South Africa: Wearing out the tarnished liberation credentials

Events in South Africa have been turbulent for months now, since Trump spoke out about ‘bad things’ happening in South Africa and inviting white farmers to avail themselves of an opportunity to go to the US and? … Farm for the US of course. He is not doing it out of the goodness of his heart. It has been so turbulent that there was almost no opportunity to write on this, as by the next day, events overran yesterday’s happenings and the landscape changed.

The South African situation is but a small part of our world, yet, in BRICS, it becomes material.

This writing has two objectives: The first is to update readers on the South African situation, and the second is to analyze whether this forms part of the war on BRICS.

Unfortunately for Trump, these people are wise to the ways of the empire and most want to stay in South Africa, as their modern history for the past 400 years was formed there, and they consider themselves a distinct ethnic group that developed out of Africa. These are the people who are so insistent on their own right to exist, that they fought the first wars against British control, because for the Brits, they were only colonial subjects. What happened, though, is that Trump’s pronouncements afforded an opportunity for the farmers and the +- 5 million moderates (but now growing fast) in the country to lobby and gain international attention to their plight.

A few notes about the scourge of apartheid, which means separate development and by that I am not attempting to obscure apartheid, but explain the meaning. There is nothing that can whitewash the horror of this philosophy as it was implemented de jure starting in 1948 by the white government in charge and before that de facto by the British in charge. This started falling apart in the late 1980s and by the time of the freedom election in 1994, it had already been abandoned in the main.

The ANC (African National Congress) was lauded as the epitome of colonial liberators who overcame the evils of the system and became the government. However, the ANC has lost its major majority over the past 30 years, and the latest polls give it a scant approval rating in the country, around 30% and fast falling, because the liberators enriched themselves, but did not and cannot govern.

They never considered themselves a government, and they never governed. They still consider themselves liberators in the struggle, but the struggle has changed to a different kind of apartheid. What they attempted to do was to frame the liberation from apartheid in the same way that the Holocaust is framed by the Jews, and they constructed an erstwhile ‘liberation badge’ for themselves and continued the carnage in the country. In the past year, the message has faded as old and hackneyed, and the fame of the so-called liberators tarnished because they could not move on and sound as if they are still USSR-style hard commies, that could not grow with the times. Neither could they implement anything good from the USSR. Their enemy today is twofold: the color white and anybody against the ANC’s liberation theology. In the meantime, they stripped the country of any wealth, and that wealth is now in their own pockets.

There is almost nobody in South Africa who has anything good to say about apartheid excesses. Everybody acknowledges that this was a hopeless and wrong philosophy. Yet, the ANC still fights it as if it still exists, but they are fighting the color white (and colored and Indians and anyone that is not ANC).  This is a major difference between the times when US soldiers decimated local Indian inhabitants and put them in separate enclaves.  The US never acknowledged its wrongheadedness and crimes. The South Africans did, and paid the price.

The Black Business Council has strong words. The ANC has been in charge for too long. What do they have to show for it? The ‘liberators’ only liberated themselves and not any other South African of any other color whatsoever. They carried on marketing themselves as liberators, attempting to create this ‘liberatorship’ in the ‘never forget’ fame just like the Jews. In the meantime the country suffered with no service, no money, no power, no governmental investment, farmers still being killed, a 60% youth unemployment rate, crime rates worse than war zones and these crimes are carefully carried out, in order to stay just below the definition of ‘genocide’ and now a red-hot war that they cannot afford, against Trump, all the while blaming the citizen groups that started shouting across the world to high heavens. I had never seen such racial invective from the black cadres and literally none from the Afrikaners. A day or two ago Ramaphosa spoke to Trump to try and mend fences but this is after many groups went to visit the US and other countries, spreading the message of the +- 150 racial laws on the books, most of them passed after the election in 1994 and generally referred to as South African democracy.

What was wrong during apartheid is wrong now, and under various pretexts, the ANC and the splinter groups out of it, continued a more brutal apartheid system, even teaching their liberation theology, which is but a rework of the US liberation theologies, in Universities. Azania theory: a theory of violence.. Listen to the Black Business Council on historical redress:

The three new laws that made the ‘fed-up’ basket overturn in the country are the large theft called expropriation without compensation, the Bela law that does away with Afrikaner education, and the new and improved BEE, Black Empowerment legislation, which is only a theft ring, as the Black Business Council says.

