Margaret Thatcher – praag.org

Thatcher did not mention Mandela in official discussions with PW Botha

Margaret Thatcher made no mention of Nelson Mandela during the only formal talks she held with South Africa’s leader PW Botha, documents released recently reveal.

The papers blow apart recent Tory boasts that she helped end apartheid – and her own claim that she had pressed for his release at the summit.

Instead Thatcher relegated the issue to a short, private chat with Botha before the June 1984 talks officially got under way. No notes were taken so there is no evidence of what was discussed.

The then PM had been urged by the British Foreign Office to raise Mandela’s imprisonment officially during the four-hour minuted formal discussions.

But Thatcher, who objected to sanctions against Botha’s regime and had branded Mandela a terrorist, failed to do so.

Thatcher’s own account says Mandela’s incarceration was “noted” during a private audience on “sensitive issues”.

But her adviser John Coles stated: “No note-takers were present. Mr Botha said he could not interfere with the South African judicial process.” – extract from The Mirror

Did Mandela’s friend supply chemical weapons to Syrian rebels?

Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Nelson Mandela

by Terry Crawford-Browne

REPORTS from Syria by Jordanian journalists allege that it was Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia who distributed those chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels.( Here he is shown with that other unrepentant terrorist)

If true, it indicates the chemical attack in Damascus to have been a false-flag operation by the American war business.

This would be entirely in keeping with Prince Bandar’s history of organising the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra weapons exchanges, Libya in 2011, the suppression of the Shia uprising in Bahrain, Saudi support for the coup d’etat in Egypt and support for Syrian rebels.

Other reports confirm that Prince Bandar also went to see Russian President Vladimir Putin last month and offered to buy $15bn worth of Russian weapons provided Mr Putin abandoned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Mr Putin gave him short shrift.

Prince Bandar was not only the Saudi ambassador in Washington for 22 years and friends of Ronald Reagan and the Bush family, but he also negotiated the 1985 £43bn Al-Yamamah weapons deal with Margaret Thatcher, which Tony Blair renewed in 2007 with the Al-Salaam weapons deal.

When the British Serious Fraud Office investigated the bribes which BAE Systems paid him, Prince Bandar allegedly threatened blood in the streets of London.

Mr Blair squelched the investigation citing “national security.” The Guardian newspaper revealed a couple of months later how BAE with collusion of the British government had laundered bribes to Prince Bandar of over £1bn through Riggs Bank in Washington DC and other US banks.

Most importantly, Prince Bandar and Ms Thatcher negotiated the Al-Yamamah deal under the British Official Secrets Act, meaning that it cannot be investigated in Britain.

Saudi Arabia ships thousands of barrels per day of oil consigned to the Bank of England, which is then distributed to Shell and BP.

Over the years a surplus has developed, which is guesstimated to be worth over $150bn. Its purpose is a) to guarantee British and US support for the Saudi royal family against domestic insurrection and b) to fund covert destabilisation of resource-rich countries in Asia and Africa under the guise of the war on terror.

Having targeted Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and other countries over the years, Syria and Egypt are Prince Bandar’s current targets. When will SA be targeted by the American and British “war business” given our country’s mineral wealth?

Saudi Arabia made lavish donations to the African National Congress. Prince Bandar was also the only foreigner present at Nelson Mandela’s secret wedding to Graca Machel, and was a frequent visitor to SA when the arms deal was being negotiated.

Mandela death parties? No, but I’ll feel safe in the Wimpy

by Dan Roodt

When Margaret Thatcher died, British leftists and her Labour Party enemies threw “death parties” in a distasteful display of Schadenfreude. Whether Mandela will die today or live to be a hundred is irrelevant to my argument, as the idea of his death has already provoked a number of reactions, including a tweet from BNP leader Nick Griffin:

“Saint #nelsonmandela on last legs it seems. Make sure to avoid BBC when the murdering old terrorist croaks. It’ll be nauseating.”

Griffin’s tweet caused outrage in British newspapers and on Twitter itself. It is not entirely in good taste, but by the standards set by Thatcher’s detractors with their “death parties” it seems to be in keeping with the Zeitgeist.

For a moment I wondered whether we, the victims of Mandela’s movement, should start organising death parties, in case he does “exchange the temporal for the eternal” as the Afrikaans saying goes. I suppose we could all come dressed in camo with plastic AK-47s.

Americans use the term “disconnect” when they mean “disparity”. It’s not really part of my vocabulary but it sounds right when I say there is a disconnect between the global image of “Saint Nelson Mandela” and the man. Here we have someone who wandered onto the world stage by mistake, almost like an extra, and got applauded for being the hero.

