Southern Africa: Totalitarian tendencies...

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It is ironic that a couple of days before Human Rights Day here in South Africa, we had to witness the pathetic response from the ANC-led coalition government to the human-rights abuses by police in Zimbabwe.

After a weekend of violent repression by Zimbabwe police of Movement for Democaratic Change (MDC) leaders and protesters, South African government reaction amounted to nothing more than a : 'we are very much concerned and we should look for ways to talk about all of this'. This from a former liberation movement (ANC) with it's charismatic ex-leader, Nelson Mandela, who went all over the world eliciting sympathy and aid in fighting a brutally repressive apartheid-government. It illustrates the old pattern of African liberation movement becoming the new oppressors. The arrogance and hubris of the ANC-led government coalition in South Africa would have been something comical if thousands of lives were not affected by their gross incompetence and mismanagement not only of South Africa as a country, but as the supposed 'powerhouse' on the African continent.

It takes an Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to stand up and point out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. 

This report from The Norwegian Council for Afrika website (quoting an article from The Guardian, Nigeria): 

South Africa: Tutu worries over African leaders' attitude on Mugabe



Amid mounting criticism on the Zimbabwean government's action against opposition activists, South Africa's Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, has denounced the attitude by African leaders towards President Robert Mugabe, saying they should instead be ashamed of police repression on opposition leadership in the country. "Some of them talked about (Zimbabwe's) sovereignty. We argue to the contrary.


By The Guardian (Nigeria) | 03.20.2007


There are scandalous things happening in this country," said Tutu who was completing his visit to Mauritius at the weekend."He (President Mugabe) was a leader I was so proud of. It's just like a nightmare for me now, and I am waiting to be pulled out of it and told that's not the same Mugabe who had led the movement to liberate his nation, and who had supported liberation movements of other countries," he further said.

He expressed his sympathy with the Zimbabwean people, while calling on South Africa "to do something for the Zimbabweans who are suffering as never before."


Source: http://ngrguardiannews.com/, quoted at http://www.afrika.no/Detailed/13764.html

As if that is not enough, a couple of months ago the same Archbishop Tutu, bless that man, was the only South African high-profile personality to speak out against the flagrant abuse of human-rights by the Botswana government against the last remaining Bushmen peoples of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

In a cosy deal between the Botswana government and the De Beers corporation, the Bushmen, who have been living in Southern Africa for more than 20 000 years, was forcibly removed from their ancestral homes to make way for diamond exploration operations. After some of them started protesting and refusing to move, their water holes were shut up, they were banned from hunting and gathering food like they have been doing for thousands of years, and many were beaten up, tortured and some were killed, also by repressive Botswana police force, with the full knowledge of De Beers comapny officials.

In a landmark legal ruling, with major assistance from the folks at www.survival-international.org, the Bushmen were allowed to return to their land, but they still face police brutality and repressive violation of their fundamental rights as human beings and as indigenous people with legitimate claims to their ancestral land.

This is unfortunately the darker side of Africa, and something that is never talked about, the repression and eradication of the indigenous Southern African San peoples (or Bushmen) by migratory black African tribes or Bantu-speaking peoples as they are referred to by anthropologists. And still today this process continues, social engineering to get rid of those they deem unworthy of sharing the land and it's resources.

In South Africa of today we see it with the continual marginalisation of South Africa's mixed-race or 'coloured' population. After the change from the apartheid regime to the ANC-led regime, only black people claim the moral authority as being previously disadvantaged. Government social programs are aimed at black people only while the Western Cape, where the last remnants of the mixed-race peoples struggle to survive, are becoming the bone of contention with black ANC councillors making openly racist remarks in public and trying all sorts of manipulative techniques to wrest power from the Democratic Alliance-led provincial government bodies.

 The ANC-led regime that currently governs the country is beset with incompetence, corruption and poor service delivery. Nowhere in the country is anyone ever assured of a stable and secure water and/or electricity supply. It mainly stems from the fact that with the enforced political agendas of the new regime, previous skilled and knowledgeable workers, who knew how to run, maintain and troubleshoot critical processes, were replaced by inexperienced blacks in a very unco-ordinated and disastrous affirmitive action campaign. Now all major services have completely collapsed, in some instances they had to rehire the white workers skilled and knowledgeable to run and maintain critical power systems (Koeberg nuclear plant), that shut down and dumped most of the country in the dark because of a bolt or screw in a critical joint that was not properly inspected and serviced.

The fact of the matter is, no one has the guts to stand up and say the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

After Mandela came back from China in 1999, and being asked about Tibet, he said that it is not for South Africa to prescribe to China their 'internal' policies. Does that not sound very much like the argument about Zimbabwe's 'sovereignity' which the Archbishop so clearly see as a lame excuse.

Did not Mbeki (South African president) just recently entertain Chinese president Wu Jintao, and what agreements and deals were struck there? Is not the Chinese investing in major hydro-electric scheme in Mozambique? Why is Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma so insistent on using Marxist rhetoric to justify their undemocratic and repressive tactics?

There seem to be an arrogant hubris behind these people's defiance of international norms and values, which make one wonders where they get their ideological inspiration from and what forms the basis for their insistence on disastrous courses of action. Marxism as an ideology and it's practical application has failed disastrously in the former Soviet countries, only in Africa will some poor, misguided fool latch onto it and trick the millions of illiterate and uneducated poor into believing in their utopian visions. These uneducated masses then rush to the polls by the millions and elect people who not only cannot communicate properly, but turns whatever department they run into a disaster. In most cases huge amounts of funds are mismanaged, embezzled, stolen and wasted, while the same poor, ignorant masses who voted them into power, insists on voting for them again.

When those responsible are brought to justice and asked to account for their incompetence or poor performance, the same old hallowed cliche rears it's head: the legacy of apartheid and that it will take a generation or three to redress the imbalances of the past.

It is now thirteen years since the first democratic elections, the world has watched South Africa during the honeymoon days, and after a while one cannot help but wonder why everything is going from bad to worse.

Instead of coming up with ways to be productive and innovate new things and produce new products, the ANC leadership insists on taking over existing resources, and through incomepetence, corruption and mismanagement, to run it into the ground, and then turning around and blaming 'the legacies of apartheid' or 'the imperialists' (Mugabe in Zimbabwe) or the 'neo-colonialists' (ex-Pres. Sam Nujoma of Namibia).

That story is wearing a bit thin and the world is simply gonna turn it's back on South Africa and it's incompetent, yet arrogant, regime and pretty soon we will have Communist China and Iran and Syria, whom Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma (South African minster of foerign affairs) insists must have access to nuclear technology, as our main trade partners, with all of their repressive and totalitarian behaviour as part of the trade deal.

In that way the ANC-led regime can get rid of the white European colonialists, seize their land and property, like they see Mugabe has already done, and finish their genocide of the descendants of the San (Bushmen) indigenous people, who are the rightful and legitimate inhabitants to the lands of Southern Africa.