South Africa "Freedom Day" -- not much to celebrate

Yesterday, black South Africans celebrated the 25th anniversary of "Freedom Day", the day in 1994 when they were allowed to cast ballots in the country's first "one person one vote" election. President Cyril Ramaphosa said, "On this day 25 years ago, we founded a new country defined by the principles of equality, unity, non-racialism and non-sexism. Despite the passage of time, we remember vividly...the exhilaration of seeing nearly 20 million South Africans of all races waiting patiently at polling stations around the country to cast their ballots."

Walt was there at the time -- based in Ha-ha-harare, the fun capital of Zimbabwe -- and remembers opening a book (read: started taking bets) on how long it would take for the most prosperous nation in Africa to regress to levels of poverty and inequality like those of Zimbabwe, the Congo, Sudan and other shithole states of the Dark Continent.

It didn't take that long. Today, widespread poverty and corruption mean that, 25 years after the end of apartheid, many South Africans are still not free. In yesterday's speech, President Ramaphosa praised the work of South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, but said that the country could not be free "when so many live without enough food, without proper shelter, without access to quality health care, without a means to earn a living."

South Africa's black majority were promised that once they were "empowered", they would have white cars, white houses and white women. Pictured above is what they got.

Yesterday, President Ramaphosa (who replaced Jacob Zuma, President No. 3, who was forced out over a string of corruption scandals and a penchant for polygamy) said, "As we celebrate 25 years of democracy, we need to focus all our attention and efforts on ensuring that all South Africans can equally experience the economic and social benefits of freedom."

The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that any progress made to fulfill the promises made to the country's blacks has been undone in just five short years. Today, South Africa is one of the most consistently unequal countries in the world. More than half the population lives in poverty, while a staggering 27% of people are unemployed. And that's according to the government's statistics, which are believed to be wildly over-optimistic.

Since 2011, three million more South Africans have been pushed below the poverty line, according to a study by the national data agency, Statistics South Africa, released this week. More than 30.4 million South Africans (55.5% of the population) live on less than 992 rand (about $75) per person per month.

Those figures, collected in 2015, are actually more optimistic than numbers from 2006, when two-thirds of South Africans were living in poverty. But it captures the painful one-step-forward, two-steps-backwards dance the country has been engaged in over the last decade trying to improve the lives of its population. In 2006, 28.4% of the country was found to be living in extreme poverty. That number had only inched downwards to 25.2% by 2015.

Those numbers aren't likely to improve. In the last year alone, South Africa has entered recession and seen its sovereign debt rating adjusted to junk status, making life harder for everyone, especially the poor. The national power supplier, Eskom, is effectively bankrupt. With massive power outages threatened, those who can afford to are rushing to buy generators and storage batteries. The "povo" (= truly poor) are buying or making candles.

Because of the seizure of productive white farms (and the murder of the white farmers, detailed previously on WWW), millions of South Africans are now facing "food insecurity" -- shortages of food, hunger, even the prospect of starvation -- the crisis which now besets Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and other black-run states to the north. This in a country which was once a net exporter of foodstuffs.

The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that the majority of its citizens live in grinding poverty. The full effect of the 2008 global financial crisis, initially hidden by the euphoria and capital injection of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, is now being felt. The country has also fallen victim to the sluggish growth seen by other commodities-driven economies, unable to improve on 3.3% growth in 2011, the highest GDP has peaked since the financial crisis.

The real problem, though, is South Africa’s inability to implement its own policies. In other words, the black government is incapable of managing the economy or the country. In 2012, the country launched a "National Development Plan" with much pomp and an explanatory animated video showing how much better life would be once they got organized. (18 years after the end of apartheid, they couldn't blame the whities any more.) But a lack of political will and simple competence have left the plan adrift. By almost all measures, South Africa is going to miss the goals -- reduction of poverty from 39% in 2009 to 0%, and the complete eliminate of hunger, by 2030 -- it set for itself in the plan.

Even the commission tasked with seeing the plan through is frustrated by the lack of government support to do so, despite having an office a few doors down from the president. The group's deputy commissioner told the meeja recently, "We have a plan, we like it very much, we take it to parliament, the whole world praises it... And we are the ones that don't implement it." Nothing more need be said. Mother Africa Wins Again.

Good news from South Africa, thanks to President Trump

It's very rare that there's any good news out of Africa, but Walt does have some to pass on, and it appears to be due to the intervention of President Donald J. Trump. (Eat your hearts out, gliberals.)

Only six (6) days after POTUS warned the government of South Africa that he had instructed the Secretary of State "to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and the large scale killing of farmers", the SA government has withdrawn its white farmland redistribution (read: land grab) bill, passed by its parliament in 2016, for "further consideration".

