Fertile, mineral rich, naturally glorious, splendidly developed, constitutionally orderly South Africa, with equality under the law and a relatively free economy, is fast becoming just another African hellhole.

It is now in a sharp and probably irreversible decline caused by the misrule and corruption of the ANC (African National Congress), which has been in power since exclusive white rule ended in 1994.

Its first black president, Nelson Mandela, was a communist who saw the sense of keeping the country capitalist. It seemed set fair to prosper – even though free enterprise was hampered by labor-protection laws made to conciliate the powerful trade unions.

The ANC, Mandela’s party, promised jobs and good housing for all. But unemployment grew, largely because of the laws protecting black employment, and shanty-towns remained, worsened, and proliferated.

As the ANC continued to rule in callous arrogance (and still does), the power-stations became unreliable and electricity cuts ever more frequent; roads were not repaired; water-supplies and the postal service became unreliable; hospitals were closed; education was rotten. The government looted the country. Civil servants and politicians took bribes for favors. (Recently, Covid relief money never reached anyone to provide relief, it simply “disappeared”.)

Mandela was succeeded in 1999 by Thabo Mbeki, whose deputy president for six years was Jacob Zuma. Mbeki dismissed him in 2005 because his reputation had become scandalous for rape and corruption. Zuma was nevertheless elected leader of the ANC in 2007, and as such became president of South Africa in 2009. His presidency ended in 2018 and Cyril  Ramaphosa’s began.

After he left office, sixteen criminal charges were brought against Zuma for fraud, racketeering, money-laundering in connection to illegal arms-dealing. He tried to get them struck down but failed. He refused to appear before a commission investigating government corruption when ordered to do so by the Constitutional Court. So on June 29, 2021 he was sentenced to 15 months in jail for contempt of court and given until July 7 to turn himself in. When he did not, the police went to his home to arrest him. They found huge crowds of his supporters surrounding his house.

Jani Allan, ex-South African journalist now living in the US, describes the scene, writing at RT:

Thousands of his supporters traveled at the weekend to Zuma’s home village of Nkandla in Kwa-Zulu Natal, to form a human shield to prevent him from being arrested … Zulus wearing traditional garb and carrying shields and knobkerries toyi-toyi’ed and sang ‘struggle’ songs.

But Zuma surrendered to the police and was taken to jail.

On July 9 , the high court of  the province heard and rejected his challenge to the fifteen-month sentence, which he brought on the grounds that he was 79 years old and jailing him in the midst of the Covid epidemic was tantamount to a death sentence.

Protests against his imprisonment erupted, and quickly became violent. Looting, arson, and massive destruction followed, not only in the province of KwaZulu-Natal but also in Guateng, in and near Johannesburg.

R. W. Johnson, emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who lives in South Africa and has written extensively about it, writes at Quillette:

The explosion of violence followed the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma on a charge of contempt for refusing to appear before the Commission of enquiry into the wholesale looting of the state which took place under his presidency. Nobody seriously doubts that Zuma stole millions, probably billions of Rands and he still faces a long list of charges for racketeering, money-laundering and sundry other crimes. But Zuma still has a large following among his Zulu followers and effectively threatened to make the country ungovernable if the government dared to jail him. …

Once the rioting and looting of shops and hijacking of trucks on the highway began, with the police clearly scared and ineffective, word rapidly spread that you could go “shopping without money”, creating huge excitement among the ranks of the millions of poor and unemployed Zulus who inhabit the townships and squatter camps around Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and from there spreading into every small town of the province. Most of the looters and miscreants were unconcerned about Zuma’s fate. They simply heard along the grapevine that trouble was going on and realised that opportunity was staring them in the face.

They flocked in huge numbers to the shopping malls and began to loot them. Quickly the spree spread to Johannesburg, home to many more Zulus—though many others joined in. It was a whole-of-community thing: most of the looters were poor and on foot but not a few arrived in cars, sometimes very expensive cars. Some even came with vast trailers to haul away freezers, fridges, and cookers. Huge queues of cars swamped the freeways, all heading for the malls, and other forms of criminality blossomed—protection rackets, attacks on and thefts from other motorists, anything that offered a quick buck.

