Extremes

Its nearing the end of October already, the time flies so quickly. The weather this month has been both extremely hot and extremely cold, alternately. In Ceres, not far from here the temperature reached -3 degrees destroying millions upon millions of rands worth of crops just into bud. Many thousands of already poor farm labourers were subsequently put out of work and the farmers themselves worried how they will survive the year. In the affected areas there will be no picking this year so expect your South African fruit exports to Canada to cost more. Famous Western Cape South African seedless table grapes, for example, were decimated.

The country also is up and down with many other extremes, and so much is uncertain; the succession battle, the corruption, the murdering once again of a South African music icon; this time it was ‘Lucky Dube’. He was shot three times last Thursday in front of his children in a botched hijacking. South Africa has lost so many artists to crime in the past two years it is difficult to keep track of those murdered. For nearly 30 years Dube has been a Continental Africa and international music star. During the apartheid era he was one of the most defiant of the protest singers, and although his music was banned, it was played throughout that period in the townships and hovels of the people. He is a huge loss to the soul of South Africa.

In his more recent “Crime and Corruption” album he predicted his own demise as follows:

Do you ever worry
about your house being broken into?
Do you ever worry
about your car being taken away from you
In broad daylight
Down Highway 54
Do you ever worry
About your wife becoming
The woman in black
Do you ever worry
About leaving home and
Coming back in a coffin
With a bullet through your head
So join us and fight this
Crime and corruption.

Dube left behind 6 children and his wife Zanele, and is only one of the 60 murdered daily in South Africa. On Friday, when my men took a load of garden refuse to the dump they came across a woman murdered and tossed in with the garbage.

To balance all this craziness in South Africa, and it couldn’t have come at a better time, there was the Rugby World Cup won by South Africa on Saturday evening in France. South Africans as a whole are as fanatical about Rugby as we Canadians are about our hockey, perhaps even more so. When the Springboks play, the streets are significantly diminished of traffic. Just prior to a game one witnesses drivers speeding on mass to insure they get to view a game with friends in a pub somewhere.

This Cup was a big one for South Africa, now embroiled in a very fearful period, and also there has been much government interference and pressure on the team to be more affirmative versus selection of players by merit. Government is demanding the players represent the population demographics while white South Africans want selection by merit. In South Africa the Blacks own Soccer, the Whites, Rugby and Cricket. It’s about identity, pride and being the best, for both groups. Our Springbok coach, Jake White, who led them to victory has had enough. This was his final game. Rumors are he will coach England or Australia next season. Since the win, however, there is an outcry for White to remain.


As a final addition to this, my October blog, I’ve decided to include a letter to Madiba by Xolela Mangcu (South Africa’s leading black intellectual, as published Oct 16 in Business Day), and a second article, the lead ‘Opinion’ on the Editorial page of the previous Sunday, October 14, by Sunday Times senior analyst, Justice Malala, titled “Deafening silence as Mbeki and Co reduce South Africa to a state of fear!”

You may not be interested, but herewith for those of you who are:
.
An open letter to former President Nelson Mandela from Xolela Mangcu

"Dear Tata:

I hope this letter finds you well. I am not well. Tears came to my eyes as I read news of the imminent arrest of Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya and Jocelyn Maker. I am not exactly sure whether I was crying for Mondli or for myself or for our country or for you in particular.

I was probably crying for all those things and more. You see, Tata, the foundations of our democracy have never been shakier, the credibility of our justice system never more suspect, the institutions of state never more compromised and our public culture never more hateful as it is under your successor, Thabo Mbeki.

He has single –handedly taken this country to its most dangerous and most perilous moment. He has become a god unto himself, accountable to nobody in particular but himself. He fires, suspends and punishes those who stand in his way.

Everywhere I go people are shaking their heads in disbelief. “What has gone wrong with this man?” they ask. I will not presume to comment on the legalities of the cases and the dismissals of high-level ANC cadres such as Jacob Zuma, Nozizwe Madlala-Routlege, Billy Masetlha and Vusi Pikoli; and now Makhanya.

These are just the state’s most public victims. That is what dictatorial regimes do – they isolate individuals and punish them in public in order to demonstrate that they will not tolerate dissent.

You know from your experience, Tata, that power knows no limits. Stalin showed us that not even the most loyal comrades were beyond the gulag. Power jails, power silences, power banishes and power ultimately kills those who are a threat to it. Power is conscious of itself but power is most dangerous when it is unconscious of its actions or when its actions take on a certain automacity.

The reflexive instinct to punish takes over all faculties – public perception and consequences be damned.

For a while, there have been rumors that the wolves are circling around Makhanya. I don’t think there is a journalist more hated by Mbeki’s regime than Makhanya. This is because he has dared to expose the depravity at the heart of Mbeki’s government.

Now we hear that Makhanya and Maker’s cell phones have been tapped. When the news broke that the SABC had a blacklist of certain commentators, I said any state that blacklists its citizens is only a step away from assassinating them.

Someone called me the other day, under the guise of a journalist, seeking commentary about the leadership succession race in the ANC. But I could immediately sense that I was talking into a tape. Maybe I am being paranoid. How could I not be paranoid when there are allegations of links between the highest offices in our land and the criminal underworld?

The very things that were done to us – the reflexive instinct to punish through imprisonment – have become the order of the day in this land at its birth. To paraphrase the scholar Achille Mbembe, we have forgotten that this democracy was born at the edge of the grave.

I read Justice Malala’s painful plea for ordinary South Africans to stand up and express their outrage. But it is his conclusion that scared me so much: “When one day, we open our eyes and our mouths, our children will not have a country to live in. This country will be a Zimbabwe because we allowed Mbeki and his cronies to rape it.”

