July 2008 - Worries

The blog issues of January and March, 2008, I have posted today, preceding this one. Since early 2007 South Africa entered a tumultuous and extremely dangerous stage of its unfolding 1994 democracy. By late 2007 I was finding it extremely difficult to blog my observations, feelings, and now fears, for this amazing country. I worried that I would be adding to the negativity which has been steadily advancing in the minds of most thinking citizens, and worried I would project this negativity to the international readers and to South Africa’s detriment.

Although I wrote two blogs in early 2008 I deliberately failed to post them. Following my unwillingness to post March, I decided not to write for a period. But now I feel it is time again. Perhaps I have adjusted, perhaps not.

My 8th anniversary of landing at Cape Town from Salt Spring Island, BC, in Canada, passed last Wednesday, June 9. I have never regretted a moment of my stay here, nor my fortunate participation in community activities. Indeed, I feel these have been my most effective and meaningful years, after raising a considerable family in Canada.

In 2000 when I arrived, I observed both a significant wounding on the part of all South African communities, but with it I recognized a subtle and bubbling hope that South Africa was becoming a truly democratic and non racist society, Tutu's rainbow nation. Although the hurt was evident everywhere but within the growing, excited and elitist ANC corridors, there was still a fully germinated seed within most people hearts that we were succeeding, that civil war had been averted by Mandela and Tutu, that the country was on the right path, that the economy was bursting and well managed. South Africa had the respect of the world, not only for Mandela’s seemingly magical abilities but also the renouncing of a nuclear weapons program.

But then, unfortunately all the mismanagement and greed that the whites so feared they would have to live with under Black government, started to rise up like tenacious weeds in a garden. Then, the killer was the arms deal.

Accepted wisdom in South Africa is that the arms deal destroyed the soul of the ANC. We have the Brits and the Germans to blame for this, both countries giving significant bribes to formerly poor people newly in political power, and this during a period in which it was illegal in the bribers’ countries to do so, and for obvious reasons. Even Mandela and Gracia, his wife, received half a million dollars each for their truthfully effective charitable foundations. To be clear the money was not received by them personally, but for their foundations dedicated to uplifting orphans and children, but nevertheless these funds were accepted and tied to the arms deal.

More than one analyst has decried the ANC government as organized crime since their corrupted activities go far beyond the Arms deal. The arms deal was simply a taste. However, it was the arms deal that made so many of the ruling ANC elite rich that their body politic decided they wanted in as well. Now corruption is so overwhelming we are swamped with failed support for the people who really matter, the poor who represent 80% of South Africa’s citizens.

To a Canadian the remarks and comments by those in power absolutely astound me.
Spin, smoke and mirrors is the daily norm. Denial, outright lies and political violence are now almost daily. It started with President Mbeki who followed Mandela. Mbeki is known as the King of Denial and his denial has resulted in a thousand people a day still dying of HIV-Aids, with infections rates still rising. His denial has resulted in Mad Bob Mugabe decimating a country once known as a jewel in Africa. His denial has been the support of dictators and a thorn in the Security Council with respect to Human Rights at the UN. He shames all South Africans. His term of office has been so severely damaging to South Africa’s potential it will likely, if possible at all, take twenty years to correct.

Mbeki recently deported thousands of Zimbabweans in direct contravention of SA’s signed agreement with the UN, sending what are effectively political refugees back to massive political violence, torture and death.

Now, we get to the crunch of it all: there has been a major split within the ANC, and literally blood is flowing, with political violence growing at an amazing rate.

In 2000, I was introduced to the ongoing concerns about Zimbabwe, as that country is our bordering neighbor, much like Ontario and Michigan. Almost immediately, I was able to see that Zimbabwe was a situation which students of political science could easily observe as a state practicing systematic and predictable moves to descend from democracy to tyranny. Roberts Mugabe, a Stalinist, has taken exactly the same steps through words, action and legislation that all former world dictators have taken after receiving the people’s hopeful and optimistic mandate, then deliberately moving down the power obsessed slope to fascism in order to consolidate total control and wealth, regardless of the people’s needs. Most South Africans think he is insane. A common rumor is that he suffers from Syphilis. Others say his problems and dysfunction arose from childhood. Whatever, if there is a compassionate God, Mugabe will end up at the Hague. Quite simply, he’s a monster exhibiting pompous idiocy. All of Southern Africa has been negatively impacted by his actions. More importantly, the people… men, women, children, the elderly, the sick, all are suffering terribly with little hope because of his seemingly meaningless existence.
And everyone, including the international community, is paralyzed, impotent.