The fact that land seized from the Boers (= "farmers", in Afrikaans) would almost certainly have been handed over to friends of the ruling African National Congress, who would have let it go back to bush, just as happened in neighbouring Zimbabwe (see "What happens when black Africans turf out white farmers", WWW 24/8/18 - includes two videos), probably had something to do with the decision as well, but for now Walt will give credit not just to President Trump but to the new South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who seems to have a degree of sense uncommon to the Big Men of Africa.

Further reading: "Land reform in South Africa has been slow and inept", The Economist, 23/8/18.

South Africans won't slaughter white farmers... at least not right now

"White cars, white houses, white women!" That's what black African terrorists were told they get, once they had wrested independence from the colonialists and white settlers. That's what they were fighting for. Not democracy but white cars, white houses and white women!

On 24 October 1964 Britain granted independence to Northern Rhodesia, which was promptly renamed Zambia. One of the first things the new black government of the Marxist Kenneth Kaunda did was to expel the mostly white commercial farmers, so their farms could be "indigenized" -- turned over to his relatives and cronies. The new farmers knew nothing about commercial farming (or even subsistence farming, in some cases) and to no-one's surprise the fertile land went back to bush. Zambia went from being an exporter of food to a net importer.

One of the countries Zambia imported food from was Rhodesia, which was run by white settlers. Rhodesia was the second-most prosperous country in sub-Saharan Africa, after South Africa, which was also run by, errr, white volk. The perfidious Brits sold out their Rhodesian kith and kin in 1980, handing the country over to Comrade Robert Mugabe and his merry band of kleptomaniacs. It took them until 2000 to seize the famously productive white farms, which were handed over to Mugabe's family and friends.

I was there, and on doctor's advice left, just in the nick of time. The botched and often violent redistribution (read: theft) of land left many farms in ruins, and the drop in production triggered an economic crisis that still haunts the country. Uncle Bob's cronies and comrades not only were ignorant of large-scale farming, but had no interest in it. They treated their farms as good places for a Sunday braai, nothing more, and just as in Zambia, the land went out of production and Zimbabwe was plunged into permanent food insecurity.

The other country Zambia, and later Zimbabwe import food from, even today, is South Africa. That country had been independent for a century or so, but didn't come under the control of black Africans until 1994, when the whites saw the black writing on the wall and made a deal with the Nelson Mandela-led African National Congress under which there was to be no wholesale seizure of farms or other sectors of the economy. I was there for that too, and remember a friend warning me "Don't be fooled. In another ten years things will be just like up north." He was wrong, but only about the timeline.

When apartheid ended in 1994, white farmers -- the word in Afrikaans is "boers" -- owned about 85% of South Africa's better farmland. A 2017 government audit found the percentage had fallen to 72%. That is 72% too much, according to Julius Malema, the avowed Marxist leader of the opposition in the country's parliament. This week he introduced a motion, which passed almost unanimously, calling for the amendment of South Africa's constitution to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation... as was done in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Honourable Mr Malema has a long-standing commitment to taking land (or houses or cars, etc) without compensation. In 2016 he told his supporters he was "not calling for the slaughter of white people -- at least for now." The policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa's platform after he took over from the incredibly corrupt Jacob Zuma in February.

In introducing the motion, Mr Malema called white farmers "criminals", and said "the time for reconciliation is now over. Now is the time for justice!" Justice for white South African farmers will look something like this.

"We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land," said the Honourable Mr Malema. The ruling ANC's rural affairs minister "There is no doubt about it, land shall be expropriated without compensation."

One small point that neither speaker addressed was the likely effect on South Africa's agricultural output. Ernst Roets, the deputy chief executive of civil rights group Afriforum, said the motion was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid. "This motion is based on a distorted image of the past," he explained. "The term 'expropriation without compensation' is a form of semantic fraud. It is nothing more than racist theft."

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." Leaving aside the grammatical lapse (for which we'll forgive Mr Groenewald since his first language is Afrikaans), he is wrong only in his use of the word "unforeseen". It is easy to foresee that this will all end badly, just as it has in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

A classic paradigm of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting to get a different result. By that definition, the decision taken by South Africa's parliament last week is indeed insane.

Further reading:
"South Africa's Farmers Look North for Opportunities", Ventures Africa, 20/11/12. And [Walt adds] where might "north" be? Answer: Zambia, Zimbabwe and other places which chased out the "white settlers" and are now begging them to come back!
"Trump is Petitioned for White Farmers From South Africa to Come to U.S. As Refugees", Absolute Truth from the Word of God, 2/3/18. Includes link to petition which you can (and should!) sign.