So the liberators only liberated themselves and not any other South African of any color whatsoever.

The stance of the generally white communities, but growing fast, who consider themselves as ethnic communities, just like the Zulus or any of the other ethnic communities, has changed to one of gaining their own space and doing their own thing. In this, they are following China with the concept of Autonomous Regions as follows:

Xizang/Tibet Autonomous Region: Buddhist
Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region: Muslim
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region: Muslim
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region: minority tribes
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region: Mongols

The one feature they all have is that minority tribes predominate within: Muslim and Buddhist, except Guangxi, which has a number of smaller tribes living side-by-side: Miao, Bai, Zhuang, Yao, etc., and the Mongols in Inner Mongolia.

It is always fascinating but also staggering to compare South Africa, which gained what was called freedom in 1994 de jure, and Russia, which fell in 1991 with indescribable hardship and poverty. The ANC gained a food exporting country, and it worked. There were railways, post office, service delivery, airlines, power provision, roads without potholes, trade and business, and expertise. Now South Africa is becoming one of the poorest countries in Africa, and Russia is the 4^th biggest economy in the world. Unfortunately the ANC with their liberation theology (I refuse to call it a theory) did not liberate anything but massively increased the size of the pockets of the cadres.

What is to be done? The ANC must now go. They did not keep up with the times. During the previous election, they lost their majority and a Government of National Unity was set up. The major partner in this coalition just took the ANC to court because of the budget, where it was proposed to increase VAT (Value Added taxation charged at the checkout). The coalition is growing and the charge to whatever is left of the government is to stop governmental (ANC) excesses and find the savings in governmental expenditure. The ANC used the governmental coffers as their own personal savings bank.

This is what is said and not in jest:

THE ANC’S RULES FOR SOUTH AFRICA:
1. If it works, break it.
2. If it’s broken, blame apartheid.
3. If people protest… call them racist.
4. Steal from the poor… call it “transformation.”
5. Raise VAT, fuel prices, and your own salaries.. all in the same week.
6. Complain about colonialism… while wearing imported Italian suits. 7. If someone questions you, say it’s “Western interference.”
8. Keep the masses poor… then buy votes with food parcels.
9. Call corruption “irregular expenditure.”
10. Never resign. Ever. Just reshuffle.

THE ANC’S RULES FOR THEMSELVES:
1. We are never wrong… just misunderstood.
2. Accountability is for the opposition.
3. Stealing isn’t corruption if you call it “cadre deployment.”
4. The taxpayers’ money is basically our bonus pool.
5. Blame apartheid… even if you’ve been in power for 30 years.
6. Never fix a problem if you can form a commission.
7. If caught red-handed, deny. If exposed, deny louder.
8. Own no businesses. Have friends who own everything.
9. If the heat’s on, reshuffle the cabinet and call for unity.
10. Never deliver… just announce “bold plans” every 6 months.

There are two further comments without diving into the false statistics on land ownership for example and if you question this, I invite you to go and search out who the biggest land owners are and the necessity of sizable farming land when growing beef and corn in a country with small rivers and a large part is semi desert. I invite you to go and check out who owns the biggest farms, completely non-productive. The statistic quoted is that 70% of land is still owned by the whites. It is an outright lie but pushed hard by the ANC.

Now we move to South Africa’s influence in BRICS. This is outsized. Looking carefully at the information from the BRICS summit preparation in Brazil, there is not one article that does not refer to South Africa as if they are the arbiter and leaders of what BRICS should be. The myth of the magical liberators, which are bigger than any magical figure, still operates. In addition, from some thinking among us, we consider that the groups in the current attempts to coopt BRICS have their eyes on Africa for their own growth. This is not the west’s war on BRICS but internal destabilization.

This is difficult for a BRICS supporter to contemplate, and all I can say is that without strong leadership, as we saw in Kazan, BRICS currently is still going to school to learn what multipolarity and multilateralism mean. The capacity still falls short in BRICS.

What we refer to as the War on BRICS is only partially being played out in South Africa, for the reason that they are shooting themselves in the foot. Trade with the US is still so material that fighting with Trump will materially damage itself and its people. In terms of the Government of National Unity, the opposition parties say that BRICS is an ANC initiative and that South Africa should have stayed a non-involved and non-aligned country for the reason that they cannot afford to involve themselves. So, if we count the opposition as say 25% (low ball number) of the voting community, there is a material opposition against involvement in BRICS. The historical memory of the USSR, and China but with a lower profile, fighting against the west and choosing South Africa as one of its proxies is alive and well and the accusation of communism is not accepted easily. These people are capitalist and their knowledge of socialism comes from the fighting years where they were the targets.