To say it is a disaster is an understatement. It is horrific to the extreme. Imagine a modern country, which it was, with middle class people doing middle class things, with food on the table for the poor, with jobs and an excellent education system, with business evolving at a rapid rate…. And now? What punishment could ever address what Mad Bob has done to Zimbabwe and its people, and what he is still doing. It is heart breaking.

And now, it is heartbreaking in South Africa as well. We have been thrown off a ski jump with the inevitable destructive landing, likely fascism. Leaders within the ANC are actually saying they will kill for Zuma, kill those who oppose his ascendancy to the throne. The enemies of Zuma include the Constitutional Court, outspoken media personalities, the exemplary National Prosecuting Authority, and all those who oppose Zuma, he of “bring me my machine gun”, or any who speak badly of him, any who oppose him politically. As with Bush, any criticism is traitorous.

Everything which is of value to democracy in South Africa is under serious and seemingly unstoppable and unpreventable attack. Even the South Africa Human Rights Commission has been forced to submit. We’ve been taken over by organized crime and it seems as futile to oppose it as it is for Zimbabwean nationals now under the violent and brutal control of the Zimbabwean military.

This is why I couldn’t post. The white’s fear that they will be driven into the sea, that South Africa is the only country in Africa where it hasn’t happened yet, (whites being driven out) is now appearing to be inevitable. Already 20% of all whites have left South Africa, and more every day. There is much despair. When the whites are gone, the country will disintegrate, becoming just one more failed African state. Without the white wealth, without the white commitment to democracy I believe there will be little hope for the country.

Black South African government has degenerated into personal and tribal animosity, the rulers and their sycophants interested only in what they can acquire in wealth and power.

As one of the ANC leaders so openly stated. “We didn’t take power to be poor.”

Conclusions: All expression of true concern for the people are absent, all that is evident is spin and electioneering. All service delivery is paralyzed. The greedy have won. South Africa may well be lost.

I have one final comment in this blog. In eight years I have come to understand true poverty, poverty which is the result of a government incapable of serving the people, though wealthy beyond belief.

In 2004 we started the Huis Tuintjies program. Our very first and most enthusiastic members were Sid and Tamara. They had three children, lived in a trailer shack at the Mandela Square Shack Settlement. Their garden, with the help of Rural Women Association, was magnificent and lasted two years. Then Sid died of Aids in 2006. Tamara left Mandela Square and moved in with friends in the Ashbury matchbox-house township attached to Montagu. In 2007, Tamara’s six year old daughter was raped so badly (while Tamara was away working on a farm picking fruit for export) that the daughter was hospitalized for three months requiring extensive reconstruction, with Tamara’s remaining children taken by the state for her negligence.

That rape, following two others of our children in the same week, led to the Rural Women Association defying a court order and opening the Sakhikamva (Xhosa) Better Life ECD & Crèche. (ECD = Early Childhood Development).

Two weeks ago, Tamara was stabbed to death, slowly bleeding her life away while an ambulance took an hour to arrive from a hospital ten minutes away. The following Saturday, our Crèche children attended her funeral and sang her soul away.

This is poverty, and this is Africa.

How sad!

Nothing will improve until we have truly committed and humanitarian government.

See also RWA’s new web site on our community activities, which continue regardless.

http://sites.google.com/site/ruralwomensouthafrica/

solinus

March 2008 - The Man Who Would Be King

The man who would be king:

I haven’t blogged since January, 2007, for many reasons. Primarily, I’ve been far to busy with three successful programs, all jammed full of details needing to be attended to. Our Huis Tuintjies (House Garden) program is now spreading through the Western Cape. Our Market Garden and community gardens are very demanding with all the preparation for feeding programs, sales and daily feeding of 80 children now registered with our ECD, the Early Childhood Development Centre at the local squatter shack camp known officially as the Mandela Square Informal Settlement.