Worse, Mandela is one of the last dinosaurs of a bygone, socialist-revolutionary age. In the early 1960s when he engaged in a botched attempt at revolution, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse Tung and their African imitators were still seen as heroes. In May 1968, the rioting French students in Paris had heard of Mao but not Mandela, yet they could just as well have put his face on a few posters. In the 1980s when I lived in Paris the French Communist Party had a monopoly on the Free Mandela slogan in France, as if they had bought the franchise from the bunch of death-party-celebrating Labour and Anglican fanatics in London.

The Church of England must be the first church in history that had engaged in money laundering to further urban terrorism in South Africa. The radical cleric, Canon Collins, oversaw the whole operation from a back office at St. Paul’s Cathedral. If only the B.I.S. in Basle had been more proactive in curtailing money laundering, they could have spared the lives of many civilians who died in ANC terrorist incidents in South Africa.

Unlike Mao, who wrote some nice poetry and became famous for his Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims, I strongly suspect that Mandela never wrote anything. He was surrounded by a bunch of white or Indian communist advisers and handlers who wrote his speeches and who more or less told him what to do. His speech from the dock at the Rivonia trial was “edited” by author Nadine Gordimer and journalist Anthony Sampson. Gordimer also “edited” his voluminous autobiography, Long walk to freedom.

Nowadays the school history books in South Africa contain naked propaganda, just like in any erstwhile East-European totalitarian state. Our children studying those books for exams are led to believe that Mandela was imprisoned for his “opposition to apartheid”, whatever that might mean.

In reality, he had already engaged in a campaign of sabotage and terror, but was found out in time by the South African police. In a post 9/11 world, and if Mandela had planned anything against the USA, he would simply have been eliminated by American special forces like Osama Bin Laden, with Hillary Clinton cackling some Caesarian paraphrase.

Like all terrorists, Mandela had embraced the dubious moral principle of “the end justifies the means”. Even after his first failed attempt for which he had been jailed for life in SA after a fair trial, prosecuted not by an Afrikaner but by a South African jew, Percy Yutar, Mandela must have ordered or acquiesced in the terror campaign masterminded by the devious Joe Slovo from London.

If ever Saint Mandela sailed on a cloud to heaven as his global leftist and liberal admirers foresee, he could announce at the pearly gates: “My organisation never had an army worth mentioning, but we did place bombs in restaurants.” The infamous Wimpy bombing campaign of the 1980s killed and maimed a large number of civilians all over the country. But the ANC’s biggest “success” if one could call it that, was the so-called Church Street Bomb in Pretoria that exploded on 20 May 1983, killing 19 civilians and injuring more than 200,

The ANC’s terror campaign in the 1980s was no different to that waged by other extremist organisations all over the world. If Mandela had given the go-ahead for the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April this year, would his reputation as “a man of peace” have been affected at all?

I daresay the world would have looked upon him somewhat differently if that had been the case. Why then is Mandela revered for having been a member of an extremist, crypto-communist “liberation movement” that bombed innocent people in the street, in Wimpy fast-food restaurants and that placed limpet mines on farm roads, killing not only white farmers but also their black workers?

Even if Mandela’s bloodthirsty teleology could have been justified by the end goal of “democracy” (belatedly replacing a communist class revolution in the early 1990s), it would still have been a vicious way of pursuing power. However, South Africa today is hardly a democracy. At best it is a violent, corrupt and crime-ridden oligarchy run by Mandela’s ex-terrorists.

Mandela’s legacy of terror against rural people, perhaps inspired by some Maoist creed, lives on today in the form of farm murders whereby our farmers are regularly attacked, tortured and killed in the cruelest ways imaginable. A local TV documentary on farm murders was appositely entitled “A bloody harvest”.

The mainstream media world-wide, particularly the BBC, may have cynically elevated Mandela to the holy status he has today, but the bloody harvest we are living through is as much his as the rest of the ANC with its shadowy characters who have successfully converted from perpetrators of random violence to looters of the public purse.

It is an intriguing question whether, for liberal journalists in the MSM, terror in the name of Islamic jihad may not be acceptable but in furthering black power it is. One type of terrorist bows to Mecca but the other thrusts his fist into the air shouting “amandla!” (power!”; therein lies all the difference, it seems.

Mandela and his cohort of self-styled revolutionaries have destabilised South Africa and we may be doomed to experience nihilistic violence forever in the form of bands of criminals or ethnic killers attacking us at random.

