that he had lived in communist-run countries before. “Every place you go where communists have taken over, they take away private ownership because private ownership gives people the power — the economic power — to oppose their government. Once you have taken that away, there is no basis on which you can have the economic power to oppose the government.”

Meanwhile, the South African government is stepping up efforts to disarm the struggling white farms, too — stripping them of their final line of defense. As has consistently been the case throughout history, of course, disarmament is always a necessary precursor to totalitarianism and the eventual mass slaughter of target groups. In fact, arms in the hands of citizens are often the final barrier to complete enslavement and even extermination.

“The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons,” Genocide Watch noted on its website in an update about South Africa posted last month. “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”

The exile who spoke with TNA said that many of the guns confiscated from whites by officials have later been found at the gruesome murder scenes of white farmers. Even mere possession of an “unregistered” or “unlicensed” weapon — licenses have become extraordinarily difficult to obtain, if not impossible — can result in jail time. And in South Africa, especially for white farmers, that is a virtual death sentence, with widespread rape and HIV infections being the norm.

Dr. Stanton promised the Afrikaners that he would be visiting the U.S. Embassy and bringing the issue to the attention of world leaders. However, he also urged them not to give up their guns and to continue resisting against the communist “ideology” espoused by so many of the political and party leaders that now dominate the nation’s coercive government apparatus.

The United Nations defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” The term also includes actions other than simply wholesale slaughter, though. According to the UN, among the crimes that can constitute genocide are causing serious harm to members of a specific minority group, deliberately inflicting conditions on the minority aimed at bringing about its destruction in whole or in part, seeking to prevent births among the targeted population, and forcibly transferring minority children to others.

Activists and exiles argue that many of those conditions have already been met — and any single one can technically constitute genocide if it is part of a systematic attempt to destroy a particular group. Meanwhile, experts say that the government is encouraging the problem, actively discriminating against whites, and in many cases even facilitating the on-going atrocities.

Not all South Africans — especially city dwellers — are convinced that there is an on-going genocide in their country, or even that one may be coming. Indeed, the vast majority of blacks and whites would simply like to live in peace with each other, and there are plenty of other problems facing South Africa at the same time. However, virtually everyone agrees that without solutions, the precarious situation in the “Rainbow Nation” will continue to deteriorate, going from bad to worse.

Many activists seeking to draw attention to the issue are calling on European governments and the United States to immediately begin accepting especially vulnerable white refugees from South Africa as a high priority. There are less than five million whites in the country, about 10 percent of the population, down from almost a quarter decades ago. Analysts say that giving them asylum, however, may prove tough politically — partly because it could expose the precious establishment myths of Nelson Mandela and his ANC as being “heroic” so-called “freedom fighters.”

Unsurprisingly, the establishment press has barely reported a word about the looming potential calamity. And by the time the world media finally catches on, many analysts worry that it might be too late.

This is a shortened version of the original article.