If ever there was an indication of the failure of the black ANC government now in control for 14 years, it is Mandela Square. Those of you who have visited my gmail album sites will recall some of the striking pictures of how these people live while their politicians, service departments and businesses hold them in crippling and increasing poverty, spinning political nonsense of their compassion for the poor, actors, virtually all of them, feeding at the trough and getting fatter by the day while the nation is crumbling.

But mainly I haven’t blogged because I’ve been in shock since November and indeed, haven’t known how to write about it. Even now, I’m not sure how to describe all the nonsense going on. However, we have a wedding later today on the property and whle we’re all preparing for that, my duties complete, I have an hour or two to try and describe what has happened in South Africa

For this Canadian in South Africa, having come here in 2000, I’m stunned by South Africa’s fall from grace. 2000 was a time of optimism and cheer, the majority embracing Mandela and Tutu’s new rainbow nation with idealism of an equal society, where racism and prejudicial hatred would be defeated once and for all, where the masses of poor and formerly oppressed would have access to houses, basic services and opportunities. Well it hasn’t happened. Its actually much worse, now a shambles, with chaos looking imminent. There are few whites here who don’t say in conversation: “well, I told you so”. Others say: “this is Africa… don’t have expectations, get used to it”.

We have a man here who would be king and he is very frightening indeed. Jacob Zuma is the new President of the ANC, (as distinct from President of the Republic) scheduled to replace the incompetent and obstructionist President Thabo Mbeki in 2009, unless Zuma is stopped by the corruption, tax evasion and racketeering charges he faces over the accepting of bribes on the arms deal and other deals. He’s a big man, wears top designer black suits, black sunglasses and is surrounded by similarly big scary men dressed identically, and toured where ever he goes in a convoy of shiny black 4 x 4’s. He has four wives and is planning to marry two more by the end of the year.

Effectively, South Africa has had a coup d’état, not a sudden violent seizure of government as described in the Oxford, but rather a not so subtle take over through the vote of a few thousand self interest seeking ANC members who wish to raze the public treasury, and this they will do. They know the present ANC government officials and patronaged bureaucracy have gotten very fat indeed and now they want their turn. These are the same people who demonstrated for Zuma at his famous rape trial with placards screaming ‘Burn the Bitch’. This is the same Zuma whose theme song is “Bring me my machine gun”, a song which is sung at all his gatherings, and with great gusto.

One-third of all the new National Executive Committee voted into power at the recent conference in December have been convicted, charged or are under investigation for crimes. The national Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger (which means The Citizen) quoted my companion Nettie Pikeur recently in their editorial. The quote is as follows: “When the vinegar is bad to start with, the result is inevitably disastrous”. Says it all, doesn’t it?

Our government, the ruling ANC party (of which I was once a proud member) the bureaucracy, the police, the ruling businesses (banks, telkom, fidelity trusts) are riddled with corruption and theft, from the working class through to the political class. The effects are devastating.

Its bad enough that in the greater democratic world South Africa has the highest violent crime rates (equal to Columbia), rape rates, HIV rates (still a 1000 a day dying), rampant collusion on price fixing along with various other noxious problems including a seeming collapse of justice, electricity supply, health and education, but the ramifications of this thickening morass is deepening poverty and suffering for the masses… and growing unrest. As South Africa is a very rich country, were the challenges of the poor to be taken seriously then growth could be incredible. But the will isn’t there, let alone the wish. My South African friends would be aghast to hear me say this, but I see very little concern or action on behalf of the poor from any of the segments of South African society. It is mostly those rare individuals with the strength to fight daily obstruction from all sides, and traditional service club members, who give any impression that anybody cares.