In a sense this had been coming for a long time. When the ANC was first elected in 1994 its posters promised “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” but paid little heed to that once they were elected. In 1995 the average number of unemployed, according to official figures, was 1,698,000 or, if one took the expanded definition of unemployment, including those who had given up looking for a job, the figure was 3,321,000. With only a few exceptional periods to the contrary, that figure has grown steadily and hugely to surpass 11.4 million today. Since the unemployed have little or no income, this has also meant a huge growth in both poverty and inequality. The ANC has routinely deplored poverty and inequality but it has generally tried to pretend that this is part of the “apartheid inheritance”. As the figures show, this is the opposite of the truth.

If you assume that each of those 11.4 million has two or three dependants, we are talking of households comprising 30 million people—half the entire population or even more. They are, for the most part, sitting in shacks, cold, hungry, without alcohol (banned as part of the COVID lockdown), insecure, with nothing to do and with almost no hope of a job. It is a picture of pure misery. These are the greatest victims of ANC misrule. Many of them are young people who have never worked in their life and who have given up hope that they ever will. For the young women among them prostitution is almost their only hope of an income. One looter, when interviewed on TV, frankly admitted that he stole every day because otherwise his 15 year old sister would “have to sleep with a grandad”. 

In practice the plight of the unemployed and poor has been ignored. The government is far more concerned with the “haves” within its coalition—the BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) capitalists, the public sector workers and the trade union bosses. …

Government is attentive to the trade unions of those in work but all it has for the unemployed is crocodile tears. … South Africa’s tight labour laws greatly privilege those in employment, giving the unemployed little opportunity to compete for jobs. Moreover, the huge weight of endemic corruption together with inept policy choices means that South Africa is now in its seventh consecutive year of falling real per capita incomes. People are getting steadily poorer and COVID lockdowns have increased the misery, costing many jobs.

If people who are ignored and treated like this are told that the time has arrived for shopping without money, how can one be surprised that they respond in such numbers and with such enthusiasm? That sort of shopping is fun and exciting and you end up with food, drink, and a new TV. …

There are also clearly political elements trying to make the country ungovernable by attacking key pieces of infrastructure—there have been attacks on reservoirs, over 120 attacks on electricity sub-stations, and the road leading to the Sapref refinery in Durban (which produces one third of all South Africa’s petrol) has become so dangerous due to continuous attacks on vehicles that the refinery has had to close down completely. Already there are huge queues at garages and a major fuel crisis is building. Moreover, as soon as a shop, warehouse, or factory has been looted it is set on fire. None of these crimes produce money and the destruction of such buildings is bound to cost jobs and lead to many more people going hungry in future. …

There is general indignation that the police have been so passive, usually just standing by and watching the looting going on. They are, of course, hugely outnumbered, though they are armed. There are many cases of the police themselves operating protection rackets and demanding “favours” from the public. …

Ramaphosa finally ordered 2,500 troops in to support the police but they make no difference: they too stand passively by as looting goes on, for the government is clearly terrified of the optics of a black government firing on poor black people. In any case, South Africa is a big country and the troops are far too thinly spread. Yet the looting goes on day after day and right before the government’s eyes the country is being destroyed, investor confidence is being undermined, and any hope of South Africa emerging from its economic crisis is vanishing. While only two provinces are affected, Gauteng is the country’s economic heart, producing 40 percent of its GDP, and Durban is the major port. The highway between Durban and Johannesburg is the country’s main economic artery and that has been closed for many days now.

With the forces of law and order so weak and inactive, vigilante militias have sprung up to protect many suburbs and, typically, to protect their local mall or supermarket on which that suburb depends. Often these vigilante groups are multiracial but usually they depend on white ex-members of the security forces. They are armed and determined to stop looting spreading to their homes. …

Already food and fuel shortages are developing. No one is going to resupply malls that have been burned or, indeed, any shop that is vulnerable to looting. So even if the looting stops as the looters run out of targets, there is bound to be a major hunger crisis—which could drive people to even more desperate acts: the big worry is attacks on private homes. But ATMs have been destroyed, pharmacies ransacked, and drink shops pillaged so there will be shortages of medical and other supplies as well. …

The Rand has dropped sharply and could fall more.