South Africa has a so-called model constitution. I do not care much for the constitution, for the ANC never respected the Geneva convention when it visited terror upon us. It seems as if their nameless war continues to this day, still without respecting the rules of civilised warfare. Of what use is the constitution if there is no real peace, no real safety?

Lately I have spent some time in Wimpy bars here in Johannesburg where they offer free wifi. They have been revamped, but still contain that 1960s American “diner” look that makes you think of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.

Inside the Wimpy they have a large letter W in a corner sometimes, an upside down M. As in Mandela. It is comforting that the ubiquitous South African Wimpy bar will outlive Mandela, the smiling old terrorist. Only when his entire generation of crazed extremists will have died out, may we make some political progress in South Africa.

No-one can feel secure in this country. There is menace everywhere. But somehow when Mandela dies I will feel a little bit safer typing an email in the Wimpy.

Mandela too soft on whites, says Mugabe in documentary

by Johannes Myburgh

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe criticises Nelson Mandela for being too soft on whites, in a documentary giving a rare and intimate look into the family life of one of Africa’s longest serving and most vilified leaders.

In a cosy lunch setting with his wife and children, the 89-year old speaks on a wide range of issues from his controversial hold on power, to his relationships with former British premiers Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

The two-and-a-half hour interview, described in detail by British and South African media ahead of its airing, shows the usually bellicose and sharp-tongued Mugabe as a loving family man.

Dali Tambo, the son of South African anti-apartheid hero Oliver Tambo, produced the documentary, which will be broadcast on South African public television next Sunday.

In the programme Tambo dines with Mugabe’s family at his wife Grace’s dairy farm.

The interview comes just months before crucial general elections in the country which in recent decades has gone from being the breadbasket of southern Africa to its biggest problem child.

One of Africa’s most popular liberation leaders, Mugabe has clashed with the West over controversial policies which saw white-owned farms violently seized over a decade ago.

In neighbouring South Africa, where white land ownership is still a flashpoint, Mugabe says former president Nelson Mandela was not hard enough.

He said former colonial masters Britain — with whom he has had a fraught relationship over the land grabs — “will praise you only if you are doing things that please them”.

“Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of (blacks),” Mugabe said of his former South African counterpart.

“That’s being too saintly, too good, too much of a saint,” he is quoted from the documentary in South Africa’s Sunday Independent.

Despite Mugabe’s disagreements with former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who died in April, he says he preferred the Iron Lady to her later successor Tony Blair.

“Mrs Thatcher, you could trust her. But of course what happened later was a different story with the Labour Party and Blair, who you could never trust,” said Mugabe.

“Who can ever believe what Mr Blair says? Here we call him Bliar.”

But despite having governed for 32 years, Africa’s oldest ruler also insists on staying in power.

According to The Guardian in Britain, the topic of the upcoming vote unleashes Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric as he bangs his fist on an armrest and insists: “There is a fight to fight.”

“My people still need me,” he told Tambo.

“And when people still need you to lead them, it’s not time, sir, it doesn’t matter how old you are, to say goodbye.”

Mugabe is currently sharing power with his rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai after violent disputed polls in 2008. No date has yet been set for this year’s elections although Mugabe is pressing for them to go ahead as soon as possible.

Tambo, 54, brushed off criticism that the programme — which will air as part of his “People of the South” television series that profiles celebrities and public figures — polishes Mugabe’s image ahead of the vote.

He told the Sunday Independent that he had also interviewed Rhodesian leader Ian Smith for a previous series.

Mugabe was “warm, charismatic and very humorous”, Tambo said.

According to The Guardian, Mugabe pours out his heart during the meal on his love for his wife and their “oneness”.

In unusual candour Mugabe also explains his affair with Grace while still married to his sickly first wife Sally — he wanted to give his mother grandchilden.

“As Sally was still going through her last few days, although it might have appeared to some as cruel, I said to myself ‘well, it’s not just myself needing children, my mother has all the time said, ah, am I going to die without seeing grandchildren’.”

He married Grace, his secretary over 40 years his junior, after Sally Mugabe died in 1992.

The couple have three children. – Sapa

Looters dancing on Thatcher’s grave

Revellers in Brixton staged a street party to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s death, culminating in arrests and an attack on a local charity shop.

Around 100 hundred people were out on the streets to celebrate the death of former the former prime minister, whose death from a stroke was announced on Monday.

A board at the famous Ritzy cinema in Windrush Square was hijacked by partygoers who swapped the letters to read ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Dead.’