I’ll give a wee example which is only one of millions of separate frauds, drowning this beautiful country. Two years ago I submitted a major proposal, upon request by the Dept of Social Development, for a Canadian style Indian Friendship Centre which would service the needs of a township attached to Montagu called Ashbury. A few thousand match box houses, boxes really, had been built two years previously for the ongoing farm worker evictees, although corrupted development individuals took 40% of the funds for the development and fled. In this large development not one public facility was emplaced.

Rural Women’s envisioned objective was a comprehensive Centre servicing as a facility for HIV orphans and the elderly, a soup kitchen (unemployment was high, about 70%), an FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) ECD, a large community garden and marketing stall, a green treed park (in the middle of a present dust bowl, for women and young children, and a security building attached to the police to deal with rising community crime. Virtually all the sponsors were in place, including the Dept of Social Services. Firstly, the local municipality fought us at every step, not only refusing to be helpful, but working against us. Eventually we had to withdraw, there was so much resistance. It was then we started a version of the Centre as an ECD at the local squatter camp, only to face a high court summons for land invasion.

However, I’m digressing. Six months after the original proposal had been submitted in 2005, which included a detailed budget for the construction of the centre and its maintenance and operation for five years, a member of the Provincial Social Development Dept showed up with a cheque for 1.2 million rand. He was a tall cocky black man who took more interest in a female district representative, whose breasts were breaking free from her blouse, walking around with his arm about her whispering whatevers in her ear, showing much more interest in seduction than in discussing the centre with Rural Women Association. In short he eventually said: “Well, I can’t give you this cheque as you don’t have the facility built.” We were disappointed naturally but accepted we’d just have to get a facility built first ourselves. That failed due to the obstruction of the local old regime council who forced our withdrawal. We then moved our efforts to the squatter camp across from the township, which fortunately, although across the street, was in a different Ward.

Two months ago we got a demand from the Dept of Social Development for a financial report on the funds we had received in 2006, the 1.2 million. To make a long story short, the Provincial official, mid 20’s, had opened a Rural Women account elsewhere with some corrupt banking clerk, and absconded with the funds. When I think of what isn’t on that parcel of land where the centre was to built, and what services we haven’t as a result of his actions been able to supply to the people of that township, I can recognize what has happened across the nation of South Africa.

The Dining Room Syndrome: The ANC is planning to build a new dining room at Parliament. The cost is in the many hundreds of millions of Rand, an updated banquet hall, obviously desperately needed for the over weight government elite. I added up the cost of implementing the Victim Support Room, the Huis Tuintjies program, the ECD centre at Mandela Square, for which we still have no government support, and divided these figures to show that the cost of the dining room was equal to the cost of completing our same RWA projects in 2,000 South African communities. Government do not care! They simply don’t care! Law of the jungle. International communities, beware. If you are supporting South African initiatives, insure it goes to qualified and credible NGO’s, not government.

Now we have an incoming National Government which is even more rabid, attacking every facet of democracy, the judiciary, the media, and the Scorpions, our elite National Prosecuting Authority’s investigative and prosecuting arm which has an 85% success rate in convictions. And it looks like the new usurpers and disbanders will succeed. Government anti-white, anti-non-black (coloureds, Indians etc) give spin, smoke and mirrors to the people, and all this began under Mbeki. It has been growing significantly. In 2000 when I got here I started observing the descent of Zimbabwe into dictatorship, step by observable step. We’re a third of the way there in South Africa with those steps and I don’t see any significant or capable resistance either now, or in the wings. Civil society seems powerless.

So I say a coup d’etat has happened, and the results will likely be devastating. And the coup d’etat is organized political crime.

The level of this crime, corruption, and lack of service in South Africa has left most of the population extremely anxious and unsettled, especially the disbanding of the Scorpions, supposedly by June, and without Parliamentary authority. They are to be merged into the police where corruption is endemic. Our national police chief is now on leave pending his trial for corruption and racketeering, charges being pursued by the aforementioned ‘Scorpions’, whose only mistake was to do their job exceedingly well. With their demise, there will be no further protection from political corruption and public service theft; it will be an open field for bureaucratic and business corruption, the obvious result being that the people in need will suffer all the more.