What the riots point to is the colossal failure of ANC governance. It has emphatically not brought a better life for poor Africans.

The outlook is for terrible crises of hunger, and shortages of fuel and medical supplies. A great deal of social infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed—some 400 malls were attacked, including many pharmacies. The ANC is more divided than ever and the economy has taken an enormous blow. Without doubt real incomes will continue to fall.

This is what the ANC has achieved after 27 years in power. … For years in opposition it boasted of how it would improve the life of the African masses, but it has found that the task of governance was a whole lot more difficult than it imagined and it is steering South Africa steadily towards the status of a failed state.

 

Update

Breitbart reports:

South Africa’s “looting death toll” from violent rioting reached 337 on Thursday July 22, 2021. Public health officials confirmed 79 deaths in Gauteng province and 258 in KwaZulu-Natal.

The South African government has announced that it will take away land owned by white farmers without compensating them for their loss.

Take from them what they legally own. Take all they have. Seize it. Steal it from them. Leave them and their families and dependents destitute.

And the British government, (wo)manned by incompetent women led by an incompetent woman, says that’s just fine.

Here’s one of the stupid women using her unearned power to do irreparable harm on a vast scale:

Breitbart London has seen a letter written by Harriet Baldwin MP, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), to Sir Paul Beresford MP, who enquired what the government’s stance on the policy [of expropriating land owned by white farmers without compensation] was on behalf of a concerned constituent.

“The British government understands the need for land reform in South Africa”, Baldwin asserted, adding that they “welcomed” promises from President Cyril Ramaphosa that “the process of land [re]distribution would be orderly within South African laws” and be carried out “without negatively affecting economic growth, agricultural production and food security”.

In a follow-up email to the constituent from the Africa Department (Central and Southern) of the FCO, also seen by Breitbart London and confirmed as “reflect[ing] Government policy on this issue” by the FCO newsdesk, the department confirms Theresa May is satisfied with having been told that “[the] process would be taken forward on a multi-party basis, through Parliament, and… within the bounds of the Constitution and carefully designed so as to avoid damaging food security or deterring investment”.

Oh, that’s okay then. The theft will be legal!

The theft will be legal?

Oh, and “carefully designed”. No damage to “food security” is likely to occur because of “careful design”. And don’t worry if you’re thinking of investing money in South Africa; these soothing words should keep you from feeling “deterred”.

That the ANC government intends to make the seizure of white-owned farms without the owners being compensated legal, through parliamentary fiat and constitutional amendments, says nothing about the justness of the policy, however — and while Ramaphosa might insist he can confiscate land without “deterring investment” the national currency took an immediate hit when the policy was announced.

Minister Baldwin and the FCO Africa Department also dismissed the constituent’s concerns that white farmers, who own a majority of land being put to use for agriculture in South Africa but only a little over a fifth of land overall, were being deliberately targeted in racist attacks.

Many white farmers, including British nationals, have been brutally attacked and sometimes murdered on their homesteads, often following a prolonged period of torture — indeed, by some measures farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world outside an active war zone.

Only white farmers attacked. Attacked only by blacks.

But Baldwin and the FCO bureaucrats played down the phenomenon, claiming: “Attacks on farmers are generally opportunistic and on the whole not based on racial grounds.”

In the same way, you see, taking land from white owners and giving it gratis to black owners has nothing to do with race.

How stupid and gullible can even a British female Member of Parliament be?

… Many observers believe the result of the land expropriation without compensation policy the ANC is pursuing — allegedly in response to electoral pressure from Julius Malema’s black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters party — will be an exodus of the country’s white minority, followed by a collapse in agricultural production and the wider economy.

As happened in Zimbabwe “when  Marxist kleptocrat Robert Mugabe seized white-owned farms … and allowed violent mobs to forcibly eject and often kill the former occupants”, so turning the “Breadbasket of Africa” into a barren wasteland of a country needing to import food while having no money to pay for it.  

Who is the Snake alluded to in our heading – in recollection of the song President Trump has recited more than once in his rally speeches? The Snake the silly women ruling Britain are clasping to their collective bosom?

