South Africa is still being run the same way it was run in 1652, with the Dutch East India Company arrived and set up a corporate fiefdom. Today’s modern corporate capitalism has enslaved its citizens and locked ordinary South Africans into a government sponsored embrace in which consumers are treated as nothing more than cash cows, to be milked each and every day.
The recent Eskom scandal in which an aggressive expansion programme that has already wasted billions of rands on an unproven and inherently flawed design for a PBMR nuclear reactor, now demands a 25% pa increase for the next five years is just the tip of the iceberg.
In every sector one sees the result of the ANC experiment with “Socialism of the Few” and Cosatu’s “An injury to one is an injury to some,” yet another deception while the gap between the rich and poor is at its greatest in half-a-century.
The only people benefiting from the charade are the elite party insiders who believe they are entitled to the wealth of the country while workers have faced the greatest roll-back in workers rights in a decade.
The ANC and NNP alliance has a lot in common with Dutch East India Company and the original board of 17. Only this time it is not Van Riebeeck and Simon van De Stel but the Trevor Manual’s and Boetie van Zyl’s who rule the roost. Maria de Quellerie even has her alterego in Maria Ramos who, thanks to Manual, heads a number of banking institutions which in turn run the country as corruption knows no bounds.
Democracy every five years is a practical joke. We have a democratic system in name only. Whatever happened to People’s Power? As for South Africa’s claim to the rule of law, yet another lie rolled out by those who would like to us to pay no attention to the reality — we have rule by jurists in the absence of a jury as the rule of law turns into the law of rules.
Yes, we might have all the modcons like television and a Bill of Rights which results in constitutionalism, but when it comes to labour issues and economic rights, one might as well be a peasant in a third world country. The Zuma administration has brought with it an end to the the progressive left and the civil rights tradition, there is nothing left in the party except tribalism and the stench of monarchy is everywhere.
Is this the end of South African exceptionalism? Are we now just a petty bantustan? Well yes, the same politics which created the bantustans of the apartheid era, have prevailed. We have a president who is unable to make any coherent policy without falling prey to factionalism and party infighting. If the intrigues of the Mbeki administration had any lessons for South Africa, it was because they were invariably about South Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world, our identity as a nation. The Zuma administration has no identity, it is no more forward looking than Polakwane and sees enemies behind every tree as our politics is driven by paternalism and its flipside, parochialism.
When the only thing keeping Zuma in power is the size of his family, we should all be worried. This is the kind of politics which held Italy together for centuries and which resulting in fascism and the mafia. Ideology Human rights not blood ties and family affiliations should bind us together, instead Zuma has brought with him, his own peculiar version of Zulu nationalism and crass politicking. One minute he is a charismatic Christian, next minute a raving traditionalist. As we speak, the Zulu king is demanding that his poster be displayed at our international airports for 2010. It will not be long before the royalists kick the last of the remaining democrats out of the House of Assembly.