Tag: RW Johnson

Opinion: South Africa is sleepwalking into disaster

The worm has turned and virtually every South African political commentator whose legacy was to encourage a one man one vote ANC takeover in South Africa is now tearing into the government and its alliance partners. The country is on its economic knees and those in charge seem blithely unaware of the destruction they have wrought and are still wreaking, or else they couldn’t care less. What is surprising is that people are surprised. Why would ANC cadres not do what they are doing, given who they are and whence they came? A leopard never changes its spots.

In his startling and brutally critical book “How long will South Africa survive? The Looming Crisis”, former ANC supporter and self-described ex Marxist R.W. Johnson explains how effortlessly the ANC government has slipped into the lifestyle of so many other African ruling cliques, but with more to plunder and destroy. He has put to bed any notions that the ANC may still have something up its sleeve and the country will come right after all. The book should be required reading for all thinking South Africans.

TAU SA has watched the slide with the somber knowledge that it was inevitable. Warning after warning has been issued, to little avail. Agriculture was one of the first victims of government’s ludicrous socialistic policies (there are currently 16 pieces of legislation on the table designed to hobble SA’s commercial agriculture) but the country at large appeared disaffected because it wasn’t happening to other segments of society. It was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped: affirmative action hit all levels of the country’s civil service; Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has affected virtually all manufacturing and commercial enterprises; attempts to nationalize the mining industry (some of which endeavors became a reality) sent investors running for the hills; and the prohibition on foreign property ownership caused uncertainty across the board and businesses started moving their head offices overseas, while others sent out cash in an upsurge of foreign purchases. This economic shambles has sent even the most optimistic believers into a tailspin.

GWEDE MANTASHE

A particular object of resentment in business and agricultural circles is ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe. He is not an elected public representative yet his pronouncements and actions are directed at all and sundry, as if he were president. In a letter to Mantashe (to which there was no reply), TAUSA president Louis Meintjies asked Mantashe what gave him the right to organize a recent conference on Afrikaans and other matters which resulted in a shambles and where not even an agenda had been drawn up? Despite the country’s disarray in virtually every sector, Mantashe chose to emphasize the Freedom Charter over the constitution as the country’s first reference for governing. Meintjies put it to Mantashe that it is the SA Communist Party that is controlling the government, and emphasized that because of TAU SA’s close contact with Georgia in the Caucasus, “that country is presently licking its economic wounds after what it suffered under Soviet Communist rule”. Clearly these comments are like water off a duck’s back as far as Mantashe and others in the ruling clique are concerned.

Mantashe talks with forked tongue. Wrote Meintjies: “On the one hand you mentioned at the conference that you need farmers as agriculture is a key industry. Shortly thereafter you threaten us with land grabs and illegal land occupation. Are you creating a climate for further violence and unrest in the country and is it your hidden agenda that farmers must be driven from their farms? You are busy creating the right climate for this”.

Shortly afterwards, a KwaZulu/Natal farmer and his family were forced to flee for their lives when 400 neighboring squatters invaded his farm and killed his cattle. The farm was conservatively valued at R12 million and the destroyed cattle at R3 million. The farmer declared that if his farm was suitably ploughed and if he were left alone to plant pineapples, the property’s value would increase to R50 million. (Twenty five years ago, Zimbabwe’s land nationalization plan was unveiled where 5 million hectares of land was grabbed by the government and compensated for a fraction of its real value. Now Zimbabwe imports maize while the populace scratches in the dust for food.)