The creature with a forked tongue? Its name is Cyril Ramaphosa. Or the Government of South Africa.

The mainstream media in the US are not reporting the news from South Africa – that all white-owned land is to be expropriated by the government without compensation. (See our posts, A calamity in South Africa, March 11, 2018, and White refugees from the dark continent, March 12, 2018.) )

US governments had a lot to do with the rise of the communist ANC [African National Congress] government in South Africa. Now that the effects of what many Western governments wrought in their zeal to replace the oppressive white apartheid regime (which had actually much reformed itself before it was deposed), most of them have lost interest.

A South African writer, critic and journalist (we have not had permission to give his name) informs us:

Yes, this whole “expropriation without compensation” issue has taken most people by surprise. [President] Ramaphosa was thought to be “business-friendly” but somehow the vast power and financial resources that fell into their laps in 1994 have made them very arrogant and wedded to their classical Marxist precepts.

The whole “land theft” myth which is based on nothing except speculation and facile stereotypes about SA history, has now become so rigidly established that one may hardly question it. That fuels the righteous outrage of blacks who want to “make the farmers pay”, also as scapegoats for what they perceive as “white supremacy”.

It is difficult to say how the farmers are going to react. Many are hoping that it is “just talk” and nothing will happen. But they are mistaken. The lunatic fringe of blacks, such as Malema’s EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters party] and another outfit called BLF (Black First Land First) are extremely radical and anti-white. They don’t want the whites in the country anymore and openly say so. The ANC is scared of losing votes to the left and will therefore co-opt their policies or prejudices.

In the north of the country, I suspect the farmers will put up a fight. Further south probably not. There could well be some kind of conflict. The thing is that the Afrikaners do not have other passports and a back door as all the other European colonists in Africa had. So what are they to do?

The other unknown are the foreign Africans in South Africa. In the event of a conflict they might rise up against the ANC too, as they have been badly treated by local blacks.

The ANC has already spent about R300 billion on their so-called “land reform” which was wasted on corruption, bureaucracy and turning productive farms into wastelands. So the prognosis of creating a new black-run agriculture is not good and it will probably end as in Zimbabwe with food shortages and a drag on the economy. We export quite a lot of fruit and other produce, including wine, which would knock the balance of payments and destroy many jobs.

So we are in for “interesting times”, as they say!

Ultimately “white guilt” is to blame. People are just so scared of speaking out because then they are vilified as “racists”. If you ask me, the ANC won the propaganda war too well in the late eighties, with the help of Sweden, Canada and all the other Western countries, and now they believe they are gods, impervious to human reason or self-doubt.

Someone quoted Adam Smith the other day where he said something about the excesses of virtue that are worse than those of vice, as one’s conscience limits vice, but not virtue.

In this time of crisis, rational virtue – always opposed to incontinent virtue – is being practiced by the Australian government with an offer of asylum to the white refugees. Australians expect the South Aricans to be the sort of settlers who will integrate well; have the same values, culture, and standards; contribute amply to the good of the country, and not be a burden on it.

From Breitbart:

Australia is ready to consider issuing special visas to mainly white, Afrikaans-speaking South African farmers due to the “horrific circumstances” of land seizures, violence and murder they face.

Peter Dutton, Australia’s home affairs minister, told the Sydney Daily Telegraph on Wednesday his department was examining a range of methods to smooth their path to Australia on humanitarian or other visa programs. As Breitbart News has reported, South Africans are increasingly worried that the government’s plans to expropriate land from white farmers without compensation could destroy the economy and the country’s fragile democracy.

Not just could, but surely will.

South Africa’s new president Cyril Ramaphosa has vowed to pursue the same course as Zimbabwe’s former leader Robert Mugabe in expropriating farmland from white farmers without compensation. President Ramaphosa, who replaced Jacob Zuma after years of corruption scandals finally forced the 75-year-old from office, was cheered in the South African parliament as he pledged to “accelerate our land distribution program … to redress a grave historical injustice and make more land available to our people for cultivation.”

Such is the level of violence in South Africa that thousands of white, Afrikaans-speaking farmers have taken to the streets to protest and plead for help.

