South Africa

When you're on fire you're on fire :

With the municipal elections safely out of the way, our political life is subsiding back to normal. An eternally grateful Mr Mbeki has been released from his disagreeable four weeks of country-arrest, and is back striding the world stage on our behalf. SABC news department loyalists no longer have to traipse around the lower end of the democratic compass recording their master’s every piety for reproduction in inspiring quarter-hour instalments each evening at seven. But for Eskom, these would have been electrifying as well.

Relieved of the exigencies of the municipal hustings, members of the central executive of the African National Congress are now able to get back to more crucial matters. And none more crucial than deciding who from among ANC ranks is going to be elected to lead the party’s new and imaginative campaign of moral degeneration.

This extraordinary volte-face has become necessary by force of circumstance. The mandarins of the ANC are acknowledging that, from among their ranks, only someone of Jacob Zuma’s singular qualities could ever have been charged with the regeneration and reinforcement of a nation’s moral texture. There was good reason for appointing him to flush out and purify the national soul. He was the only one among the ranks of the ruling party -- or their hangers-on -- of the requisite ethical fortitude. He was top of the heap, the very acme of probity and restraint. Together with his disciples in the ANC Youth League, Jacob Zuma jealously occupied South Africa’s moral uplands. Sadly, with his attentions now diverted by other and graver personal issues, he has left both his political brothers and a nation bereft. We now have only one way to go: back down into the sewers. If the ANC Youth League have their way we won’t even have a bitch to burn on the way....

 

Brilliant! Be sure to go read the rest for yourself...

I know I usually put things like this in the News Swing section but I think Matshikiza's well written piece deserves prominence because it touches on a number of issues I feel very strongly about. For those of you who don't subscribe to the M&G (shame on you!) here's a taste of a well argued Opinion piece that had me nodding in agreement as I read it :

As we hurtle towards municipal elections in South Africa in a matter of weeks, the escalating campaign by various parties, including the ruling African National Congress and the official Democratic Alliance opposition (not to mention that dark horse known as the Freedom Front), to make people sit up and take notice seems to demonstrate a fear that apathy has taken hold of our populace a mere decade after the universal franchise was finally won in the wake of a long and bitter struggle.

No big surprises here. The country’s politicians should have long been aware of the phenomenon in neighbouring countries, such as Zimbabwe, where potential voters in both rural and urban areas openly asked why they should bother to vote after the first national elections in 1980 because the ruling Zanu party was bound to come back into power anyway and nothing much had changed. Things were better under Ian Smith, and his proclaimed “Thousand Years of White Rule” policy the formerly disposessed black poor were heard to grumble.

South Africa’s municipalities, such as they are, appear to be run by faceless individuals, shuffled around by the central committees of the various parties according to their proven loyalty to the leader. Potential leaders with real, individualistic fire are rapidly sidelined.

No, no, this state of apathy should come as no surprise. But, it is not a problem that is confined to South Africa and Zimbabwe. Democratic Centralism, as it used to be known in the good old days of Soviet Communism, has now been openly embraced, with very few exceptions, across what used to be known as the Free World...

Once again Mondli Makhanya delivers with a great article about the lead-up to the current rift between the Prez. and Jay-Z. Very interesting reading and I strongly suggest you take a look for yourself, a taste :

Mbeki had used the deputy president’s office to build his profile and prove his fitness to govern, but Zuma felt he was being deprived of the means to climb to higher office.This was the seed that would germinate into the bitterness that governs the man who will appear in the Durban High Court next week. That bitterness would also feed a mood of dissent across the nation.

 

Any attempt at fully understanding the current crisis facing the ANC and the country has to take cognisance of the fact that Zuma has been on a fight-back campaign since the day he arrived in Pretoria. He believed then that he was not welcome at the Union Buildings, and went about making sure that he would defy all odds and climb to the top tier...

 

After a bit of a drought in good material since his book appeared, the master (Tom Eaton, duh!) has returned to form. Here's part of his latest article to give you a taste :  

Those who watch Top Billing are not, as a rule, exposed to disturbing concepts like multi-lingualism. Indeed, generations of selective breeding and some ferociously opportunist and cheekily genocidal shenanigans by Great Granddaddy on the Reef in the 1880s have combined to form a protective cocoon around them, keeping at bay the horror of the middle-class world, with its vacuum cleaners and swimming-pool filters and universities, and all the other repulsive things that poor people get up to.

Of course, the extremely rich do not have time to watch Top Billing, being too busy having Moët enemas while performing carnal sleight of hand on senior government officials; and so it was only the very rich, the desperately gauche and the maniacally revolutionary (who watch the programme to reinvigorate flagging esprit de corps while making nail-bombs in their basements) who witnessed first-hand some weeks ago the use of our 12th official language: East Rand New Money.

