The world watched in restrained shock and resigned dismay this week as South Africans looted and pillaged in the name, and arguably at the behest, of their disgraced former president, Jacob Zuma. The defiant 79-year-old was finally convicted of contempt of court last month for refusing to attend an inquiry into state-capture corruption during his presidency.
But, when threatened with imminent arrest, like all bullies, he caved and turned himself in to serve a 15-month prison sentence. Then all hell broke loose.
Here is how the BBC reported on this still-raging menace on Tuesday:
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The death toll in South Africa has risen to 72 as violence continues across the country following the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma.
Crowds looting and setting alight shopping centres clashed with police in several cities on Tuesday. …
South African police said in a statement they had identified 12 people suspected of provoking the riots, and that a total of 1,234 people had been arrested.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has called it some of the worst violence witnessed in South Africa since the 1990s, before the end of apartheid, with fires started, highways blocked and businesses and warehouses looted in major cities and small towns in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces.
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I bemoaned to a friend in Cape Town, after being assured of her safety, as follows:
So Africa’s beacon of hope has come to this …
Of course, as Joseph Conrad narrated so vividly, it takes little to shatter the thin veneer that separates civilization from savagery. Indeed, we saw this shattering with the infamous insurrection of January 6 in no less a place than the United States of America. For reasons too complicated to even mention, however, we have seen this shattering too often on the Dark Continent of Africa.
Still, this raises an ominous question: If Zuma’s wannabe-Zulu warriors rioted and pillaged to protest his imprisonment, what will Trump’s MAGA insurrectionists do when he’s arrested and thrown in jail, which I predict will happen this fall…? And, mind you, this ominous prospect is just one of many unfolding developments in America for which I fear the infamous insurrection of January 6 will be deemed, in hindsight, a dress rehearsal.
In any event, my I-told-you-so despair was not lost on my South African friend. After all, she has been the most avid reader over the years of my commentaries that presaged this dystopian state of affairs. But my despair must have seemed quaint juxtaposed with (what must be) the unbridled schadenfreude prevailing there among whites still pining for South Africa’s old apartheid regime …
The point, though, is that what I wrote just three years ago not only cited many of those commentaries but crystallized my Cassandra warnings. Therefore, I can do no better on this occasion than to reprise in full “Aping Zimbabwe, South Africa Expropriating White Farms to Give to Blacks,” August 12, 2018:
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Corruption, incompetence, lawlessness, and the spectre of racial retribution are driving South Africa into the same dysfunctional shithole where Zimbabwe has been festering for the past 30 years.
I have lamented this fateful symmetry in many commentaries, most notably in “South Africa ‘Betraying Its Values’,” May 13, 2011, “Zuma Doing to South Africa What Mugabe Did to Zimbabwe,” December 12, 2015, and “South Africa Replaces Corrupt Zuma with Captured Ramaphosa,” February 16, 2018.
More to the point, though, I have continually warned it would be thus – as the following excerpts attest:
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From “Zimbabweans Pray for Liberation from Their Liberator – Robert Mugabe,” May 29, 2005:
To the relief and exultation of restive blacks, Mugabe announced sweeping land reforms in which his government would seize the ‘farms of white colonialists to give to landless peasants and the veterans of the war of liberation’. Unfortunately, like his independence blueprint for black empowerment, Mugabe’s land reforms have been an abject failure:
Five years ago, there were 4000 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe; today, there are only 400 (mostly unproductive) farms left. Five years ago, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa; today, it is a basket case of starving people. …
Instead of seizing white farms, it would have made far more sense to impose (price and production) controls on them pursuant to the national interest. White farmers would have complied. What’s more, Mugabe could have spun this as a form of nationalization consistent with his plan for black empowerment.
- From “Zuma Issues Fatwa against Cartoonist Zapiro,” December 22, 2008:
Rabble-rousing trade unionists and unreformed communists have turned the ANC from a governing coalition into a band of rebels. Therefore, Zuma enlisting them to intimidate a political cartoonist should serve as a dire warning of what South Africa will become under his leadership.
From “Julius Malema: President Jacob Zuma’s Mini-Me,” August 18, 2011:
[T]he country Mandela liberated is becoming just another dysfunctional African kleptocracy under Zuma’s rule. Which, alas, is dashing great expectations that it would become the Dark Continent’s beacon of democracy, economic development, and black empowerment. …
Misguided blacks who took out their subsistence frustrations on white farmers in South Africa were incited to do so by the many misguided blacks who did the same in neighboring Zimbabwe … pursuant to official government policy.
- From “Massacre at South Africa’s Lonmin Marikana Mine,” August 17, 2012:
It’s hardly surprising … that these poor, uneducated South Africans have now resorted to rabble-rousing tactics to get better wages and other benefits: President Zuma himself led them to believe that these are the least to which they were entitled from day one of his presidency. But we have seen the inevitable consequences of his brand of mindless populism play out (in the extreme) in Zimbabwe. …
Zuma’s rhetoric led thousands of poor black miners to believe they were entitled to strike and use similar tribal weapons/tools to extract more than a doubling of their wages from rich white mine owners and their token black shareholders, most notably Cyril Ramaphosa. …
The analogy to Zimbabwe is instructive. Because just as that country was a thriving producer of farm products before similar strife turned it into a basket case, South Africa is now risking its status as the world’s leading producer of platinum being irreparably harmed.
- And from “Wither South Africa,” April 10, 2017:
[South Africa] is in the death throes of becoming a Zimbabwean mess. … Having robbed the treasury, wrecked the economy, and scandalized the people, South Africa’s rapacious leaders are now setting their sights on the last repast of all pseudo nationalists: white-owned land. …
South Africa is on an inexorable descent into the heart of darkness.