PANIC

Panic is creeping into the writings of commentators and newspaper editors about the country’s economic malaise and the ANC/SACP alliance’s bull-headedness and inability to acknowledge the dire consequences of their policies. A Business Day editorial (29.7.15) declares that the ANC is “sleepwalking into disaster” and points out the damage caused to the mining industry and the economy at large by the government. Strong words unheard of during Mandela’s rule are now being bandied about with impunity: “mulishness” is used to describe the ANC’s mindset over their introduction of travel restrictions now hurting the hospitality industry. They have a “Stalinist worldview” says another editor, while former Business Day editor Peter Bruce uses words like “drivel”, “pseudo Marxist claptrap” and “deranged” to describe various policies of the ruling clique. It’s a bit late for this type of vituperation from people of influence, many of whom lauded the coming to power of the ANC and who initially turned a blind eye to their corruption, incompetence and other sins in order to give the impression that “democracy” was flourishing in South Africa. At the same time, many lambasted those who warned of the perils of an ANC government as dinosaurs, rightwing fanatics and even Nazis!

Huge layoffs and retrenchments are planned by mining companies fed up to the back teeth with destructive government policies, strikes and union demands. Yet government cadres continue to threaten the mining industry. One of the world’s biggest mining groups Glencore has just had its licence suspended, with minister of Mineral Resources Ngoako Ramatlhodi deploring Glencore for creating “inhumane” job losses!

All along those in government have never viewed capitalism as a creator of jobs but rather as a supplier of jobs. Mining, manufacturing, agriculture –all of them are the ANC’s playthings, to be manipulated to fit their socialist agenda. These people have no idea of what drives an economy, and despite the abysmal failure of socialism and communism, they believe that somehow these failures can be turned into successes by declaring this to be so! Rhetoric beats logic every time.

Why this ANC behavior has suddenly shocked people whose forefathers have lived for centuries in Africa is a mystery. A perfect storm is brewing. R.W. Johnson predicts a possible implosion of SA’s economy where the government may have to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. But with these two organizations there’s no free lunch. Their funds are not as loose as the SA taxpayers’ money, to be spent willy nilly with no accountability. Foreign loans mean conditions, two of which will surely be a demand to cut the salaries of the bloated SA civil service, and the other will be instructions to prune welfare payments now distributed to more than 15 million recipients. Currently public sector pay is rising 7% translating into an 11,5% increase for the average worker when benefits are included. This three year wage deal will cost an extra R66 bn. Will the economy survive long enough for this increase to be met, or will the IMF pull the plug on it? What then for the ANC?

These recipient groups may turn on the ANC and the organization could disintegrate into infighting between factions trying to retain their places at the trough. Unemployment could soar to Zimbabwean levels , and millions could roam the streets looking for food. It’s not an unrealistic scenario. (In South Africa, the number of workers in agriculture fell 31% to 670 000 in 2014 from 969 000 in 2001. The current unofficial unemployment level is estimated to be 40%.)

SIXPENS

Says R W Johnson in his book: “In his celebrated dystopian novel written in 1947 ‘When Smuts goes: A history of South Africa from 1952 to 2010’, Arthur Keppel-Jones foresaw South Africa meeting its ruin at the hands of a primitive Zulu leader, Sixpens. There are many points of comparison between Zuma and Sixpens. Indeed, in many respects, Zuma has fulfilled the predictive vision of right-wing whites who resisted majority rule on the grounds that it would bring authoritarianism, corruption and incompetence sufficient to ruin the country. The surprise is how quickly the ANC in power regressed to this sort of rule and, even more, how it rallied behind Zuma, defending him against any criticism.”

In light of the country’s parlous situation and the fact that the government neither listens to advice nor acts rationally, the TAU SA president urged farmers to stick to their principles and to unify. A line must now be drawn in the sand. Farmers must declare that they did not steal land from anyone; they will not accept government propaganda without question; they will refuse to be drawn into participating in failed and failing government projects; and they will continue to produce food for South Africa while paying no attention to government’s socialist rhetoric. In a newspaper interview, Mr. Meintjies says that he doesn’t believe the government wants to get rid of commercial farmers. ”They want to control them. They want to control agriculture. If they can do that, they can control the food production, and if they control food, they control the masses”. The TAU SA president has been called a dinosaur by some critics but the dinosaurs knew what was coming.

