JACOB ZUMA AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZANC.

TOPIC: JACOB ZUMA AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZANC.

“Thinkers prepare a revolution; bandits carry it out.” Marios Azuela, the Mexican author of The Underdogs.

Is Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party of Julius Malema correct to characterize the ANC led by president Jacob Zuma as Zuma ANC (ZANC)? Is this a mere form of petulant insult? Is it a political gimmick? Or is it an accurate description of the fundamentally changed heart, soul and essence of the ANC under Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung?

Is Jacob Zuma’s impact on the ANC so profound and pervasive that he can be said to have changed the entire ANC in his own image?

Not since its founding in 1912, until Zuma’s rise to lead it, had the ANC been conflated so much with its leader, the way ZANC is today. There was never talk of MANC under the much-criticized Dr. James Moroka, or the much-beloved Nelson Mandela, nor under the controversial ANC presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Throughout its decades in exile, there was never a reference to TANC under the much-celebrated presidency of OR Tambo. Even at the height of its ideologically messy divorce from the ANC in the mid- to late 1950s, when it was throwing every available political kitchen sink at the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) spoke about “the Communist-infiltrated” and “Charterist” ANC, but never about Luthuli ANC (LANC) of the 1950s.

So why is the name ZANC catching so much traction and gaining such a wide currency in our ever-expanding political lexicon, especially among SA’s black youth?

In his very influential classic, The State and Revolution, the Russian communist revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, Vladimir Lenin, made an interesting comment about the origin of the name Bolshevik. He wrote about “…a meaningless and ugly term as ‘Bolshevik'”, which he believed “…expresses absolutely nothing other than the purely accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we were in a majority…” (Penguin Books, 1992, page 73).

Similarly, other than the fact that, accidentally or not, the Zuma supporters, Zumaphiles, Zuma sycophants and Zuma fanatics were in the clear majority at the ANC Mangaung conference of December 2012, the term Zuma ANC (ZANC) “…expresses absolutely nothing…” In fact, if truth be told, the name ZANC, like the name Bolshevik, is “a meaningless and ugly term”, no doubt full of pejorative intent on the part of those who threw and are throwing these names around.

In relation to ZANC, such usage of “the meaningless and ugly” term has the unintended and unhelpful effect of reducing all the historical and contemporary problems of the ANC to one man, and one man only – Jacob Zuma. It is political reductionism of the worst order, because it presupposes, wrongly, that if only you remove Zuma from leading SA and the ANC, all our accumulated national problems would just evaporate away like dew before a hot morning sun. Just in terms of a logical argument, this obviously cannot be the case.

But then, if we swallowed this Leninist line of reasoning, we would be compelled to recall that following the historic March 1946 Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtail” speech of former UK prime minister and War-time hero, Winston Churchill, and especially in light of the very intellectually impactful 1947 essay of the influential US diplomat and Sovietologist, George F. Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, the name Bolsheviks assumed a totally different meaning, far from denoting just a mere, “accidental” numerical superiority “at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903”, as Lenin put it. It began to embody a dire and wholly threatening, expansionist political ideology of Soviet Communism and Soviet power. (See George F Kennan, Expanded Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1984). According to this line of reasoning by Churchill and Kennan, which was initially forcefully rejected by the American public, Lenin had set a train of events in motion that imperiled the freedoms and democratic rights of the West.

Likewise, since the expulsion of former ANC Youth League leaders from the ANC, including Julius Malema, especially since the recent official launch of Malema’s EFF at Marikana in October this year, the name ZANC has begun to be impugned with and to assume dire and wholly threatening overtones of a deviant, narrow-minded, ethnic, viral and currently dominant ANC sub-ideology, which, allegedly, has fundamentally departed from the historic ANC’s original mission, values and strategic perspective. In this scheme of things, ZANC currently constitutes an unrecognizable, but dreadful, mutant from the original ANC of John Dube, Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. Accordingly, the salient characteristic of ZANC is that it deliberately seeks to suborn the original ANC and the post-apartheid democratic SA State to the survivalist imperatives of one man and one man only, Jacob Zuma.

In addition, as we ponder the murky origin of the name ZANC, we should bear in mind a very fascinating assertion made by the famous American social scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, about the origin of the name America, as we today commonly refer to the United States of America (USA).

Huntington wrote that:

“…outsiders are likely to perceive people who share something in common as a collective entity before those people do and even if major differences exist among them. Looking at their North American colonies from London, the British saw them as a whole before the colonists did.”

Huntington further quotes John M. Murrin as stating that “…in a word, America was Britain’s idea.” (Huntington, Who Are We? – The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Simon and Schuster, 2004, page 111).

Interestingly, before the arrival of conquering white European explorers and colonialists in South Africa, blacks neither considered themselves “black”, nor referred to each other as “blacks.” It was the colonialists and later the apartheid apostles, who were the carriers of the white supremacist and racist ideologies, who made blacks in South Africa to be aware of their “blackness”, in relative terms, and thus forcing them to recognize themselves as a distinct “common entity” of blacks.

There is no doubt that the name ZANC is EFF’s idea. There is further no doubt that the ANC does not perceive itself as ZANC, nor does it want or like to be perceived as ZANC by “outsiders”, including by EFF. ANC still likes to refer to itself as ANC, pure and simple. This is how it wants to be perceived by others. No surprise there. There is finally no doubt that major differences are still immanent among members of the ANC who were left behind by those who were either expelled from the ANC or departed for EFF. It is also quite possible that, as former ANC and ANCYL members, and now “outsiders” themselves, EFF members may “perceive” that ZANC “…share something in common”, even before the remaining majority ANC members are prepared to publicly acknowledge the new and redefining basis of their existence “as a collective entity” called ZANC, especially when that new something is as odious as corruption.

Features giving rise to such a new “collective entity” called ZANC and to this which ZANC members “…share in common”, from the standpoint of EFF and other ANC critics, evidently, could be anything from the rising tide of state corruption, the now entrenched abuse of state organs to settle political and ideological differences, the rising marginalization and purging of political foes by the ANC’s hegemonic and triumphalist elements, the growth of a personality cult within the ANC (which former SA and ANC president Thabo Mbeki stridently bemoaned in his Open Letter to Jacob Zuma in late 2008), the growing regionalization of the political gravitas of the ANC (including the demonstrable electoral decline in ANC support, since 2008, in all SA provinces other than Kwa-Zulu Natal, a province from where ANC president Jacob Zuma hails), the blind and fanatical support for certain ANC leaders based on ethnic allegiance alone, and the rise and rise of tribalism and tribal politics within ZANC. The rise of tribalism within the SA society has recently been decried by eminent SA public personalities. As a majority party in society, the ANC could not conceivably remain unaffected by such an unfortunate development in our country, if so.