Smashed glass was strewn on the street after the window of charity shop Barnardos was kicked in during ugly scenes.

Police officers trying to keep order were attacked, with extra numbers drafted in to stop revellers spilling out on to the roads and causing traffic delays.

Two women were arrested on suspicion of burglary and spent the night in cells after Barnardos was targeted during celebrations.

Reporter Ewan Palmer was at the scene. He said: “There was the notion that this morbid celebration has been planned in thousands of people’s heads for more than 30 years.

“Police stood by and watched as more and more people arrived with their drink and banners mocking her death. Shouts of ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! dead, dead, dead!” rang around gleefully.

“Chalk was handed out so people could graffiti their own message on the ground and surrounding walls.

“There were even two guys playing double bass and acoustic guitar in the crowd for a singalong. At the start of the evening, the whole thing resembled a middle-class music festival more than a raucous demo.

“Almost inevitably after a few hours of people drinking in the streets, this escalated into scenes of unrest between people and riot police, resulting in arrests and even serious injury.”

The revellers downed alcohol and brandished placards reading “The bitch is dead” and ‘Rejoice Thatcher is dead.’ Many revellers appeared younger than the 23 years which have passed since Thatcher left office.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “Police dealt with a group of approximately 100 people in Brixton who caused low-level disorder including throwing missiles at officers.

“In order to protect the community and to ensure the highways remained clear, extra officers were deployed.

“Two women were arrested after being found inside a shop in Brixton. They remain in custody.” – IBT

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

Are Mrs. Thatcher’s cuckoos coming home to roost?

Mrs. Margaret Thatcher famously stated in the nineteen-eighties that “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”

For this, she was ridiculed by the British radicals, with Bishop Trevor Huddleston of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the forefront. Since that time, all the anti-apartheid secrets have been revealed, including the active role played by British radicals, especially within the Anglican Church, in undermining what was then still the sovereign government of South Africa.

Whereas the ANC and SACP also enjoyed Soviet and East German support, the financial and organisational muscle for the South African revolution was provided by Sweden and the Anglican Church. Another radical priest, Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s in London, oversaw a vast network of agents who channelled funds in the name of the Defence and Aid Fund into South Africa for political trials and to support the relatives of imprisoned revolutionaries. Under today’s banking laws, money may no longer be laundered in such a fashion.

On the website of the Canon Collins Trust, a document boasts that one hundred million pounds were distributed in support of attempts to overthrow the much-vilified reformist government of PW Botha. Revolution, and not reform, was what everyone had preached back then.

However, as South Africa pursues its dream of an egalitarian society at all costs, there is a certain revolutionary fatigue setting in, even among the most ardent supporters of the ANC. And the second phase of the revolution, or “second transition” as it has been euphemistically called, still lies ahead of us. During that phase, most white farmers will lose their land and large swathes of private industry, including the mines, may be nationalised. Mayhem and ethnic conflict will probably result.

Increasingly, to paraphrase a line from Joyce’s Ulysses, the New South Africa is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

Over the past thirteen days, there have been seventeen victims of farm attacks in South Africa. Not all have died, but the death rate is high. Some were horribly tortured. Another ten people were killed at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana amid strife between the mine and two competing trade unions.

The American NGO, Genocide Watch, has already classified South Africa as a category 5 (out of a possible 8) genocide risk, with polarisation between groups taking place. On his recent visit to South Africa, Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch stated that the atrocities committed against Afrikaner farmers “were signs of genocide and that there is enough suspicion that it is being organised”.

Stanton also asserted an intrinsic connection between communist ideology and genocide. In this, he is supported by the post-Maoist philosophers of France, the so-called nouveaux philosophes, who broke with Marxism in the nineteen-seventies and also saw the germ of crimes against humanity in the concepts of Marx and Lenin.

In the minds of the ANC “comrades”, transformation is both necessary and inevitable, echoing classical Marxist-Leninism. Ordinary human lives or cultures will not stand in the way of their grand strategy to effect a radical change in South Africa. In almost every public appearance, ANC leaders use the Marxist cliché “moving forward”, indicating the country’s march towards a millenarian goal.

Afrikaner children at high school listen to the iconoclastic band Fokofpolisiekar, voicing their frustrations with violence, affirmative action and social decay in songs such as “Brand Suid-Afrika”. And certainly the impression that South Africa is burning, sometimes literally, is not amiss. If only the BBC, NBC and other major TV networks overseas had been filming all of this as they did during the seventies and eighties, already there would have been an impression that South Africa was experiencing a crisis.