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) said that ”the people never give up their liberties but under some delusion”. Why so many people of influence took so easily to ANC rule may never be explained. But Burke also said that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”. Change may be on the way, and not a moment too soon. We must hold on until the ANC destroys itself. Perhaps then, after such trauma, the country can regenerate and realize once again its full potential.

Afrikaners will be blamed for Marikana too

Piet Swanepoel responds to R.W. Johnson’s article on the Marikana, Sharpeville and the Pondo uprisings.

Johnson’s article was very interesting and deserves to be read by anyone trying to make sense of events in Africa.

Like Johnson I also trace my involvement or interest in African political developments to Durban. Unfortunately we were not contemporaries there – I arrived in Durban in 1948 and was transferred to South West Africa in January 1961, whereas it seems that his involvement only started in 1960.

We were in different camps as well. He was a budding Marxist and I was a Special Branch detective. Our backgrounds also differed completely. He was English, (albeit our local branch of the species), whereas I was (still am) an Afrikaner.

We seem to have known the same people, for example the Arensteins, but when I came to know Rowley and Jacqueline they were living in a block of flats where there would have been no room for visiting Pondo chiefs.

Their neighbours, I remember, were Errol and Dorothy Shanley, both also listed communists like the Arensteins. What I heard only recently was that Ronnie Kasrils, our former Minister of Intelligence, and Jacqueline Arenstein, were cousins.

We also knew the same places. Like Lakhani Chambers, where the ANC had a small little office, sometimes unoccupied for weeks, whereas the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) offices in the same building were spacious with a big staff under M.P.Naicker, a very committed communist.

Some time in the early fifties I had been one of a small party of detectives, led by a visiting American intelligence officer, who entered Lakhani Hall late one night and planted a then state of the art bug in the ceiling..

Unfortunately the bug was never very effective because of the long distance to our wire recorder at the Smith Street Police station.

This article is about the massacres Mr. Johnson did not deal with, but his references to Durban in the sixties make me remember so many names which white people never knew, but to us in the Special Branch were household names.

Names like Albert John Luthuli, Massabalala Bonny Yengwa, Pitness Humphry Simelane and Wilson Zamindlela Conco. This latter fellow was a pain in the neck to me. He was the treasurer of the ANC in Natal. His father, Harry Conco, was a successful bus owner who operated a fleet of busses which passed Highflats in Southern Natal every day when I was stationed there in 1947.

Why, I asked myself, was my father a poor unschooled Boer, whose son had to start life as a labourer on the Railways, and this smart Aleck’s father a rich businessman who could send his kid to varsity to become a doctor?

But enough of that. This is about the massacres you never talk about. First of all you need to know what I call a massacre. I take my cue from Funk and Wagnells which defines a massacre as the indiscriminate killing in numbers of the unresisting or defenceless.

Johnson, as to be expected, does not deal with the most terrible massacre in the history of South Africa. English-speaking people do not share with Afrikaners, the grief and pain at the remembrance of the murders of Piet Retief and his party of some hundred Voortrekkers and their non-white grooms at King Dingane’s kraal on February 6th, 1838.

They had been invited into the kraal by the King and requested to leave their firearms with their horses, so they were absolutely defenceless when the King gave the order to have them killed.

The killing of Retief and his men was only the lesser part of the brutal murders of that week. Immediately after they had clubbed their victims to death, Dingane’s impis were dispatched to attack the old men, women and children and servants who were waiting for Retief and his party’s return.

41 Boer men, 56 Boer women, 185 Boer children and 200 Coloured and African servants were killed in the vicinity of where the town of Weenen (Weeping) stands today.

What saddens an Afrikaner like me is how a modern liberal English writer deals with the massacre I’ve described here. Anthony Sampson, in his Mandela – the authorized Biography, appears never to have heard of them.

Instead he writes “16 December was Dingane’s day, which commemorated the Afrikaners’ massacre of Zulus in 1838”. It It is unbelievable, but the Battle of Blood River has now become an Afrikaner massacre of Zulus!