Speaking of tribalism within the ANC of today, the paranoia of those speaking about ZANC may have been fed and fuelled by a passage from the biography on Mac Maharaj, the current SA Presidency and president Jacob Zuma’s spokesman, entitled Shades of Difference – Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, by Padraig O’ Malley.

In it Padraig O’ Malley describes current SA and ANC president Jacob Zuma in this manner:

“Zuma’s immersion in his Zulu heritage, his assiduous attention to be seen as being Zulu, is not happenstance but the cold calculation of a political poker player who, whatever the denouement of his corruption trial, has played his hand with deftness and steeliness of will that has left his political enemies flat-footed.” (O’ Malley, Viking, 2007, page 470).

Many South Africans would readily accept that Jacob Zuma is a masterful political poker player, and political survivalist, of great note. But very few would have thought that this skill extends to his use of “his Zulu heritage” and his “being Zulu.” And many South Africa would conclude that such alleged use of “Zulu heritage” and of “being a Zulu”, not as “happenstance, but as “cold calculation” in ANC internal political games, borders too closely on what may be described, quite uncomfortably, as deliberate mobilization of tribal sentiment and narrow ethno-cultural identity for questionable political gain, which, unsurprisingly, would leave, if true, Jacob Zuma’s internal ANC political enemies “flat-footed”, to borrow Padraig O’ Malley’s own florid expression.

But it is also possible that there could be available and offered a more benign interpretation of what O’ Malley meant by that passage. After all neither Padraig O’ Malley nor Mac Maharaj himself is a recognized authority on “Zulu heritage” or on “being Zulu”. So room does exist that they might have impugned altogether unwarranted motives on what was a normal recourse by Jacob Zuma to his traditional and cultural roots.

But their statement sits side by side with Julius Malema’s oft-repeated accusation that Zuma is “a tribalist.”

To appreciate the full import of what O’ Malley wrote about Jacob Zuma’s “immersion in his Zulu heritage, his assiduous attention to be seen as being Zulu”, not as “happenstance”, one needs to revert to the start of Mac Maharaj’s biography, where O’ Malley describes how he met Maharaj.

Amongst other things, O’ Malley offered this distillation of what he believes was Mac Maharaj’s view about the pre-ZANC politics of the ANC at the time, which can also be a handy summation of what the very essence of ZANC is really all about today.

O’ Malley wrote:

“But in pursuing things in his own way, he (i.e Mac Maharaj) found that in the new South Africa the new ANC had little time for the kind of behavior that served the ANC so well during the struggle.” (Ibid, page 23).

As if not content with this fire-and-brimstone political damnation of the ANC at the time, Mac Maharaj, according to O’ Malley, further indicated that “in the new South Africa, the ANC was quite willing, in the interests of enforcing the hegemony of the party, to rewrite its own history.” (Ibid).

It can therefore not be true that ZANC started at the Mangaung ANC conference of 2012. If Maharaj is to be believed, the lineage of what today is referred to by EFF as ZANC came with the bathwater for the ANC’s power baby on 27 April 1994. Post-1994, several leading lights of EFF, especially on the road to and following the chaotic 2007 ANC Polokwane conference, played a decisive role in ensuring the emergence and blossoming of an ANC trend that directly led to the birth of ZANC. It would be impossible, therefore, for them to completely disown the “monster” that is ZANC today. They are half responsible for ZANC’s birth.

But has the process of the ANC rewriting “its own history” reached its apogee under ZANC? Has ZANC even gone as far as trying to rewrite and re-interpreting key clauses of the historic 1955 Freedom Charter?

There are many today who now believe that the morbid symptoms, which were identified by the prodigiously talented Mac Maharaj, already then a veteran ANC politician in his mid-fifties, have now, to paraphrase George F. Kennan, allowed ANC deficiencies to overwhelm and hobble its intrinsic potential for transformational change in post-apartheid South Africa. If so, this would be the real tragedy of ZANC.

Fundamentally, the ANC’s dilemma, so well and trenchantly articulated by Mac Maharaj in O’ Malley’s biography of him, is the charge sheet being leveled against ZANC by EFF and other opposition parties. It is also that which today constitutes the mortal threat, from within itself, confronted by the ANC of 2013-2014 under the leadership of Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung. In a word, the threat is that, to enforce the hegemony of the party, the ANC seems today willing to rewrite its own history in the most unexpected of ways. For an example, to this day, the ANC cannot bring itself to refer to the tragic August 2012 killings by SA Police Service (SAPS) at Marikana as a massacre, taking rather the legalistic route of awaiting for the outcome of the commission investigating the matter.

To enforce its hegemony over the whole SA society, ZANC is prepared to rewrite not just its own history, but also to rewrite our common, post-apartheid SA history, which is our common patrimony and that which we bequeath to future SA generations.

This perhaps is the real, big trouble with ZANC under Jacob Zuma.

5th Cediablog.

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://cedia.co.za
isaac@cedia.co.za
Cedia Blog: https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
Twitter : Cedia6
Facebook : Cedia Cedia
LinkedIn : Cedia Cedia
Google+ : isaac mogotsi
Cedia Pay-Off Line: Dynamic Thought – Positive Action.
Cedia Directors: Isaac M. Mogotsi – Executive Chairman; Saul S. Pila – Chief Operating Officer.

Not Yet Uhuru: Uhuru Kenyatta, SA Diplomacy and International Legality.

TOPIC: NOT YET UHURU: UHURU KENYATTA, SA DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL LEGALITY.

“It is not yet Uhuru, as long as our people live in shacks.” Letta Mbuli, the legendary SA singer.

INTRODUCTION.

I spent much of 1990 in exile in Nairobi, Kenya.

I found Nairobi an enormously fascinating African city. Like no other city in Africa outside South Africa, Nairobi reminded me of Pretoria, save that it was a black African city, whilst Pretoria was viewed by the apartheid architects as a white European city in Africa. So strong was the juxtapositioning of Nairobi and Pretoria in mind that, upon returning from exile in December 1990, I soon penned a short story, which later the short-lived Johannesburg-based publisher, Justified Press, ran under the title “The Return of the Prodigal Exile.” It remains my only published fictionalized short-story; so powerful was the Kenyan experience on me. I peppered the short story with nuggets from Nairobi’s urban legends like the “matatu” taxis and the rubbish heaps in infamous slums, a walking distance from Nairobi’s CBD.