After almost two decades of ANC rule, it appears that Mrs. Thatcher’s cuckoos are coming home to roost. Like ZANU PF in Zimbabwe, the ANC has not been able to make the transition from a crypto-communist liberation movement waving AK-47s to a political party managing Africa’s only industrial state. In its rhetoric and its thinking, it is stuck in a time warp, sometime before Ché Guevara got shot in Bolivia.

The ANC’s British supporters, as well as Sweden, saw fit to launch the ANC in its successful bid for power in South Africa. In fact, on 27 April 2004, the Swedish ambassador in Pretoria stated on Radiosondergrense, but speaking English, that “without the help of Sweden, the ANC would never have ruled South Africa”.

To many outside South Africa, the ANC still represents the party of Nelson Mandela. To them he personifies the romantic hero, a kind of black Ché Guevara who went to prison to liberate the South African masses. However, to the racial and ethnic minorities who suffer under ANC rule, with its accompanying threats of “kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, the movement is a Frankenstein let loose. The modern ANC was made in Britain, but it has grafted itself onto the South African state, blurring the boundaries between itself and the republic.

Through its culture of tenderpreneurs and high-spending officials, it has arguably become one of the richest political parties in the world, unassailable in the polls. In a vast country where electioneering is prohibitively expensive, oppositon parties face a permanent financial and propaganda disadvantage. The SANDF has been transformed, precisely, into nothing more than an ANC militia, an extension of Umkhonto we Sizwe. So even if the ANC is outvoted in 2019 or 2024 or when Jesus returns, as Zuma has stated, it will probably cling onto power, just like ZANU PF or the Angolan MPLA has done.

Of course, that paragon of human rights and democracy, Robert Mugabe, was also enthusiastically backed by British diplomats at Lancaster House and fêted by Fleet Street as a great African leader. The British penchant for radical chic has found a ready outlet in Southern Africa, to devastating effect.

However, like all radical movements, the ANC will overplay its hand. The question is not if but when. The further issue is how much damage it will do to South Africa and how many more massacres of Afrikaner families will take place before a realignment occurs.

Three reasons South Africa will fail

by Claudia Meades

Ex British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said anybody who thought the ANC could govern country was living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Could anybody, at the time she said it, have imagined that nobody would deliver a more vivid demonstration of her claim, than the ANC itself.

In fact, delivering an account of the ANC’s failures, in as little as seventeen years, will likely take as many years – for not a day passes that South Africans are not bombarded with reams of inanities, clearly depicting the state-of-disaster South Africa has become, under the ANC’s governance.

Indeed, I herewith challenge anybody to name anything-, even if it is just one item of success that can be directly contributed to the ANC government – for if you can actually find something, you will be presented with thousands of failures in return. Where else, in the known universe, would such an entity remain in government..? Oops, I forgot.., Zimbabwe…

In passing: let me remind you, the ANC had little to do with the 2010 Soccer World Cup – it was managed from Europe; Sepp Blatter (a Swiss national) simply seized South Africa for a month. The Gautrain was conceived and designed in Europe. The SKA is simply foreign technology in a remote place and so on.

Sport in South Africa survives, not because of the ANC, but despite the ANC. Since 1994, South Africa has only performed in a sustainable manner, in water-sports, golf and rugby.

The ANC stuck its middle-finger down the throat of South African Soccer and demanded the 2010 SWC present an almost exclusively non-white team – the result was the greatest embarrassment in the history of the sport: i.e. the host being eliminated in the first round. In a bender of divine justice, similar to Jesse Owen’s achievements at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, was delivered the clearest signal conceivable to the fascism of South Africa’s current black-nationalist regime – this time, a crushing defeat at the “hands” of a near lily-white team…

Kindly do not quote, as a ‘post ‘94 ANC achievement’, anything to do with SARS and/or tax. The ANC does NOT generate tax money – it consumes it, seemingly in a glutinous destructive rage.

While there are places elsewhere in Africa nearing double percentage-point growth-rates, the South African economy is staggering along at less than 2% growth – a figure vehemently disputed by some, saying that in real terms, the South African economy is currently shrinking; e.g. all the signs point at it, citing time-on-time unemployment figures and -other key economic determinants.

The post-Polokwane-‘07 regime has managed to chase away 70% of the Foreign Direct Investment in less than two-and-a-half years (the effects now catching up with the economy). The crippling effects of near insane increases in energy costs – while the country is tiptoeing on the edge of the abyss of rolling black-outs (likely a struggling economy’s death knell), Escom is partying up a (lightning)-storm and giving its executives record salaries and increases.