Thousands of well-armed Zulu warriors attacked a laager in which some 300 Afrikaners were determined to defend themselves. Their primitive front-loader rifles enabled them to fight off the Zulus but that now becomes a massacre!

Another series of events which have been described by some people as massacres took place in Durban in January 1949. These events, like the Weenen massacres, are not frequently mentioned any more, but being one of the few remaining witnesses to the first act in that drama, I think people might be interested in what I remember of it.

As I said, it was January 1949. I had just progressed from being a detective probationer to a fully fledged detective constable. I was not yet 21 years old so I could not be issued with a firearm. (In those years detectives were issued with .38 pistols). I was on the Theft from Motor cars squad, a small unit and had just completed a motor cycle with side-car course and been issued a licence to drive a Harley Davidson.

We, child detectives, were tutored by older hands and Zulu colleagues. We knew absolutely nothing about politics or race relations or Marxism. We lived as we’d grown up. Zulu colleagues told you stories of what was going on in their communities and you told them what white people were saying.

The big story on the Zulu side was that some wealthy Indian young men were taking advantage of young Zulu girls, getting them pregnant, but refusing to marry them or pay maintenance for the children.

Only a small number of such misdeeds had apparently been committed, but it was a nice juicy type of story. None of us regarded it as anything serious, until one morning the Zulu detectives insisted on seeing the chief of the CID. There was going to be something terribly serious happening near the Bus Centre at the Indian market, they reported.

A group of men were preventing bus drivers from departing from the centre, leaving thousands of African passengers stranded in the centre. Many of them were dock workers who depended on busses to take them to the docks in Point Road. And agitators were busy among the passengers. The talk was that the time had come to rid the country of the Indians.

There was not much the CID chief and the District Commandant could do. They verified the fact that all the busses arriving at the Bus Centre near the Indian market were prevented from departing and that thousands of people were consequently massing up in the Centre. For some reason which I never really understood they decided that all the detectives at the Smith Street Police station were to be deployed in the Indian business quarter to observe what was happening. We were loaded into a few Black Marias.

If I remember correctly, I was dropped in Leopold Street, which led off from the Bus Centre to Grey Street, the heart of the Indian business centre. I stood on the pavement feeling very lonely.

We were all instructed to take up positions about 50 yards apart. The street had become eerily quiet. All the Indian shopkeepers and their families had retreated to their flats above their shops which were all locked, but in those days, unprotected by burglar fencing.

From the Bus Centre, which was approximately 300 yards from where I was standing, roars could be heard and suddenly what I thought were a million people filled the street in a mad rush in my direction.

They screamed and ululated and I knew the end of the world had come. Most of them had wooden “kieries” and these they used to smash every shop window in their way. At this stage they were not looting the contents of the shop windows. They were content to destroy the windows and did not attempt to enter further into the shops.

They were clearly in a hurry to destroy the shop window of every one of the hundreds of Indian shops in the area. And in the next hour or two they did that. Not a singleshot was fired at them. It would have been suicidal to interfere with them.

The weird thing was that they never even threatened me or any of my colleagues as I later established. Many of them stopped next to me for a few seconds and advised me to arrange that the ships in the harbour were to be instructed to receive all the Indians in Natal to take them back to their Motherland!

In the days which followed the mood changed and the rioting became very serious. Many innocent Indian people were killed and their shops looted.

Policemen were flown in from the Rand to try and restore order and eventually even Marines from the Navy with machine guns were deployed. Curfews were enforced and people ignoring them were shot.

It was a sad time. For me the saddest part came afterwards. It was an article I read years later in an American magazine. The real cause of these tragedies, it claimed, were the policies of the Afrikaners who had taken over the country the year before! In Durban, at that time, there was not a single Afrikaner councilor.

I have no doubt that eventually Marikana will be blamed on us, the Afrikaners, also.