So, Zelensky came to visit South Africa and left quickly because of the major Russian strikes after the Easter truce. Ramaphosa carefully worded his statements as an effort to make peace. There is this rumor (or is it a rumor?) that Zelensky bought controlling interest in a platinum mine, and he stayed just long enough to sign. South Africa also cannot afford to remain on this peace train and must give attention to itself. The ANC cannot spend the money for outsized and airplanes full of delegations to go and make peace in Ukraine and Russia. The contradictions are too stark, as their own citizenry is too broken up, and the IMF and World Bank are dropping serious warnings. There is no investment whatsoever because nobody will invest with the threat of one of the new laws, expropriation without compensation. Elon Musk is bitter because he cannot implement StarLink in the country because he does not have free black partners, and being Musk, he won’t pay anyone for no performance and no merit. He is correct in this instance. The counter point is that Microsoft does this in South Africa. Well, well, you may have a large part of the answer. Of course the west does it. South Africa has IMF loans from Covid times where they enthusiastically jumped on that bandwagon and instituted the western style jabs with western bought materials and western style lockdowns. It was a celebration at the trough of money for free. They dodged a fiscal bullet by buying every single word from the west and hauling in every single freebie given by the west while locking down their own populations. We saw horrible things with food parcels. The ANC cadres received theirs, but the white people were passed by. Now there is water provision for farms based on race!

Then the money ran out again. This is purely gossip, I pass it along as gossip, and yet, it is well known in the circles. The ANC ran out of money after the largesse of Covid times. They went to visit their BRICS buddy Iran. They returned with money to continue as a party, and they started the lawsuit against Israel. “The Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) is an ongoing case that was brought before the International Court of Justice on 29 December 2023 by South Africa regarding Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip.”

The case is going nowhere and it is accepted that Iran helped out to shore up financial resources of the party, and paid for the court case to be brought to the ICJ. This is the main reason why the case is going nowhere. Locally, it strengthens the case of the +- 25% against BRICS membership materially as they now think Iran is as dirty as the ANC, and for that matter, BRICS is involved in this. To say the least, the optics are not good!

So, it is an open question as to how much War on BRICS Trump is waging and how much he is simply punishing South Africa for their new and improved anti-white legislation and trying to steal their skilled farming community. Here, unfortunately, Trump has the cards and can push South Africa over either as a part of the War on BRICS, or simply because he can.

I paint a bad picture but there is a major unemployment rate, youth is a 60% unemployment rate, the State Owned Enterprises have been raided in full and economically there is no hope. Or is there?

Yes, there is.  Here is Rob Hersov.  He is a hard free marketeer, he likes Trump and Milei, he is a capitalist and also a very rich man that could for the rest of his natural life drink margaritas on some brilliant beach somewhere. Unlike Trump and Milei though, he does not come with a chainsaw. In his essence and polics I disagree with him. But given the local situation, I agree with him as to what needs to be done. He understands how to restructure the economy and what he says, is exactly the same as for example, China would do.  China however has the talent to do it from a state restructure perspective. South Africa does not have that.  Hence, state structures must be privatized, rebuilt and the country must be reconstructed.  With no State Capacity, the private business community must take over.  I would, of course, have preferred that a China model be followed, but without capacity, Rob Hersov’s model is all that there is. Here he talks about poverty:

Please feel free to ask me questions should you have any. This landscape has changed hugely over the past while and it is impossible to wrap one’s arms around it in one post. At the end of the day in South Africa, BRICS is exposed because of the split in the philosophy of the community, The ANC’s grift, open theft and scandals over the years, the knowledge of that setting in, the understanding that the liberation creed benefited and enriched only a tiny slice of society and the shakeup of the community as a whole will bring major change in its wake. In the meantime, South Africa sells coal to the EU and to Israel while the electricity provision in-country is again reaching major non-performance proportions. The great liberators cannot provide power for their country and nothing much else. There is a good reason why neither Russia nor China gets involved in any major economic assistance to South Africa. They visit schools with gifts, they kiss babies, and they do the nice things but they’re not going to give out money or investment in any material manner at all. What I am talking about here are all open secrets. It is only those that still have shining eyes for the so-called liberators that do not know this.