The property developer and his wife — known, in ERNM, as his wahf — had erected on the shores of a large lake their own little patch of heaven. That their patch of heaven seemed to have been stolen intact from a Tuscan-themed Las Vegas indoor putt-putt course didn’t bother them a bit. Even the “porm trees”, sad drooping little Levantine exiles transplanted into the muddy soil of a strange continent, conspired to heighten the overwhelming kitsch. They were real, but they may as well have been plastic...

 

It only gets better, definitely go read the rest for yourself!

Nice couple of articles in the M&G this week. First off there's John Matshikiza with an excellent piece about the funeral of Brett Kebble :

First off is the muted manner in which his gruesome demise has been treated by both the eminent and the rank and file of our brave new society. Sure, there was a big funeral at the cathedral in Cape Town where superstars and hangers-on of the liberation movement filed in, looking pious but basically putting on a good front for the television cameras. The entire African National Congress Youth League had their heads fashionably shaved so that they could look snappy carrying out the coffin. It was one of those classic moments of “please do not adjust your television set, the problem is actually reality itself”....

Anyway, Kebble’s funeral was yet another of those post-apartheid party events when you were not sure whether it was supposed to feel like a wedding, a funeral, or someone’s 21st birthday party. You were just supposed to be there, or be square. Any suggestion that there was something to mourn (like the violent and unexplained passing of someone you cared about) was rapidly buried behind the need to be out there looking good. The shaven head had nothing to do with the lately deceased in his sarcophagus. It had everything to do with how your shoes matched the tucks in your Italian suit, and the squeak of the leather seats as you sank your body into your high-end 4x4, wrapped the shades around your head, and figured out how to slip out of the funeral cortege once the basics had been taken care of...

 

Definitely checkout the rest of the article, Matshikiza is a solid writer who always produces the goods without overreaching. Article of the week for me though goes to Rapule Tabane and Vicki Robinson with their excellent piece on how the Prez. intends to crush pretender to the throne Jay-Z :  

African National Congress president Thabo Mbeki believes his deputy, Jacob Zuma, will exhaust himself politically before the crucial 2007 ANC congress, and plans to weaken him by constantly beating an anti-corruption drum.

Senior party sources said this was the core of Mbeki’s counter-strategy in the vicious battle over the presidential succession. Almost every speech Mbeki now delivers highlights corruption as a cancer that could destroy the ruling party. His speeches and columns on the ANC website, ANC Today, regularly allude to the principled and moral leadership provided by past ANC leaders who were not interested in material gain.

Mbeki must have taken comfort from last week’s Research Service survey, which found that 60% of South Africans from all walks of life back his handling of the Zuma affair. The litmus test of his leadership, however, will come from within the party, more specifically from the branches, which ultimately elect the party president.

 

Many have been wondering why the Prez. has kept silent for so long and I think this article hits the nail on the head! Mbeki doesn't need to enter a shouting match with Zuma, he knows time is on his side (as well as most of South Africa) all he needs to do is wear Zuma down a little at a time. There's not going to be a big showdown in this match - he's counting on Zuma just fading from the scene. If there's one thing Mbeki does well its playing the political game, Jay-Z is way out of his depth....

Interesting new article by Richard Calland in the M&G. Covering a lot of ground Calland gives good perspective about where we are now both socially and politically using interesting examples and analyses. A notable extract :

"The tribute to Brett Kebble by Khanyo Gqulu last week (“Our north, our south, our east and west”) would have been the most delicious piece of satire had it not been offered in such apparently deadly earnest. It - along with the rest of the sickly tributes to Kebble over the past 10 days - illustrates at least two things about the new South Africa.

Firstly, that there is more than one elite-building project going on. Secondly, that the interplay between money and politics has reached epidemic proportions. There are different and self-evidently competing sites of capital accumulation and acquisition. Kebble won the affection of a group of wannabe millionaires because he was willing to help extend the game beyond the usual suspects - the Patrice Motsepe and Mzi Khumalos of this brave new world.

What is fascinating is how quickly a new elite - forged in the afterglow of Nelson Mandela’s national reconciliation project and further encouraged by President Thabo Mbeki’s readiness to support the emergence of a small but powerful group of black captains of industry - rapidly becomes a political and economic establishment (an “elite compact” to use the old-fashioned Marxist jargon).

The Kebble-sponsored band of comrades challenges this establishment, with profound political repercussions. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but to paint Kebble as some sort of benevolent patrician is as unconvincing as the desire of some people to portray Jacob Zuma as a great socialist hero...."