The short story helped me to put to bed my Kenyan experiences which populated my sub-consciousness, where they remained buried until rudely awoken this month, when the African Union (AU) took the important decision regarding Kenya’s leaders and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

I have now reread my old short story to remind myself of what Kenya meant to me in 1990 – the smell, sound and sight of Nairobi -, and to contrast that with the Kenya on global display today, thanks to the global media, regarding the question of prosecution of its leaders by the ICC.

I deeply love Kenya. And I love to speak my broken Swahili even more.

Kenya and Egypt are the only two countries out of many African countries I have visited and or lived in, that had and continue to have a magical, almost mythical, pull on my imagination. Egyptians like to boast to visitors that if you drink from the celebrated Nile River, you are bound to be a repeat visitor to Egypt. So true. But so too is the majestic sight of Kilimanjaro, either from the Tanzanian or Kenyan side. The sight turns you instantly into a repeat visitor to East Africa.

Unfortunately these two great African powers, Kenya and Egypt, are going through their most difficult period in their long history. Kenya has just emerged from a vicious, deeply shameful civil war. Egypt seems determined that nothing will stop it from plunging into its own shameful, vicious civil war.

And now Kenya has grabbed the attention of the world for all the wrong reasons; civil war, controversial elections and now the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecuting its leaders. To add salt to injury, the recent Al Shaabab attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall made matters worse, exposing the weak underbelly of the boastful but clearly ineffective Kenyan state.

For many Kenyans, the penny has indeed finally dropped.

CHAPTER ONE.

When I lived in Nairobi in 1990, Kenya struck me as the first avowedly African capitalist country I ever lived in outside South Africa. It was also shamelessly pro-western, and specifically pro-British and pro-American. Also, unlike her neighbors Tanzania and Uganda, who offered strong political and military support to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Kenya’s stance against racist Pretoria was muted, by comparison and to put it delicately. And already then, the nifarous tribal sentiment in Kenyan politics was very pronounced and shocking, especially the feeling among the Kikuyus and Luyos that then President Arab Moi’s minority tribe, the Kalenjins, had overstayed their (un)welcome in political power and the State House. Being also the time of great anti-Soviet upheavals in Eastern Europe, the anti-KANU and pro-democracy movement seemed to be on the ascendancy, if not unstoppable, led by great Kenyan intellectuals like the lawyer Paul Muite. It finally came to nothing, other than a change of guard at the pigs’ feeding trough.

It was also clear then that there was general public awareness that the Kenyan state had fallen victim to alternating capture by a rapacious, ruthless and comprador Kenyan black, and often very tribalistic and violent, capitalist class, whose sole defining feature was ever-escalating state and private sector corruption and primitive accumulation, and the worshipping of Daniel Arab Moi’s personality cult. Alongside this trend, 1990 was also characterized by the ever-growing pauperization of millions of Kenyans, and attendant outbreaks of violent, localized tribal clashes over grassing land, water and other limited resources, including between the Masaais and the Kalenjins in the Rift Valley.

No one knew then that these were the harbingers of Kenya’s 2008 brutal civil war. If they did, the canary in the mine did not chirp loud enough.

By way of a shorthand, I characterize all these morbid features of Kenya of 1990, the Kenya I lived in, as “Kenyafication.” And it is against the backdrop of this assemblage of these morbid Kenyan national features, which I witnessed with my own eyes or got direct first-hand account of in 1990, that I warn when I write about the dangers of unchecked neo-liberal lurch in, and “Kenyafication” of, South Africa of today, under the rule by the ANC. What I choose to call SA’s “civil war of a special type”, and what others generally call the large-scale outbreak of xenophobic attacks, gave us only a little foretaste of what Kenya went through in its 2008 full-blown civil war.

Hard as it may be for some to believe, there was a definite and well-defined political backdrop and trajectory to the unimaginable and vicious civil war in Kenya in 2008, and the rot was long in coming, and not utterly surprising to those who lived and followed developments in Kenya.

As I pointed out in my now old Pretoria News article critiquing the SA National Development Plan (NDP) in its infancy, it was noteworthy that the Kenyan civil war broke out not long after the adoption and release of Kenya’s National Development Plan (NDP), once again proof-positive that an NDP is no silver bullet, but may heighten national discords, instead of attenuating them. Equally, no one could foresee that only a short time would separate SA Parliament’s adoption of the SA National Development Plan (NDP) and the Marikana Massacre, democratic SA’s first large-scale, brutal state atrocity.

The only thing this point proves is that often there is a parallel universe for those crafting nations’ NDPs, and another universe for on-the-ground developments in any country. Jamaica, after adopting its NDP, also experienced the outbreak of its worst urban criminal violence ever.

The signs of decay are always there for those who care to see them. Unlike the biblical manna, they don’t suddenly drop from the sky onto our bosoms.

I cannot help but view the current predicament of Kenya with the ICC against this heuristics background of my stay in Nairobi in 1990. What though escaped my attention at the time in Kenya was the shocking extent to which Kenya was, and still remains to this day, beholden to the West’s aid for budgetary support and all kinds of patronage, fifty years after gaining independence from its former colonial masters. However, what has been a boon for Kenya in recent times has been the discovery of oil, gas and large quantity of water resources, which have the potential to make Kenya freer, if it does not allow itself to be struck by the commodity curse or, less threateningly, by the Dutch disease.

Yet Kenya’s confrontation with the ICC, aided by the support of SA’s diplomacy and the AU, throw up unpalatable paradoxes about Kenya, which may help to forecast where the can will stop rolling on the Kenya-ICC crisis of international legality and legitimacy. These paradoxes may also assist SA diplomacy to steady its arm as it navigates the treacherous waters upon which floats the Kenya-ICC-AU-West all-mighty confrontation.

Firstly, Kenya remains an unashamedly pro-western and pro-free market country, the African poster-boy, in case the SA government has forgotten, of global capitalism and Milton Friedman-like free market and free wheeling economics, whilst it has at the same time dragged the whole AU into a confrontation with the West over the appearance of her leaders at the ICC. So the possibility of Kenyan leaders doing a behind-the-scenes deal with the West, especially with US president Barack Obama, a descendent of Kenya, and doing an about-face on the AU, which leaves the AU embarrassed, as well as high and dry, remains considerable. AU leaders need to factor this in their Kenya-ICC dealings and in their strident anti-West pronouncements on the Kenya-ICC crisis of international legality.

Secondly, it is interesting to note that the real big diplomatic fight the post-apartheid SA government, led by the ANC, has had, which does not directly affect our own national interest as such, is over leaders of a country, Kenya, which did so little for the anti-apartheid struggle, compared to Kenya’s own immediate neighbors, say Tanzania or Uganda, or even the Sudan for that matter.