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As it happened, some of my South African friends led the chorus of those who dismissed my warnings with resolute indignation, so much so that I often felt like a latter-day Cassandra. But this latest, vindicating instance of South Africa aping Zimbabwe should finally convince even my indignant friends of their validity:
The ANC has targeted 139 selected farms that they plan to expropriate without compensation in the coming weeks as it moves to make good on its commitment to test out section 25 of the Constitution.
The governing party emerged from a two-day lekgotla of its highest decision-making body, the national executive committee (NEC), with the resolve to make an amendment to the constitution which will explicitly allow for the conditional expropriation of land without compensation.
(SA City News, August 5, 2018)
Frankly, this is stupefying. After all, everyone knows this kind of racially motivated land reform was the tipping point for Zimbabwe’s economic death spiral.
Mind you, when Ramaphosa replaced (ousted) Zuma as president in February, this collectivist pandering was the last thing anyone expected. After all, as indicated above, Ramaphosa was/is the poster boy for the few black South Africans who amassed unimagined fortunes by cultivating business ties with the country’s white capitalist elites.
Those ties were plainly opportunistic. Yet they raised great expectations, at home and abroad, that under his leadership South Africa would emulate countries like Switzerland, not ape those like Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, Zuma’s kakistocratic government planted seeds of distress and restiveness in so many blacks that Ramaphosa seems resigned to just harvest their grievances.
As in Zimbabwe, dispossessed blacks compose the vast majority of the electorate in South Africa. Moreover, as it was with Mugabe’s land grab, the only thing that explains Ramaphosa’s is his wish to appease those blacks whose votes he needs to consolidate his power – the welfare of the country be damned.
In addition to dispossessing white farmers, he clearly hopes to uproot the growing influence of Julius Malema’s far-left party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which has made expropriating land without compensation its clarion call. Ramaphosa is banking on this pilfered policy to help him win his own electoral mandate in national elections next year.
Meanwhile:
South Africa’s unemployment rate has …. been ranked as the worst in the world in a new global competitiveness report. It is rated number 9 of the world’s 20 unemployed rated countries, and the unemployment rate for women sits at 29 percent and 24.8 percent for men.
(HuffPost ZA, June 6, 2018)
This, compounded by an epidemic of graft and violence, is what nearly 25 years of black rule has wrought. And Ramaphosa seems hell-bent on making matters worse.
Incidentally, apropos of South Africa serving as that continental beacon, huddled masses of poor, oppressed Africans are fleeing north to mother Europe instead of south to this Cape of [Lost] Hope:
I just hope the damning irony is not lost on any proud African that, 50 years after decolonization, hundreds of Africans (men, women, and children) are risking their lives, practically every day, to subjugate themselves to the paternal mercies of their former colonial masters in Europe.
(“African Migrants Turning Mediterranean Sea into Vast Cemetery,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 12, 2015)
It speaks volumes in this respect that Zimbabweans – who fled the frying pan their country was – have returned home in droves to escape the fire South Africa has become:
The events unfolding there today are as ironic as they are disappointing. Because, in recent weeks, the deadly violence black South Africans have perpetrated against black foreigners rivals the violence white South Africans perpetrated against blacks during apartheid.
In fact, just imagine a prevailing state of fear that would force a Zimbabwean – who (along with 3 million others) immigrated to South Africa to escape starvation, poverty, and political oppression – to return to Zimbabwe because he would rather die in his homeland than in South Africa.
(“In South Africa, Xenophobic Blacks Prove Almost as Deadly as Apartheid Whites,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 23, 2008)
But white South Africans are now escaping too:
So popular is Australia as an escape route for white South Africans that the phrase ‘Packing for Perth’ or just ‘PFP’ has become a common term for those planning to flee. …
Fuelled by economic inequality and racial tensions, the worst of the violence has spread from the major cities to rural areas, where white farmers are the primary targets of gangs who commit murder, rape, torture and robbery.
(The Australian, April 16, 2018)
I should clarify that white farmers are not as indispensable to South Africa as they were/are to Zimbabwe. Therefore, I do not expect to be writing about South Africans as I did about Zimbabweans in “Zimbabwe’s Black Farmers Cry: Bring Back White Farmers,” September 16, 2015.
Instead, South Africa’s white flight might cause me to write about it as I did about Venezuela in commentaries like “Venezuela’s Death Spiral of Recession, Protest, and Repression,” April 24, 2017, and “Chávez Chavismo: More Robbing Hoodlum than Robin Hood,” August 12, 2015.
Indeed, as the Financial Mail asked in an August 9 editorial:
Why does Ramaphosa, a respected businessman, enthusiastically support a proposal that he knows could be ruinous to property values, investor confidence and food security?
Alas, as indicated above, the only answer is Ramaphosa’s desire for power. But, ultimately, I fear Israeli diplomat Abba Eban said it best in the Jerusalem Post on November 18, 2002. Because here is what he said about Arabs, which can probably be said about Africans too:
[They] never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Related commentaries:
SA betraying its values… Zuma doing to SA… corrupt Zuma, captured Ramaphosa…
Zimbabweans pray for liberation… Wither South Africa… Zuma issues Fatwa…
Xenophobic blacks… Venezuela… Chavismo…
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That shared, I will close with this query: I caught a fleeting image on TV of a South African woman with what looks like a 50″ flat screen TV on her head dashing into a shanty that clearly has no electricity. So what do you suppose she intends to do with it…? Things that make you go, hmmm, no?