Last year the October 30th #BlackMonday protests were organized after civil rights group AfriForum released figures claiming the murder rate for South African farmers was 156 per 100,000 — putting it well above the already high national average and making farming arguably the most dangerous occupation in the world outside a war zone.

At the same time, the number of slain farmers, farm workers, and family members — most of them white — [in 2017] had hit 71, surpassing the estimated death toll for 2016.

Now Australia stands ready to offer help.

“If you look at the footage and read the stories, you hear the accounts, it’s a horrific circumstance they face,” Mr. Dutton told the Telegraph.

The home affairs minister noted Australia has refugee, humanitarian and other visa programs which have the “potential to help some of these people”. He said he had asked his department to look at the options “because from what I have seen they do need help from a civilized country like ours”.

“The people we’re talking about want to work hard, they want to contribute to a country like Australia,” Mr. Dutton continued. “We want people who want to come here, abide by our laws, integrate into our society, work hard, not lead a life on welfare. And I think these people deserve special attention and we’re certainly applying that special attention now.”

Mr. Dutton suggested options included the in-country persecution visa category, and to bring them to Australia on humanitarian visas via referrals from others in Australia.

When Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, it was a land of plenty. All citizens, black and white, benefited from the skill and labor of whites and blacks on the white-owned farms. (Note: the country had no apartheid laws.) Then, with the dynamic aid of socialist Britain, it fell under the dictatorship of communist Robert Mugabe. He sent gangs of “veterans” – ie. murderers – to seize farms owned by whites. The farmers, their families, their black servants were slaughtered. Often they were tortured first. For the fun of it. And the land became unproductive.

Now, South Africa …

Our Facebook summary of a Daily Mail article tells the story:

White South African farmers will have their land confiscated after a landslide vote in parliament. The motion was brought by the murderous radical Julius Malema, but the policy was also a key factor in the new president Cyril Ramaphosa’s platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February. It passed by 241 votes to 83. In 2016, Malema told his supporters he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people – at least for now”. Freedom Front Plus party leader Pieter Groenewald said the decision to strip white farmers of their land would cause “unforeseen consequences that is not in the interest of South Africa”. The deputy chief executive of the civil rights group Afriforum said the motion was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid.

A few facts:

Many of the white farmer families have owned their farms for hundreds of years. In many cases it is all they have. Now it is to be taken from them without compensation.

They did not “steal” it from any of the Bantu tribes, who came overland from the north and encountered white settlers arriving by sea at about the same time. The only native people of South Africa were the Khoikhoi (or Bushmen). The Bantu were not farmers but herdsmen.

Large areas of the land already redistributed by the ANC government to black owners – 2.8 million hectares [1 hectare = just under 2 and a half acres], for which the government paid R20.5bn – are today under-utilized or fallow.

Ilana Mercer – South African born libertarian – writes at Townhall, pointing out that this legalized crime of expropriation has long been foreseeable:

Up until, or on the day, a predictable calamity unfolds in South Africa, you still find Western media insisting that,

* No, there’s no racial component to the butchering of thousands of white rural folks in ways that would make Shaka Zulu proud.
* No, the mutilated, tortured bodies of Boer and British men, women and children aren’t evidence of racial hatred, but a mere artifact of good old crime. No hate crimes. No crimes against humanity. Move along. Let the carnage play on.

And the latest:

To listen to leftist, counterfactual, ahistoric pabulum served up by most in media, a decision by South Africa’s Parliament to smooth the way for an expropriation without compensation of private property came out of … nowhere.

It just so happened — pure fluke! — that the permanently entrenched, racialist parties in parliament used their thumping majorities to vote for legalizing state theft from a politically powerless minority. Didn’t see that coming!

And still they beat on breast: How did the mythical land of Nelson Mandela turn into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?

How did that country’s vaunted constitution yield to “the horror, the horror” of land theft?