Thirdly, in terms of our own domestic politics at the moment, SA leaders like Bishop Makgoba of the Anglican Church, former president Thabo Mbeki, and lately even Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, have all warned us about the rising specter of tribalism in our country. Yet the fight of our democratic SA government with the ICC over the prosecution of Kenyan leaders takes us into the corner of leaders of a country where tribalism and tribal politics are rampant, paramount and account for the ferocity of the 2008 Kenyan civil war. The abuse of tribalism by Kenyan politicians stand in direct antithesis to the ANC and PAC’s highly laudable, historical and long-standing non-tribalism. In Kenya, like some in South Africa, politicians often pay only lip service to non-tribalism, whilst quick to resort to tribal political mobilization to insinuate themselves into power, or, variably, to keep themselves in power. Kenya is an outdoor billboard advertisement for South Africans on the dangers of tribal and racialized mobilization for short-term political gain, but causing deep long-term national harm. At the end of the day, the wheels do come off when the tribal and racial gloves are off.

Fourth, our support for Kenya and the AU’s position on the ICC may be wrongly construed as support for very violent Kenyan politicians, who think nothing about legal accountability for their murderous actions, and who will countenance no obstacle whatsoever in their ruthless pursuit of public power, for selfish gain. That these Kenyan leaders are relatively young men, only adds up to the gravity of the accusations leveled against them. The 2008 Kenyan civil war remains a profoundly shameful chapter in Africa’s long post-colonial history. This is especially so when you compare this “dastardly criminal” (credit to ANC’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, for inventing the term) Kenyan political act with Tanzania’s glorious success in forging what is arguably Africa’s most durable, admirable and ennobling nation-building project, which has brought together over 100 Tanzanian tribes in peaceful co-existence since Tanzania gained independence in the early 1960s. The recent outburst of communal violence in Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa, over the killing of a radical Moslem leader, only re-emphasizes the fragility of Kenya’s own less-than-stellar post-colonial nation-building project.

Fifth, the most astonishing feature about Kenya is the almost total absence of any organized force of the Left, or a viable forum for left-leaning politics, in a sad parody of the US. Even our tiny “footstool of imperialism” (credit to Julius Malema’s ANCYL for the expression) neighbor, Botswana, whose deeply annoying, continual renegade foreign policy pronouncements mislead her to think she is a major African player, at least formally entertains some left-leaning political formations, even if to no much avail or visible effect. The absence of any Left alternative or perspective in Kenya has created a sad situation where the Kenyan political class, unchallenged politically by any contrasting, alternative political narrative about public power and constraints on its exercise, congregates onto only the right wing plank of national politics, thus distorting the true political picture in Kenya; and consequently the elements of Kenya’s political class outrace each other to the very bottom of the Kenyan political barrel of rightwing, pro-western, and tribalistic politics. Can Uhuru Kenyatta and Orila Odinga be honestly said to be presenting competing political perspectives for Kenyans, beyond a power-lust and “it’s my tribe’s turn to eat” sickening mentality?

In such circumstances, tribal affiliations get mobilized by Kenya’s depraved elites to gain whatever advantage over competitors. To SA and the AU, this state of affairs must ring a loud warning bell that says that there is a real possibility of a repeat of the 2008 Kenyan civil war, even if on a smaller scale and less intermittently, because real, competitive politics, in terms of availability of real choices regarding profoundly varying political perspectives, has long died in Kenya. And because, absent a truly Leftist perspective, Kenya’s “democracy” remains profoundly undemocratic, in spite of formal and procedural adherence to democratic practices. Real, democratic politics in Kenya has unfortunately been supplanted by mindless materialism, sickening tribalism, regionalism, the “me-me” and “mini-me” syndrome, religious communalism, greed, high-level corruption and a shameful dependence on western aid. In this sense, Kenya truly is even less of an African “democracy” than the brutal Swazi monarchy which bans and persecutes radical, alternative political perspectives, which nevertheless exist underground, in Swaziland to boot. But exist they do.

Not so with Kenya.

The great SA irony is that ZANUfication has come for such trashing in public discourse, but there is almost universal silence about the equally dangerous and immanent threats posed by the ongoing Kenyafication in SA under the rule by ZANC.

CONCLUSION.

The late Chinua Achebe wrote “The Trouble with Nigeria”, a searing, no-holds-barred, devastating critique of the sad state of affairs and public power in his beloved motherland, Nigeria. Achebe, in his brilliant treatise, asserted that the “trouble” with Nigeria was squarely the failure of leadership. Other than Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Professor Ali Mazrui, is there a Kenyan, among the deeply corrupt Kenyan elites of today, who can similarly pen “The Problem With Kenya”? For God’s sake, unlike Kenya, at least no Nigerian leader has ever been dragged, crying like a baby and kicking like a stud, to appear before the ICC, very rightly the ultimate leadership ignominy in Africa. Nigeria has long suffered brutal military dictatorships in its post-colonial history, which nearly completely ruined Nigeria. Yet uninterrupted Kenyan civilian rule since independence, with one of the lowest presidential turn-overs in Africa (in fact comparable to Botswana’s), has not made much difference to Kenya, in comparison. In point of fact, Kenya has repeated the same maladies that afflicted Nigeria for so long – tribalism, civil war, corruption, state capture by the elites, regionalism, Moslem-Christian strife and divide, foreign war, incurable suckling on western aid, and growing poverty and inequality. The question before the Kenyan elites now is whether they will squander their country’s new-found and vast natural resources in the way the Nigerian elites have done, or whether they will use these resources for the development of all Kenyans without exception.

Unless Kenya faces up to these existential challenges in its own belly, it is hard to see how it can successfully prosecute its war against Al-Shabbab in Somalia, or, more ominously, in Kenya for that matter. But the sad truth is that it may be much easier for Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Burundi to meddle militarily in Somalia, than for them to squarely face up to and address their own historical, domestic challenges and accumulated national problems. Their involvement in Somalia may in fact be a means to distract and divert domestic attention away from their internal problems, and to sing for lunch before their western budget-support paymasters. If so, they, especially Kenya, are really opening themselves up for a crushing defeat at the hands of Somalia’s militants in the long-term, just like Ethiopia has already tasted in the very recent past.

No nation ever successfully prosecutes a foreign war, if it is divided and inattentive at home.