Government spin is that all those who criticize ANC government personalities are anti-revolutionary. In fact, it is they who are anti-revolutionary, striking at all the underpinnings of democracy, all of them, justice, media, transparency.

After arms deals, the greatest opportunity for corruption is nuclear, and guess what South Africa is after now, with the French President and Carla here committing hundreds of billions of rand to build nuclear power facilities in South Africa, and with government members owing a large portion of South Africa’s Eskom, our incompetent and aging electricity supplier, once a hallmark of South African success.

In addition we have in the Western Cape, the reverse Trek. The first Trek was when the boers started marching north long ago to claim land at a time when southern South Africa was brown, not black. Now many whites living in northern South Africa are trekking back to the Cape because of the crime and uncertainty, even though 40% of SA’s crime is in fact in the Western Cape. Houses are now more expensive in the Cape than in Canada, as so many whites in fear are returning from the northern provinces, while at the same time relatively equal numbers of white South Africans are leaving the Cape for other countries. I know many who are leaving, and in a sense they have in reality, been driven into the sea as so many prophesized to me would happen, when I arrived in 2000. Violent crime really, really is, very scary here.

One of the more visible ramifications of all the unrest in South Africa is that racism is on an accelerated rate of increase, with evidence of this exhibited daily in our newspapers. There are horrid and disgusting stories of violent and irritation racist behaviors from all sides, as frustration, old prejudices and fear levels rise. The rainbow nation dream is virtually dead. There are no more Mandelas and Tutus, only greedy self seeking individuals after power who control government with 76% of the seats. Actors, virtually all of them, knowing what to say, how to spin, and with few exceptions seem interested only in advantage to themselves and their friends, and to hell with the poor, the country and democracy. These reapers of the public coffers regularly repeat their mantra: “well you know, democracy isn’t an African thing”. We all know what is ‘the African thing’, it’s the Big Man, its dictatorship, its Zimbabwe, Kenya and the seemingly endless poverty and cruelty exhibited in so many African countries.

Will there be a miracle? I don’t know. I would like to think so. However a great many of the good, and the skilled have left or are leaving. In reality, Organized Crime now controls the ANC, likely we are all lost. It was bloodless, it was legal; nevertheless it was a coup and a coup which will do the country, the people and the continent, no good at all. Its perhaps interesting to note that Jacob Zuma’s middle name in Zulu means ‘deceiver’. His up coming trial in August, if it happens at all, will likely tear the country apart. Pray for us.

For the moment, and with an optimistic wedding about to unfold on this gorgeous property from whence I type, its time for a glass of wine under South Africa’s clear blue summer sky and a walk in the gardens amongst the thriving plants so I can listen to the birds, insects and the running river ‘onder blopunt’ , (under Mt. Blopunt at Montagu). It will be a meditative moment to remind myself that, regardless, I am peaceful, well, and happy nevertheless to be in Africa. Cheers.

Update: Since writing this in March, we have had the horrific xenophobic attacks, the burning man whose image undoubtedly you have seen in your papers. These internal refugees are still interred in horrid camps within SA, although they may have lived here for a decade or more. Many hundreds have been deported to Zimbabwe against UN rules which SA had signed onto, and although the situation in Zimbabwe remains disastrous.

27 South Africans were murdered during this Xenophobic outbreak, being mistaken for foreigners.

solinus

January, 2008 - Worries

January 2008

I have not contributed to my blog for some months, for various reasons. One, I had another expensive nightmare with three separate internet servers which kept me off line for about two months causing great disruption to all my internet activity, especially communication with government departments pertaining to the various programs, as project manager for Rural Women.

Since arriving in South Africa in 2000 the expense, awkwardness, and corruption in telecommunications has been one of my significant frustrations. So great in fact I consider SA telecommunications the great business betrayer of South Africa and the new dispensation since 1994.