Easily, even seamlessly — as I’ve been warning since the 2011 publication of  Into the cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, which provided the analytical edifice for what’s unfolding. …

One of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential campaign promises was to finally get down to the business of the people: stealing private property. Since replacing Jacob Zuma as president, Ramaphosa has openly endeavored to speed up the transfer of land from white to black owners after his inauguration two weeks ago. Yet, this inherently aggressive, coercive act was studiously finessed by the news cartel. Before Ramaphosa, Zuma too had “called on parliament to change South Africa’s Constitution to allow the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation”. 

Unlike so many celebrity journos involved, both men know that said constitution is no bulwark against state expropriation. Or against any “public” or private violence, for that matter. As a protector of individual rights to life, liberty and property, the thing is worse than useless — a wordy and worthless document.

Take Section 12 of this progressive constitution. It enshrines the “Freedom and Security of the Person”. Isn’t it comforting to know that in a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, the individual has a right to live free of all those forms of violence?

Here’s the rub: Nowhere does the South African Constitution state whether its beneficiaries may defend their most precious of rights. Recounted in Into The Cannibal’s Pot is example after example of innocent victims of crime punished and prosecuted by those who swore to uphold the constitution. These victims are punished for merely and minimally defending their so-called constitutionally enshrined rights.

The African National Congress (ANC) has always, not suddenly, disregarded the importance of private property, public order and the remedial value of punitive justice. …

The ANC under its leader Nelson Mandela was, and the ANC remains, essentially a communist party. It made concessions to capitalism because its leaders were persuaded that the economic consequences for the country if it did not would be catastrophic. Now, it seems, such a catastrophe looks less forbidding to them.

As for equality before the law: The South African Bill of Rights is contemptuous of it. It enshrines group rights and allows for compensatory and distributive “justice”.

In other words, it is all for “social justice” which is not just at all.

The state’s confiscatory powers may be used to redress “past injustices”. “To promote the achievement of equality; legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”

The Constitution already allows a good deal of mischief in the name of the “greater good”, land expropriation included. Thus the Expropriation Bill of 2008: It’s the precursor to the current land expropriation process. Where, pray tell, was the news cartel when it was floated as an impetus for land nationalization?

With the 2008 Bill, the dominant ruling party had empowered itself — and “any organ of state, at any level of government” — to take ownership and possession of property “simply by giving notice to the expropriated owner”. The state would make the “final” determination of the compensation due, subject only to a limited form of court review. Both movable and immovable property has always been up for grabs — “livestock and farming implements, residential homes, business premises and equipment, patents, and shares”. The 2008 Bill was temporarily shelved before the 2009 elections, but not forgotten. It led naturally to talk about nationalization.

In March 2010, a plan was tabled in Parliament for turning “all productive land into a national asset leased to farmers”.  Such sentiments are hardly new. True to a promise made in Mandela’s 1955 communistic Freedom Charter, the ANC has already nationalized the “mineral wealth beneath the soil” and the water rights. …

The result of nationalizing water rights: the Cape peninsula, one of the most fertile regions of the entire planet, full of vineyards, famous fruit farms, nature reserves where a vast variety of wild flora has flourished, is now afflicted with drought. The City of Cape Town itself is running out of drinking water!

Israeli experts, who can turn a desert into a garden, offered to come and solve the water problem, but the ANC-led authorities refused because they hate the Jews. Because “Palestine”. (See the Reuters report here.)

Note: More Jews were imprisoned and died for the cause of black liberation in South Africa than any other “white demographic”.

All along had the entrenchment of a property clause in the South African Constitution angered judicial activists, who conflate the protection of private property with the entrenchment of white privilege. Their fears were overblown. Back then, I wagered that nationalization would necessitate but a minor tweak to the Constitution, since the latter already allows all the mischief mentioned. …

Since the dawn of “freedom” in South Africa, commercial farmers, mostly white, have been terrorized and threatened with land claims. As if this were not bad enough, they can now expect nationalization.

In case Zimbabwe is a distant memory, the nationalization of South Africa’s farms will increase unemployment in the agricultural sector, and with it, rural poverty. That will guarantee mass migration to the cities, with all the attendant problems which this exodus poses. Also, it will undermine South Africa’s ability to meet its food needs and deter investment in the country.

There will also be much blood spilt. Famine and Death will stalk the land. As many an example of communist rule attests.

But Communists never have to say “sorry”.