And so, as SA and the AU fight in the corner of Kenyan leaders against the ICC and the West, which I think and believe is in fact a very good and necessary fight – or more correctly, from my personal point of view, an imperative proxy fight against the West’s omnipresent neocolonial agenda in Africa -, we should be mindful that there is a very difficult political discussion that the AU leaders still have to conduct with the leaders of Kenya about the political future of their country. For the type of unstinted support SA and AU leaders have given to Kenya in her fight for survival with the ICC, this is a small price for Kenya to pay and cannot possibly be construed by Kenyan leaders as interference in her domestic affairs. Otherwise in another ten or twenty years, when another bout of large-scale violence breaks out in Kenya, the AU will again be dragged into an unseemly slugfest with the West and into a mud sludge over the Kenyan leadership.

The AU and SA should know that with these types of slugfest and sludge, no one in the pigpen ever comes out smelling like fresh roses. And often the stain from the pigpen is hard to remove from those involved.

What is more, even if the AU leaders succeed to move the ICC trial of Kenyan leaders from The Hague to say either Nairobi or Arusha, the legal proceedings should affirm, and not seek to undermine, SA and the AU’s unbending adherence to international legality, especially their firm commitment against impunity. Such proceedings, away from The Hague, if that, should also not render obsolete the crying need to conduct a vital political discourse with Kenya’s entire political class about what, in the first place, gave rise to the horrendous circumstances which allowed the vicious Kenyan civil war to break out in the first place, which itself was an abominable dereliction of national political duty by Kenya’s entire political class, and not just by president Uhuru Kenyatta and vice deputy Ruto alone.

In this sense, SA president Jacob Zuma is correct and on-point to suggest that Kenya may want to consider whether SA’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was very ably led by our much-venerated Archbishop Desmond Tutu, would have any meaning and relevance for Kenya’s post-civil war future.

Otherwise the SA and AU’s support for the position of Kenyan leaders vis-a-vis the ICC is built on quick sand of continental delusion, ambiguous international legality and self-serving political morality. The Kenyan civil war was not just a criminal act, but also a dastardly political failure by Kenya’s entire political class. The ICC can help with the criminal side of the coin. The AU must chip in to help Kenya with the political side of the coin.

Above all, Kenya must use the present predicament of its national leaders to turn a new leaf, away from uncritical, slavish parroting of pro-western policies and posture, historically speaking, to a much more deeper, finely nuanced and richer Pan-African commitment and content, more in deeds than words. This is arguably her best insurance for a successful Kenyan nation-building project, and against legal impunity for Kenyan elites. In this, Kenya can take a leaf from the copybook of her neighbor, one of the colossi of human freedom, one of the stalwarts of the international anti-apartheid movement and one of the quintessential Pan-African powers, namely Tanzania.

This could be Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta’s most celebrated and enduring political legacy.

Sad to say, but until then, it’s not yet Uhuru, Dear Mr. President Uhuru Kenyatta. Also because we still have the ICC fight of our lives on our hands.

Excellency, I wish you and your deputy a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as free men.

4th Cediablog.

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://www.cedia.co.za
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
isaac@cedia.co.za
Twitter : Cedia6
Facebook : Cedia Cedia
LinkedIn : Cedia Cedia
Google+ : isaac mogotsi
Pay-Off Line: Dynamic Thought – Positive Action
Cedia Directors: Isaac M. Mogotsi – Executive Chairman; Saul S. Pila – Chief Operating Officer.
22 October 2013.

Angry Red Berets and the Two Zees: What Chance EFF and Julius Malema in the 2014 Elections?

TOPIC: ANGRY RED BERETS AND THE TWO ZEES: WHAT CHANCE EFF AND JULIUS MALEMA IN THE 2014 NATIONAL ELECTIONS?

INTRODUCTION.

The two biggest mountains Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) need to crest for them to triumph in the 2014 elections are the much bigger and much longer Mount Jacob Zuma, and the much smaller and much flatter one, Mount Helen Zille. Mount Zuma is as big and long as the Drakensburg Mountain range, whilst Mount Zille is of the size and shape of Table Mountain. Which mountain to scale first is perhaps the toughest strategic challenge before Malema and EFF. That President Jacob Zuma hails from Kwa Zulu-Natal (KZN), which the Drakensberg Mountains abut, and Zille is based in Cape Town, whose fabled background is Table Mountain, is only accidental to this analogy. So too is the fact that EFF was officially launched last week on the Marikana Koppie, which, compared to the Drakensburg and Table Mountains, looks like an anthill, another analogy which should not be over-interpreted nor over-analyzed, but which may still come to assist EFF if it’s not dismissed out of hand.

But, on second thought, perhaps Malema and his EFF need this mountain analogy to focus and concentrate their minds at the herculean task before them, if they hope to win the 2014 national elections. Because they would really need to literally move the two mountains to stand any chance of defeating either Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance (DA), and, much, much less plausibly, of defeating the ANC of President Zuma.

A defeat by EFF over the ANC would be nothing short of a complete revolution in South Africa. The defeat of the DA by EFF, for the position of the country’s official parliamentary opposition, would be nothing short of seismic political and parliamentary change, but is not far-fetched, and may even be good for the moribund opposition politics in our country. EFF can reach further into the black, especially youth and unemployed, vote than the DA can ever hope to.

In short, for EFF to be able to defeat the DA in the 2014 national elections, that would signal that there is a much broader and much deeper appetite in the SA society for the EFF’s radical economic policy proposals, or the Zimbabwe option, than we have been made to believe by both the ANC and the DA. By defeating the DA next year for the prestige and privilege of being SA’s official parliamentary opposition, that would affirm the existence of a huge, untapped growth potential for EFF in SA politics and electoral opportunities. EFF would be in a better position to challenge the ANC for power in subsequent national and local elections (2016, 2019, 2021 and or 2024). A good EFF electoral performance in 2014, by way of defeating the DA, would spell trouble for the DA as a governing party in the Western Cape and other municipalities across the country, whilst allowing EFF to build the necessary juggernaut political machinery and tail-wind momentum sufficient for it to give the ANC a real run for its money in subsequent elections. This may be directly beneficial for the ANC’s own service delivery record, which could suddenly experience a healthy uptick. Such a win by EFF will bring it closer to the national and parliamentary resources it needs to grow beyond just being a youth protest movement, into a truly national, well-resourced and well-organized modern political party with a cross-generational appeal, and whose views on SA and African issues are sought by locals and visitors alike. It could well, in practice, render the ANC and its government lame-duck. It would make EFF in practice and theory a government-in-waiting. Such an outcome would be an enormous achievement for a party established only this month. And in the most unlikely scenario of EFF’s electoral victory over the ANC, it would mean that the SA electorate has completely and totally rejected any and everything represented by the CODESA negotiations and the political settlement CODESA gave birth to. It would literally and fundamentally mean a new day for South Africa, as significant and as powerful as 27 April 1994, and as portent and transformative as 16 June 1976. Such an improbable victory by EFF over the ANC would upend everything we have come to know about SA politics since 1994.

