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
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
Labels: Zuma
posted by Legal Alien at 5:26 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home