November 18, 2013
Udo Froese
Mozambique’s founding president, Samora Moises Machel, was clear about his country and Africa’s future – political freedom does not mean free from economic slavery. Machel used the cry-of-resistance, “A Luta Continua!”, to emphasise the continuous nature of the struggle Africa is engaged in.
And indeed, it is a struggle as the new South Africa simply was not allowed to start on a clean slate. The country still has to grapple with the cruel oppressive past. In South Africa and Namibia, certain pockets of the population hold sway over public debate. For a while now, South Africa’s media have been showing demonstrations by a host of trade unions and township dwellers. Those, living in the townships fear a new surge of “xenophobia” that could even lead to a “North African-style Arab Spring” ending in an imperialist “regime change”.
Shops and homes of Somalis, Pakistanis, Mozambicans and Zimbabweans in the black living areas are being looted, burnt down and their owners killed. Television footage from as recent as May 2008 tells the gruesome story of people, so-called foreigners, being murdered through the imported method of neck-lacing under apartheid South Africa.
Political nonentities, hooligan armchair academic analysts, businessmen and banksters regurgitate the threat of a “North African-style Arab Spring” followed by a “regime change” to bring the ruling ANC, its president and its government down. Research has shown people do not always protest against the absence of service delivery. There are other reasons too. Restlessness seems to be ignited by a Third Force, exploiting the socio-economic woes.
These planned strategies are further intensified by demarcations of existing areas, splitting them up and re-aligning them with other more, or less densely populated areas, which do not have a record of supporting the ANC. Hidden agendas of divide and rule are a recipe for unrest. People fight back through protests.
Add to this unemployment and structured poverty with masses of people lingering through the days of their lives without any hope of finding a job. It is a powder keg in the making. An old but wise saying describes it well: “An idle mind is the devil’s playground,” as hope and self-esteem are being eroded.
The reasons are obvious. First, it is not and was never ANC policy to create a chaotic democracy that relies on dependence, eventually exploding into anarchy.
Protests and service delivery marches, looting and “xenophobia” have never been part of ANC policies, nor of the movement’s making. Those are the agendas of the warlords in the shadows, the hostile owners of the economy, hailing themselves as “captains of industry”.
The African National Congress used mass rallies until 1994 to make their indigenous African base understand the movement, its goals and its plans for the future of the country. Those included continuous efforts to work hard and take charge of one’s own life, of the land and of the economy.
At the same time the baggage of South Africa’s colonial-apartheid past, including its harshly oligopolistic economy, keep the majority of the population shackled in abject poverty. One example is the current Demarcation Board of South Africa and its top structures.
Others are the “Sunset Clauses”, drawn up jointly by the last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, and the late, former head of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Joe Slovo. The “Sunset Clauses” will most certainly come to their legal end before next year’s elections and will find their way into the social media in order to allow the general public an insight into those clauses before they will be dissolved.
Another bone of contention is South Africa’s judiciary. It is still held in a vice-like grip by colonial-apartheid judges, their networks and their understanding of their laws. It is a powerful lobby.
The foreign funded and owned “civil society” and its influence on the day-to-day running of this country needs to be addressed too. One cannot expect the former racist rulers to demarcate the country correctly. And, the former rulers are not only white. Former Bantustan administrators were trained and guided in a certain way, which would fit into the grand apartheid plan. Therefore, they are indeed unfit to demarcate South Africa and should never have been tasked with such responsibilities.
It would be advisable that the Demarcation Board should be made to resign forthwith and hand over to a fully trained, professional team without any criminal historical background of grand apartheid and other such prejudices, if the ANC does not want to be taken by a nasty surprise. A senior member of the ANC explained to this writer, “This strategy of demarcating South Africa could eventually leave the ruling ANC without much of a voters’ base.
“It would be whittled away slowly, but surely, until some form of political opposition would have smuggled the power away from the indigenous African majority. Their planned date of transfer of power seems focused on 2019, as the Democratic Alliance (DA) seems hard at work towards the take-over of the Union Buildings in Pretoria.”
The above also demonstrates how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) under Archbishop Desmond Tutu fitted into the grand apartheid plan.
It almost seemed to be set up to retain the power of the exclusive and secret Boer Brotherhood, the Afrikaaner Broederbond, and its ownership of the economy. Together with Israel and the imperialist West’s overt and covert support, they drove colonial-apartheid.
But, why would this still be allowed to happen 20 years into democracy?
This needs to be urgently corrected to prevent racist right-wing structures to destablise the country and collapse the rand currency.
And so the struggle continues.
* Udo W Froese is a political and socio-economic analyst and columnist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His Twitter handle is @theotherafrika, and you can follow his blog at theotherafrika.wordpress.com
Labels: ANC, THIRD FORCE
posted by MrK @ 12:11 AM
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