Those of us who can run will, of course, run, if we can get out before the wolves get to us. Another writer, Jacob Dlamini, described Mbeki as “one of the pettiest presidents South Africa is likely to ever know”. And this is based on the view that he uses state institutions to persecute anyone who mildly disagrees with him.

In such a short space of time, since you stepped down from the presidency, the state itself has become indistinguishable from the individual (President Mbeki).

This is a disgrace for a country that was held aloft as the beacon of freedom, democracy and justice just a mere decade ago. How did we fall so quickly from grace? Where are the good men and women of the ANC? How could they allow their senses to be deadened this way? How could they connive in the dismemberment of the very project everyone gave up so much for?

How could people who were so brave under apartheid, just cower under one man? What is it that they know that we do not know?

I am writing this letter, Tata, to say that you are our last hope, our only chance. You cannot watch silently while your successor deliberately pulls apart everything you and your departed comrades so carefully put together.

Your voice would reverberate across this land, across this continent and across the world. Your voice, Tata, could help avert evils that are certainly going to be visited on the people of this country by a power-mad bunch in the Union Buildings.
Your voice could pull this country from certain ruination. Your voice could save our lives."

Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation at the University of Witwatersrand.

Also herewith the following article, published by the Sunday Times senior analyst, Justice Malala, titled “Deafening silence as Mbeki and Co reduce South Africa to a state of fear”

“I am angry and I am afraid, I am deeply afraid for my country. The sound of silence has fallen over our country while the government of President Thabo Mbeki, in its anger and its shame over its numerous failures and acts of deceit, uses state security apparatus to go after every man and woman who dares to speak truth to power.

While all this happens, the many good men and women in Cabinet, in government, in business, in the trade unions and in civil society, keep quiet. Where are the good men and women of the United Democratic Front? Where are the many good men and women of the SA Council of Churches, such as Brigalia Bam?

They are silent. They are in agreement while the democracy they fought for is abused to protect the increasingly paranoid and discredited presidency of Mbeki and to settle petty personal scores. We should all hang our heads in shame.

I write this having just heard that the editor of this newspaper, Mondli Makhanya, and its head of investigations, Jocelyn Maker, will be arrested this week. Their crime is that they published a story alleging that the Minister of Health, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, screamed at hospital staff and drank huge amounts of booze while in hospital for a shoulder operation.

The minister, the custodian of our nation’s health, has denied none of these allegations. The newspaper also published allegations that Tshabalala-Msimang was a drunk and a thief. This story has not been refuted by the minister nor any other government official.

Instead, the minister of Health has abused public funds by getting two of her generals to publish wasteful, unintelligible advertisements in various newspapers to allege that it is a crime to access personal medical records. No one has said a word about the public interest. Instead, the case was handed to the Western Cape’s top detective.

The imminent arrest of Makhanya and Maker is nothing new in the ignominy that is now the Mbeki regime. It has long been alleged that Jacob Zuma, the ANC’s deputy president, was investigated by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) under Bulelani Ngcuka, husband of the current deputy president, because he dared dream of succeeding Mbeki while the President did not wish it to be so.

I have always dismissed this allegation as conspiratorial bunkum. I am not so sure anymore. Where once I would have asked Zuma’s supporters to show me the evidence, I am forced to ask Mbeki and his cronies to show me the evidence that they did not indeed set the Scorpions on Zuma’s trail.

Of course, the worst abuse of state apparatus is playing itself out today while we consider the fact that Makhanya and Maker will be arrested, prosecuted and perhaps even jailed. That abuse is the refusal by Mbeki to let the law take its course and have National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi, an Mbeki confidante, arrested by the Scorpions.

Mbeki went to extraordinary lengths to stop the current NPA head, Vusi Pikoli, from arresting Selebi (National Police Commissioner and Head of Interpol) on corruption-related charges, despite a warrant of arrest and search warrants being issued by magistrates and judges.

But Mbeki went further. For more than a week he and his office lied to the public and the parliamentary opposition about the existence of such a warrant. These past two weeks they have been going to extraordinary lengths to cover up this outrage.

The question has to be asked: is this the South Africa of Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli? Did the heroes of June, 1976 and the veterans of the fires of ‘80s lose out on schooling and normal lives to be in a country where journalists are prosecuted as happened under apartheid?

The Mbeki regime has been an unmitigated disaster from the onset. But ineptitude – ranging from the failure to deal with HIV/Aids and rampant crime to consorting with criminals such as Robert Mugabe – is different from pure, unadulterated corruption such as we see unfolding today in the Pikoli saga and now the persecution of Makhanya and Maker.

These are steps into the worlds of Mobute Sese Seko and Mugabe. Only 13 years into our democracy, Mbeki’s Stalinist leanings are fully on show: journalists and editors arrested and jailed; opponents jailed on trumped-up charges; everyone in government living in fear that they are been followed, watched and bugged.

How long before a bullet arrives for a pesky journalist or Jacob Zuma? Remember, we used to say Mbeki would not interfere with the judiciary. We were wrong.

The worst part of this whole outrage is that Makhanya and Maker could go to jail. They will go to jail while good men and women stand and watch. They will be jailed while Mandela and many others stand and watch while the country they fought for so valiantly falls deeper into the hands of a corrupt and power mad coterie at the Union Buildings.

I am angry and I am afraid. But mostly I am ashamed; ashamed and embarrassed to call myself South African. Ashamed that in this country we all keep quiet while evil is so routinely perpetuated by a bunch we ourselves put into power.

When one day, we open our eyes and our mouths, our children will not have a country to live in. This country will be a Zimbabwe because we allowed Mbeki and his cronies to rape it."

Thus ends my blog for October, 2007.
What does the future hold
for South Africa,
for the Continent
for this Canadian boy
Onder Blopunt

solinus