But the failure by EFF to topple the DA from the position of official parliamentary opposition will mean that there is as yet no serious, demonstrable and broad-based national appetite in South Africa, even among the poor urban and rural dwellers, as well as the masses of the unemployed, for radical economic proposals being espoused by EFF. It would mean the death of the Zimbabwe option for South Africa, and the consequent and attendant intensification of neo-liberal Kenyafication of South Africa. This will be bad news for EFF, because it would mean it was just an anti-Zuma vengeance vehicle for expelled and bitter former ANC and ANCYL members, without much national political appeal and embeddedness whatsoever. It is hard to see how EFF will be able to surmount such a shattering defeat, and rebuild on it to recreate some prospects for future, greater electoral EFF successes.

Such a defeat for EFF will mean that, in all but name, South Africa has, for the long haul, settled for a dominant two-party political system, with many little political puppies and beagles, cornered by the two dominant parties in a revolving-door political existence, including EFF, and forever sniping at the heels of the two big political parties, the ANC and the DA, without much demonstrable success, but with much all-night harmless barking.

In a nutshell, for EFF to credibly talk about defeating the ANC in future elections, including next year, it should better the DA’s current national electoral support of about 17% and still hope that the DA itself does not gain much further electoral support next year. This in itself, let alone EFF’s more wishful thinking about defeating the ANC next year, is Himalayan ambition for the EFF. But groups of dedicated mountain climbers do claim to be able to climb any high mountain nowadays.

CHAPTER ONE.

It is simply not possible for EFF to defeat the ANC in next year’s elections, if it cannot first imagine itself becoming the official parliamentary opposition at the expense of Helen Zille and the DA. How does EFF hope to defeat the ANC, when it cannot even show the numbers that can allow it to dislodge the DA as official parliamentary opposition? Only a youthful flight of fancy, on a Limpopo-made broomstick, can visualize such an outcome. Other than through an Arab Spring-style youth revolution, there is simply no way EFF will dislodge the ANC from power next year.

But EFF can rattle the ANC massively in next year’s elections, and rattle it to its foundation at that.

What a good, solid electoral performance by EFF in next year’s national elections may do, by way of becoming the second biggest political party in South Africa, is to so rattle the ANC’s leadership at national and provincial level – meaning so hard and so unexpectantly- that President Zuma will hardly be able to survive the next ANC National General Council (NGC) following after next year’s national elections. Meaning that such a good EFF electoral performance may force the panicky ANC National General Council to consider to recall President Jacob Zuma from office, in a paradoxical reversal of the Pretoria 2005 ANC National General Council’s decision to reject Zuma’s decision to resign as ANC deputy president, following his firing from Cabinet by former President Thabo Mbeki, in the wake of Shabir Shaik’s conviction for corruption.

And this electoral outcome is within EFF’s grasp and realm of electoral possibilities next year, partly because a lot of anti-Zuma forces within the ANC are just waiting for any credible excuse to gang up against Zuma and to send him packing back to iNkandla. That it may be EFF which may provide them with such an excuse is a bitter pill they will be ready to swallow. Does EFF have the requisite organizational muscle – the boots on the ground in every village, township, town and city in South Africa – to do that? I do doubt it.

In practical political terms, such an outcome for EFF, of seeing Zuma once again politically beleaguered by his own ANC’s internal forces post-2014 national elections, may actually be more satisfying, and more important, at a personal level, to Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, two of the co-founders of EFF, than even an outright electoral victory over the DA to make EFF the next South African official parliamentary opposition. It would constitute the two’s ultimate revenge against and triumph over their sworn and bitter political nemesis – Jacob Zuma of iNkandla. I think this is a more realistic and attainable goal for EFF in next year’s national elections, than the more improbable aim of electorally toppling the ANC from power.

But will the perfect become the enemy of the good for EFF’s duo, in terms of their electoral strategizing for next year’s national elections? I suspect so, unfortunately.

Malema, Shivambu and EFF’s fixation, and even morbid obsession, with Jacob Zuma’s ANC, or ZANC as they are wont to call it now, and specifically with Zuma himself, coupled with their unchecked hurry to scale the Drakensburg Mountains, even before they reach the Table Mountain and the SA parliamentary princinct, and even before they muster mountain-climbing on the Marikana Koppie, will be their ultimate undoing. If the former ANC Youth Leaguers keep on pursuing unattainable, but alluring, gargantuan, short-term political objectives, and keep on accumulating huge, successive, but insurmountable, political defeats in the SA political market-place, such as failing to deliver on their newest promise to defeat the ANC in next year national elections, whilst neglecting the more attainable, but prosaic, political objectives, such as defeating the DA, or at least becoming the third biggest SA parliamentary party in less than eight months, which in itself would be a mind-blowing achievement for any new political kid on the block, they are, sooner than they probably expect, going to be in far worse political space than they now reckon possible.

It should be remembered that despite their wild and loud pre-Mangaung promises, they did fail to topple Zuma in Mangaung. In fact, their defeat in Mangaung was so overwhelming, so total, that they ended up, unintentionally, strengthening Zuma’s grip over the ANC. Zuma emerged much stronger after Mangaung than before Mangaung. Similarly, their miscalculation, based on an unrealistic political calculus, which itself is driven by emotionalism and short-termism regarding next year’s national elections, and motivated by an irrational obsession with wanting Jacob Zuma to be consigned to history’s dustbins in the shortest possible time, will help Zuma to again triumph over them decisively, and to finally consign them, instead, to history’s dustbins, if not to long jail terms. Another commanding, decisive Zuma win in next year’s national elections will silence the emerging and powerful anti-Zuma voices in the ANC post-Mangaung, especially in the ANC’s Gauteng and North West provinces.

This is because ANC and SA president Zuma and his band of fanatical ANC supporters, especially in KZN and Mpumalanga, have reached a very simplistic and compelling political conclusion – in politics, a win, any win, cleans all your scandals, incompetence and non-delivery. As long as it continues to win, the post-Thabo Mbeki ANC will not mind being led even by a drunken donkey covered in ANC colors and muttering inaudible prattle about the National Development Plan (NDP). For, with regard to this post-Mbeki ANC, a win is a win, is a win, is a win. Period. It is into this simplistic and simple-minded conclusion that Malaema and EFF’s unhelpful obsession about, and fixation on, ZANC plays. It is really not about Zuma, stupid. It is about the nature and state of the current post-Mbeki and post-Mangaung ANC. Got it?