In summary – the ANC’s modus operandi is simple: take from the white minority and pay the black majority to keep them in power. I am not the first one to raise this actuality, great minds like Moeletsi Mbeki, have done it before. While the aforementioned mores is justified by a near demonic entitlement – viz, as Adolf Hitler presented a “biblical promise” of a thousand-year rule, the ANC delivered the same psychotic delusions, with their “we will rule till Jesus comes” lunacy – a folly that has crippled South Africa at every level of functionality, yet in a rage of overwhelming delusion the ANC continues to celebrate “victory” (even presenting a fictional “battle” that never even happened).

A delusional rage that is slurped up by the largely illiterate- and/or unemployed masses who firmly believe it is their birthright to “take from white people” – spurred on by their spear-dangling DIC-tator, who earlier this year pledged to [verbatim quote] “aggressively” [unquote] remove white South African’s share of the economy, a share that is current less than 20% (of the economy). But as history will attest, the parasitic rage of the communist-vampire will not stop, until its host is sucked bone dry – that is before the monster turns on itself…

As one of the most obese governments on earth, the relevant ANC officials live in a TAX-(funded) HEAVEN, consisting of high-speed convoys-of-destruction featuring Europe’s finest vehicles, private airliners flying in fuel-gulping dual formations to convey a single person to the other side of the earth, seven-course-meals on demand, even an entire private town to be built in honour of the functionally Illiterate Spear-of-the-Nation and his King-Solomon-like bevy of “traditional” wives (one can only image, in horrid trepidation, what the gate-pillars will resemble) and so on.

All of this, while the vast majority of the people who keep the ANC in government, live on less than what one of them splurge out on a suit (often while on a tax-sponsored frenzy in 5th Avenue New York; also known as the land of the “evil imperialist”) – paid for by tax-payers who largely do not even vote for them. A situation so desperate, the USA (in turn) has to rush over to the country (e.g. led by Hillary Clinton’s current visit), to rescue South Africa’s education system and to deliver the critical commonsense (currently lacking) to create real jobs in South Africa, while “The Spear” is frolicking around exotic islands.

Kindly note: the USA has a GDP/capita that is nearly five times (5 x) greater than that of South Africa. Yet the despotic nationalist (ANC) regime, keeps ululating to the whims of the little yellow-and-red flagged critters (i.e. China) – with a GDP/capita that is (more than) 30% LESS than even that of South Africa. Frightening is it not..?

Very few people in South Africa understand the fundamental concept of “TAX”. Tax is not simply an unconditional payment. The only “unconditional” payments are THEFT.

Tax money is handed to a government in good faith – by-and-large, if not exclusively, to deliver collective services that cannot-, or cannot efficiently be achieved by individual entities.

A simple example is street light – one person cannot put up street lights, as everybody uses the street, so money is placed in a ‘pool’ and it is used for collective services. Anything else is THEFT – tax money belongs to the PUBLIC, notably the de facto tax-paying public (e.g. NOT those “tax-payers” who work for the state, the government, municipalities, state-owned-, or semi-state-owned companies, BEE-companies surviving on state-tenders, etc – they simply regurgitate tax-money). The tax-regime conceptually functions/exists in exactly the same manner as that of the body-corporate of a sectional title community/building.

The inconvenient reality is: should the tax-paying community of a country decide to stop paying tax, there is fundamentally nothing the government can do – largely as the ‘government’ needs the very same income to acquire its wherewithal. I.o.w. basically a self-perpetuating incongruity.

Governments will naturally NEVER admit this absolute vulnerability and will use a plethora of methods to intimidate-, indoctrinate (etc) people to continue to pay tax. Imagine a government jailing all its tax-payers – it can NEVER happen.

The South African case must be a tax-base that is one of the most unique in the world. I do not have the exact figures, but South Africa must be the only place on earth, where MORE THAN 80% of the bona fide tax-paying public (refer to the exclusions in brackets in the relevant paragraph above) do not vote for the ruling party. While the vast majority, who vote for the ruling party, contribute little (if not essentially nothing) to the tax-income of the country – viz. one relevant figure I do have: around 70% of the people who vote for the ANC are unemployed.

Shall I remind you that the most prolific country that the world has ever seen – the USA (a place that is younger than South Africa and one that has travelled further than any known being), was built on the ethos – ‘NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION’.

