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