CONCLUSION

For EFF, the target should be Zille’s DA, and not Zuma’s ANC.

The two Zees – Zuma and Zille – cannot be taken on both at once by EFF. EFF simply does not have the resources, tested organizational strength, the visionary talent, the maturity and vitality, the necessary intellectual depth, mature internal political culture, sufficient ideological cohesion and, frankly, even the boots on the ground, to take on the ANC and the DA all at once, other than as staff-riders on a wave of a popular, if not populist, youth revolution breaking out across SA, which thing will not happen next year. EFF should also learn from the history of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) that the moment you make the ANC your primary enemy and primary focus, and not the structural system keeping blacks and the poor down, you lose significant black support, despite the fact that you may carry impressive struggle credentials and despite the fact that you may have very popular and charismatic leaders in your mist. A focus on the DA and Helen Zille in next year’s national elections, in line with Julius Malema’s own highly jaundiced view about, and very bitter denunciations of, the DA and Helen Zille, when he was still the ANCYL hell-raising leader, will strike a chord with SA black and non-middle class politics that made him such a formidable young politician in the first place. A focus on the ANC and Zuma will make him come across as merely a bitter and furious young man, like a teenage lover scorned by the ANC.

In this sense, the electoral outcome that should give the EFF the greatest satisfaction is when they can establish themselves as post-apartheid’s first official black parliamentary opposition, and to see Helen Zille and the DA bite the electoral dust at the foot of Table Mountain.

It would be easier for a biblical camel, ridden by a very rich, fatty boom-boom BEE oligarch, to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a Marikana Koppie to suddenly become as big as the Drakensberg Mountains by July next year.

If it is wise enough, EFF should really focus all its energies and attention exclusively on the DA and Helen Zille. They should make Helen Zille and the DA the primary target of their electioneering, and not Zuma or the ANC. In any case, the ANC under Jacob Zuma is bound to self-destruct in the next ten years, and in time for the 2024 national elections, unless it can replace Zuma with a more credible and ethically upright leader, such as Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the current AU Commission’s chairman.. So, to paraphrase Jacob Zuma himself, why would EFF harp on and waste its time beating a python which is busy chocking itself to death. It is a waste of EFF’s resources and energy. The ongoing and unstoppable mighty factional fights within the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance will ensure that the ANC brings itself down to its knees, with or without the EFF, and by dint of its own explosive, irresoluble internal contradictions. The deep, philosophical question the EFF should ask itself is whether it really matters that a mighty tree falls in the forest, or whether EFF believes a mighty tree falls in the forest only when EFF is near it, cuts it down and hears it fall. It is a bigger historical process at work within the ANC that EFF may ill-advisedly seek to own or hasten. Like the DA, an EFF that is overly obsessed with and fixated on the ANC and Jacob Zuma will only prolong the historical process of the ANC’s self-destruction and demise under Zuma, because practically all factions in the ANC are strongly united only by their intense animus to either Helen Zille and the DA, or Julius Malema and his EFF. Nothing else in SA politics unites and animates these ANC factions, otherwise at each other’s throats most of the time, than either Zille or Malema, either the DA or EFF. The very huge turn out for Jacob Zuma’s recent rally at Julius Malema’s own birthplace, Seshego, Limpopo, should have made this point clear to EFF. These two entities, DA and EFF, are the ANC’s “neo-apartheid”, in terms of presenting a transcendent, uniting, external threat, enemy and organizing principle for the ANC, especially during election times.

EFF should also not underestimate the organizationally- and politically-paralyzing effect a huge Zuma defeat has on SA politics and Zuma’s political foes alike. It is really true that people underestimate Zuma at their own peril. It took former President Thabo Mbeki, following his landslide defeat by Zuma at the ANC conference in Polokwane in 2007, almost five years to effectively regain his previous balance and poise within the domestic political scene and public intellectual space. It may take EFF a much longer time than that to regain their electoral balance and poise after the 2014 elections, if they suffer a similar, massive electoral defeat at the hands of Zuma, in a toe-to-toe electoral battle with the ANC next year. Whilst Mbeki is now splendidly recovering from his Polokwane defeat, largely thanks to his amazing intellectual, organizational and, most importantly, strategic depth, EFF may not survive its first body-blow electoral defeat at the hands of Jacob Zuma next year.

Will Julius Malema and EFF be in a position to moderate their clearly excessive political exuberance, EFF’s policy and ideological hubris, and their youthful impatience to see Zuma politically and electorally defeated? Do they have the required maturity, strategic stamina and organisational foresight to survive their first five years between next year’s elections and the 2019 elections, without going the sad and messy route of COPE post-2009 national elections?

This is the ultimate test for EFF, and not whether they can defeat Zuma or not in next year’s national elections. They clearly will be unable to defeat Zuma next year, whilst reducing the margin of ANC victory will help them exacerbate ANC’s acute and volatile internal contradictions at the expense of Zuma. This realistically should be EFF’s political aim in next year’s national elections. The truly admirable triumph for Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu is that they could at all lead their new-born party in a contest with the DA and ANC in next year’s national elections. That is achievement enough for them. If they handle matters well and strategically, going forward, they may still one day surprise South Africa and Africa. And possibly surprise even themselves.

But that cannot be next year, however much they may wish that to be the case. To insist otherwise is to give sway within EFF to subjectivism and voluntarism. It is to mistake a wish for a fact. In politics, that is an unpardonable and very costly error. The history of the ANCYL under Julius Malema attests to this truism.

3rd Cediablog

By:

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://www.cedia.co.za
http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordprocess.com
isaac@cedia.co.za
Twitter : Cedia6
Facebook : Cedia Cedia
LinkedIn : Cedia Cedia
Google+ : isaac mogotsi
Cedia Pay-Off Line : Dynamic Thought – Positive Action.
Cedia Directors : Isaac M. Mogotsi – Executive Chairman; Saul S. Pila – Chief Operating Officer.
16 October 2013

J’Accuse – Open Letter to French President Francois Hollande

TOPIC: J’ACCUSE – OPEN LETTER TO FRENCH PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE.

Dear President Francois Hollande.

INTRODUCTION.

I refer to your presidential visit to South Africa this week.

Firstly, for the sake of transparency, let me declare upfront my interest in what I am about to write about you: I do not welcome your visit to South Africa this week. In fact, I am totally opposed to it. I really think your visit is ill-advised. I truly think your French policy towards Africa stinks to high heavens. If I had the power, you would not set your feet in my country, and if you did, as you are going to, I would throw you into the sea to be swallowed by a whale, like biblical Daniel, to take you back to Normandy beach, in the hope that such a marine experience would so frighten you, that you would never want to visit Africa again, at least as long as you remain French president.