The ANC has left in its wake a plethora of ventures that could only be messed-up by the absolute hopeless – e.g. Telkom (how do you mess up an unmitigated monopoly that is near unconditionally guaranteed? Telkom is now such a desperate mess it wants to withdraw from the stock exchange), SAA (once the greatest airline in the world), Universities (once amongst the most revered academic institutions in the world – now manage little more than ILLITERATE GRADUATES, just ask the Law Society of South Africa), Hospitals (epic institutions that saw some the world’s greatest medical achievements – e.g. the first heart-transplant in history, now little more than macabre medieval slaughterhouses, crawling with Cuban hand-me-downs), etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

THIS IS THE FIRST REASON SOUTH AFRICA WILL FAIL – the ANC takes money from hard-working people and have nothing to show for it.

It is however the latest governmental inanity, of grand proportions, that now warrants ‘special’ mention.

The South African Local Government Association (Salga) is an idiosyncratic oddity that is probably unique to South Africa. Few hard-working South Africans who make a bona fide contribution to the country’s economy have ever heard of this peculiar public entity. An entity created under Section 21 of the Companies Act (1973) – it is the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs’s [GOVSA] “Court Jester” and was formed in terms of the Organised Local Government Act 52 of 1997.

Salga represents local government on numerous intergovernmental forums such as the President’s Coordinating Council, Minister and MEC’s forum, the Budget Forum, the National Council of Provinces and the Financial and Fiscal Commission. However, nobody really understands why Salga is necessary or what its value-adding mandate is – this however has not stopped its tax-leeching existence (either directly from a national government grant or indirectly from e.g. membership fees). It appears to be, in some ways, the ANC government’s own union – as bizarre as it sounds (not that peculiarities has ever stopped the ANC regime).

It is worth noting here that the Department of GOVSA is comfortably one of the greatest disasters in an already disastrous ANC government. It presides over rampant non-compliance, corruption of endemic proportions, collapsing- to non-existent infrastructure (including structures that collapsed almost upon completion, by virtue of entities like SGL Engineering, On-Point Engineers and such – distinguished by a certain “director” who took twenty-one years to fail Woodwork), absenteeism so vast it is impossible to quantify, incompetence beyond even the worst nightmare – often openly admitted with flagrant “so what” entitlement, fiscal losses of epic proportions, etc, etc, etc.

E.g. GOVSA (in March 2011) regarded 8 out of 32 unqualified audits as “…an improvement…” – i.e. one quarter – where else in the world would a three-quarters failure-rate be regarded as good enough..? Except naturally a place starting with “Z”…

GOVSA’s rampant disconnection from reality is eagerly led by another one of the ANC regime’s big spender – Richard Baloyi. He who spent R360 000 on car rentals, on 21 occasions, for “unavoidable” reasons – obviously a good enough reason, certainly at more than R17000 a shot. Following his impeccable example, his deputy Ayanda Dlodlo did the same on 18 occasions, at a cost of R205 000 – at more than R11000 a shot, she made sure she did not threaten her bosses score per ‘shot’…

Another (rare in this case) oddity in the ANC is auditor-general Terence Nombembe. Recently Nombembe delivered a report to parliament that estimated 70% of municipal officials were not qualified to perform their duties.

At this point, it worth pointing at Act no 12 of 2004 – The Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Actions – believe it or not, assented to, by a president of an ANC government, in April 2004 (not on the 1st, smart-****).

In CHAPTER 2 – named “OFFENCES IN RESPECT OF CORRUPT ACTIVITIES”, Part 2: “Offences in respect of corrupt activities relating to specific persons”, under the heading “Offences in respect of corrupt activities relating to public officers”, it states,
[verbatim – from line no 50] – “4. (1) Any – (a) public officer, who directly or indirectly, accepts or agrees or offers to accept any gratification from any other person, whether for the benefit of himself or herself or for the benefit of ANOTHER PERSON…”

Then,
“…in order to act, personally or by influencing another person so to act, in a manner…
(ii) that amounts to
(aa) the abuse of a position of authority;
(bb) a breach of trust; or
(cc) the violation of … a set of rules;
(iii) designed to achieve an unjustified result…
is guilty of the offence of corrupt activities relating to public officers.
(2) … “to act” in subsection (1) Includes –
(b) performing or not adequately performing any official functions…”

Not only is 70% incompetence an overwhelmingly unbelievable figure – in any ‘book’, anywhere on earth (bar perhaps Z…) – appointing- and/or allowing such a person to continue- and/or aiding- and/or assisting such a person, is by definition a corrupt activity (i.o.w. corruption).
Act no 12, 2004, gives the prosecuting authority the power to imprison somebody for life (take note Woodwork students – start practicing your ‘Boeremag’ anthems, you could be sharing a close proximity with some unlikely friends – till Jesus comes…).