 

Fascinating angle which suggests a lot more is happening behind the scenes than the public realises, especially in the succession debate/Zuma Affair. Be sure to read the entire article yourself, its well worth it.  

A new bible has just been released and it goes by the name of "Twelve Rows Back". Go and get your own copy NOW!

He walked amoung us spreading the Word - and it was good....

"The urge of people in the developing world to heap scorn and spleen upon those in the developed is a curious one. In fact, to come across a young man living in a house made of goat dysentery, who spends his days in quivering prayer to a vengeful god (whose divine bipolar disorder ordains everything from thunderstorms to sexually transmitted diseases) and his nights in athletic and arbitrary fornication with any carbon-based, land-dwelling creature he can get his tattooed little hands on, one might be tempted to suggest that the developing world’s insistence that the developed is preoccupied with power, sex and righteousness is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

 

Of course, one wouldn’t want to say this within earshot, since, given his vibrant and earthy connection with his native spirituality, he’d almost certainly assume that you’d heard the pot speaking, perhaps in a clear if brassy voice, and developing-world jurisprudence would be enlisted along with a good length of strong rope and a heap of kindling. It can never be a good thing when one’s trial on charges of witchcraft is halted briefly as the judge recounts with glee how he was winged just the week before by spiteful djinn disguised as an AK-47. And besides, one doesn’t want to be responsible for the inevitable pre-emptive burning of the neighbour’s pretty daughter, who is too pretty for her own good and who has been, you know, looking at decent citizens with those filthy pretty dark eyes of hers. Goddamn witch. Light-of-my-eye, put Junior on your shoulders so he can watch her sizzle."

 

Read it again.....pure genius...

Now you can move on to reading the rest.

Very interesting article by Mondli Makhanya in the latest Sunday Times dealing with the "split" in the ANC over Jay-Z. The following paragraphs really caught my eye - 

"In the absence of visible leadership from Mbeki, ANC alliance structures looked for a substitute leader they could relate to. In Jacob Zuma they found a willing and enthusiastic champion. They found in him the comforting father who would listen to their frustrations and share perspectives on the direction of party and republic. When the nation was going through a period of depression over the President’s views on HIV/Aids, Zuma seemed the sensible man, who said all the right things and appeared at all the right places. When Mbeki would absent-mindedly clap along to struggle tunes at party gatherings, Zuma would grab the microphone and lead the masses in song. And when Mbeki was seen on television arriving at foreign locales or addressing high-powered conferences, Zuma seemed to be present on the ground. He came to be loved and respected.

 

So when it emerged that Zuma had sold his soul to French arms dealers and other influence-pedlars, he was always going to be the recipient of great sympathy. And when his supporters started speaking darkly about conspiracies, they found fertile ground.

 

The distant President’s cold and sometimes contemptuous relationship with many in the upper echelons of the ANC and its alliance partners drove senior members of the coalition into Zuma’s hands."

 

Goes a long way in explaining a lot of things about the current Jay-Z debacle...In addition, Makhanya discusses the ugly side of the rise of populism and its danger to our country -

"Should the Zuma camp achieve any measure of success, South Africa’s ruling party will lose much of the sophistication it has developed over the decades. We will see a regression to raw politics — the kind of politics that says it is okay to take short cuts with the law, and which does not respect order.One just has to look at the positions articulated by the Zuma camp during the course of the battle. This camp has, in the words of an ANC activist, “shown us the worst that this country can be.

 

It has told us that corruption is fine as long as it is practised by someone of good political standing, and of sympathetic ideology. The attacks on the judiciary and law enforcement agencies give us a glimpse of how state institutions would be regarded and treated should this camp gain ascendancy."

Great article, definitely worth a read... 

I've been a bit disappointed by the last few weeks Lemmer, but today he delivered the goods. Have a taste :

"Anyone who thinks the African National Congress Youth League is a politburo of dour, humourless Marxists clearly hasn’t ever visited the “lifestyle” link on its website, where the young lions hawk distinctly bourgeois accessories to the masses. This week the cadres of liberation are offering a visit to “Cloud Nine Floating and Massage Spa” (storming the barricades of poverty can raise hell with one’s lower back and cuticles), and Lemmer was fascinated to learn more about revolutionary mediation. “A natural high is normally described as being on cloud nine, something our there out of the ordinary [sic], hardly ever achieved under ordinary circumstances.” Does this imply that an unnatural high is something everyday and easily achievable? Deur die blare met ’n bietjie boom?"

 

Are these guys for real??