Prior to 94 the fiber optic broadband cable to Europe and then to the Saint Lawrence in Canada was established on tax payers money, at least South Africa’s part in it. After 94 Telkom was effectively privatized with shares virtually given, and sold also at very low cost to the new and growing black elite, many of them government figures. The profits and growth in value over the years has been astounding with net profit in 2005 at 1500 % with no new lines or infrastructure emplaced. Not only was speed kept slow on purpose as fees for use were based on time on line, and we’re talking here 30 or 40k, but difficulties experienced with the company and its monopoly were and generally are impossible to remedy as the company is not interested in helping its customers, only snaring their money.

The effect has been that one, SA lost all potential to become internationally networked or for that matter nationally networked without paying costs which regularly amount to 10 times that of other countries. There has not been a month in the over seven years I have been here that my telecommunication costs haven’t been five or more times the cost of my residential rental. Also it has meant that only a small percentage of the population can afford telecommunications, and thus the cost of doing business or community work is burdened to such a degree that the effectiveness of each of these groups is perhaps at 1/10th of its capacity.

Both last year and this year my computer’s broadband, which is now, if I’m lucky 500k, has been hijacked. By that I mean, we not only pay for line, server and speed separately, we also pay for the amount of data which is uploaded and downloaded. We pay by the gigabyte and if you have arranged for say two gigabytes and it gets used up in a week then they shut you down and in my experience it takes two weeks to two months to get it running again.

How has it been hijacked? Well, corruption is so strongly ingrained in virtually every government department and most commercial business (law of the jungle and all that) that someone from either Telkom of Vodacom (which is owned by Telkom) sold my pin and log-in information so someone else was able to access my limited and expensive two gigabytes of broadband. In discussions with Telkom, which took days and days to bring about they simply took the position: “well you’ve obviously given your pin and log in to someone else, so its your fault and your problem, and you owe us two years in payments as you signed a two year contract.”

Last year it cost me Rand 20,000 to repair, this year only R10,000, so I guess that’s some sort of improvement. Considering I had seven days usage of a two year contract, I’m somewhat peeved.

On other matters, I’m not optimistic about 2008. My New Year’s was terrible for various reasons including rushing my ECD Crèche administrator to hospital after being bitten twice by a scorpion. Mostly, we’re all very worried about South Africa’s political situation which is nothing short of being a farce. The White response is: “see, told you so, its Africa”. We desperately needed a change from Mbeki, a president who apart from giving economic advantage to the ‘black diamonds’
(our growing black elite) has failed miserably, and as Steven Lewis said: ‘may well be charged with crimes against humanity in the future for his obstructionist stand against medical help for HIV-Aids sufferers, his cozy relationship with Mugabe and many of the other world’s tyrants, the blocking of important resolutions on the Security Council of the UN and his over all Denialism of the growing poverty and continually accelerating crime.

Zuma, who you’ve likely heard of, has now been charged with crimes befitting Al Capone, and Selebi, our national police chief is likely to be charged as well. I’m still amazed that Interpol hasn’t publicly launched an investigation on him, very mysterious.

So here we have a Zuma president elect as of 10 days ago, and additionally, highly charged Zuma supporters openly stating they will not allow Zuma to be brought down. These are the supporters who massed in the thousands and screamed “Burn the Bitch” when Zuma was charged with and acquitted of raping the daughter of an old and deceased friend. She and her mother have been moved to Europe somewhere for their protection. From Zuma’s side the argument is that it is a government conspiracy to prevent his presidency, which is nonsense. The man as a populist is a crook and a thief, not to mention a puppet to very unsavory people, as alike to Selebi. Who knows what will happen to this exquisitely beautiful country and the dream of a non-racial all inclusive society.

Looking at other countries, take Kenya for example this very day, and it is possible to understand the very real fears that South Africa will go the way of Zimbabwe and other African nations. When I arrived here in June, 2000, many new white friends told me it was only time before the last remaining significant white African community, living in South Africa, would be pushed into the sea. I’m not so sure now that this fear won’t be realized.

Ethics isn’t even considered in South Africa, not that I can see. You rarely see an analysis or column speaking about ethics. Pity! Without it, the downfall of any nation is determined.

I’m off to the garden. At least there, I find comfort and freedom from worry.

For further information on cyber hijacking, see:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7154187.stm