Following Terence Nombembe revelation, the cabinet instructed COVSA’s Minister (Richard Baloyi) to ensure municipalities employ suitably qualified financial officers – a somewhat impotent response to what is potentially a very serious matter, nevertheless..,

Into the fray steps Salga’s CEO Xolile George, to quickly expose cabinet’s ‘response’ for what it really is – viz ineffectual lip-service.

Nobody (that matters) really knows who Xolile George is, but he quickly poured ice cold water (midst country-wide snowfalls for the first time in recorded history) on the instruction from cabinet, by saying that the inefficient workers were contractual obligations for the municipalities and cannot be let go. He then proceeded to say: “…Our appetite is not to fire people but to capacitate them…”

STAGGERING..!

I trust Xolile George can grasp that he is potentially an accessory to corruption. But I guess he does not grasp this verity and nor do the ANC. In fact the entire ANC regime is not only impervious to the extent- and de facto meaning of corruption, it is wholly oblivious. The examples are overwhelming – I have merely elaborated on one ‘interesting’ example.

THE SECOND REASON SOUTH AFRICA WILL FAIL under the ANC – it has “incapacitated” itself to address incompetence, corruption and alike.

The thrid reason is courtesy of one the greatest literary minds of our time – Ilana Mercer (a citizen of the USA, notably so, as the ANC’s destruction of South Africa is increasingly being recognised on the global stage).

As a classical liberal writer she has written one of the greatest- and probably most complete dissertations on post-Apartheid South Africa – in many ways, of Apartheid South Africa. Her book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” is a script that is a minimum requirement for ANYBODY who values a future in South Africa (and for that matter the USA) – notably for their children- and theirs. Read it – I urge you.

She has written a number of essays on South Africa (particularly post-1994 South Africa), but for the purposes here, I will refer to her article titled “Clueless in South Africa with Mrs. Obama”

It touches on the ANC’s obligatory sophism – viz “BLAME WHITES FOR EVERYTHING”, from sun-spots to old-age homes…

Ilana cites Jim Peron, a US expat, as she notes, “…idealism drove him to decamp to post-apartheid South Africa…”. Peron says: “Every time something goes wrong (and that happens constantly), the same litany of excuses is recited. ‘We inherited this problem from the corrupt apartheid regime.’…”

She follows by stating “…There’s one pesky problem with this particular blame-game: South Africa’s flourishing criminal class consists mainly of youngsters who’ve come of age and blossomed under black rule…”

Then she states another inconvenient verity: “…minority-ruled South Africa, with all its problems, offered Africans more than any other country on the Dark Continent…”.

As such she further notes another uncomfortable fact “…While black Africa and East Europe circled the drain due to communism, South Africa was experiencing an economic explosion, courtesy of the National Party’s relatively conservative economics. An oasis in the African desert, South Africa’s… …economy grew at an annual rate of six percent during the 1960s…”.

Presenting more substance not fitting well into the ANC’s “sheep-suit” that blames everything on WHITE APARTHEID, Ilana notes:
“…In his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, F. W. de Klerk, who received a Nobel Peace prize for surrendering South Africa to the ANC, corrected the record.

Apartheid was not only about white privilege but also about development and redistribution of income from whites to blacks. The economy had grown by an average of 3.5 percent per year under apartheid, the black school population grew by 250 percent in the first twenty-five years of apartheid, and the black share of total personal income had nearly doubled from twenty percent in the mid-1970s to thirty seven percent in 1995, while that of whites declined from seventy one to forty nine percent.” As bad as the Bantu Education system was, it vastly improved black literacy.

Twelve years into the Nationalist government’s rule, the rate of literacy among the Bantu of South Africa was already higher than that of any other state in Africa, or that of India…”

It is worth noting that the gains in the literacy of black South Africans during almost five decades of apartheid, has been all but eradicated by the ANC regime, in as little as one-and-a-half decades.

Then she gives a brief overview of the vast improvements in health-care and life-expectancy of black South Africans under apartheid. A day will come when history will show that the apartheid government took better care of black people than the regime elected under (so-called) “democracy”.
She concludes by saying “…By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate…”

THIS IS THE THIRD REASON SOUTH WILL FAIL under the ANC regime – viz the convenient proxy apartheid offers for reality…