In a word, you are really not welcome to visit SA, Mr. President, at least in my book.

In fact, if I really had Superman’s powers, I would declare you persona non grata (PNG) across the whole of Africa. If, like a believer in Hinduism, I could choose what to be reincarnated into in my afterlife today, in time for your visit this week to my country, I would reincarnate myself as former American president Monroe, and declare the Monroe Doctrine over all of Africa, to prevent your types from ever abusing and taking for granted our beloved, ancient African continent again.

You are lucky that there are no Monroes amongst the crop of African leaders today, who could show you the bold African sign reading: THE RIGHT OF ENTRY IS RESERVED.

This is because I consider you and John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, two of the ugly white men of the 21st century. By ugly white men, I am not referring to your physical attributes, although both of you have enough of these to recommend you for the expression. About this I shall make only a cursory mention of below, quoting from a renowned journalist. But I shall resist the temptation to go that undignified route full throttle, tempting though it is to do so, for it will trivialize the negative sentiment I hold about you, which I am about to express and share with you in this open letter, and to go that route will also demean my African ancestors and me in the process. The utterance of such an expression by me about your looks would also detract and deduct from the bedrock of my ethical beliefs, which is the African Ubuntu. Lastly, I am not using the term “ugly white men” in the way people would sarcastically use the term “ugly Jew” in the past to refer to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

I am using the term rather in the sense Ben Mezrich would write about “ugly Americans” in an eponymous book. I am using the term for its intended insurgent political meaning and significance. These political meaning and significance stem from your recent impermissible warmongering, in which you and John Kerry indulged and excelled, at the pleasure of US president Barack Obama’s threatened, but for now aborted, war against the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

And you really want me to believe you are a “French socialist”? Perish the thought. The impression I have gained of you is that you are just a wily political careerist and a ruthless, unabashed ideological opportunist who adorns himself with the term “French socialist” to advance your personal power ambitions and your craving for personal glory. What is “French socialist” about your FrancaAfrique policy? You tell me.

You have defiled socialism by your warmongering on Mali and Syria, Mr. President Hollande.

And, just to remind you, you are no former French president Jacque Chirac, although you seek, unsuccessfully and in your many TV interviews, to cloth yourself in his formidable and much-celebrated anti-Iraqi war legacy. Mr. President, I was part of the team under former SA president Thabo Mbeki that interacted very closely with former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s French foreign policy establishment in its opposition to George W Bush and Tony Blair’s war of folly on Iraq, in line with SA’s own opposition to that war. I visited Paris several times in this capacity. I recall with warm fondness that when our team, led by former SA foreign affairs deputy minister, Aziz Pahad, visited the French presidency and foreign ministry, for discussions on Iraq with senior French officials, we were so impressed that the then-just-designated new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, (a very handsome, good-looking white French man), broke his summer holiday in southern France to fly to Paris to come and meet with deputy minister Pahad and his team. We were even more impressed by his profound knowledge of Africa and the developing world, as France’s former ambassador to Madagascar. But what absolutely bowled us over was de Villepin and Jacque Chirac’s unflinching opposition to George W Bush and Tony Blair’s illegal, unilateral and needless war of choice on Iraq. And on this score, these French leaders were merely representing and giving expression to a very strong anti-war French public opinion prevalent at the time. We knew in those official discussions that the conservative French government of Chirac and de Villepin was absolutely opposed to warmongering on Iraq, the sort of warmongering that has now become your second nature, especially when you, a socialist president of France, deal with Africa, and especially when you threaten to deal with Bashar al-Asaad’s Syria. That is why I tell you, President Hollande, you are no Jacque Chirac on matters of war and peace. You are just trying to ride on his anti-Iraq war coat-tails in order to perpetrate a deceptive war on Syria that the French public, to their eternal glory, and to your great chagrin, oppose by huge public opinion majorities.

No wonder you find it easy to rush to introduce a draft resolution on Syria at the UN Security Council, whilst you were absolutely petrified to allow the great French democratic parliament to pass a vote on your warmongering policy towards Syria. You knew you would suffer the same embarrassing defeat which befell UK prime minister David Cameron, when he strove to steamroll both his own co-ruling Conservative Party and the UK parliament to approve his warmongering on Syria. At least David Cameron, to his credit, had the courage of his convictions and took the gamble to allow for a UK parliamentary vote on his unpopular Syria policy. Not so with you, I am afraid. You, on the other hand, would not take the risk to entrust to the democratically-elected French parliament, the representative of the French people, with a conscience vote on your warmongering Syria policy. At the end of the day, all you have done is to uncritically hitch France to the warmongering bandwagon of what former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, once famously termed “a hyper-frenetic power”, or what the wonderful, much admired and highly respected French philosopher, and a true friend of Africa, Jean-Paul Satre, once described, quite correctly, in his Foreword to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth, as “a super-European monstrosity”, namely, the United States of America (USA).

I deliberately use the expression “ugly white men” as a means to denounce, in no uncertain terms, your and France’s ongoing brutal destabilization and neo-colonization of a whole swath of the African continent, anew and in the 21st century, just to gain for France a diplomatic and economic advantage domestically and on the world stage, at the expense of Africa herself. Because I am aware that you intend to project yourself as a friend of Africa during your upcoming SA visit, I have decided to level with you, through this open letter. I am aware that you intend to portray yourself as a lover of Africa, an Afrophile, as soon as you touch down on the South African soil.

Although in my previous life as a South African diplomat in Geneva I fell in love with your country and its wonderful people, although I regard myself as an incurable Francophile, although I spent a lot of time in France, sometimes driving all by myself from Geneva right through to Paris and back, and sometimes traveling on the Euro-train from Paris to Dover in England, although I used to do my family weekend shopping in southern France to escape the more weighty Swiss francs, and although I was never discriminated against personally, not once, by the French people during my many visits to and sojourns in France, when many times my family and myself would be the only black faces around a sea of French white faces, and although one of my sons was born in French Switzerland assisted by Swiss French midwives, and although I often felt safer then in France than I normally do now in such conservative, barely reformed South African small towns like Brits, Ventersdorp, and Middleburg, I have retained my critiquing faculties versa viz France’s policy towards Africa. Yet as a sign of my abiding appreciation for such French hospitality and humane treatment during my stay and visits to your great country, I am continually self-teaching French and about French culture, as well as her great literature. I suppose by now you have correctly guessed that I regard Emile Zola, the great French author of the original J’Accuse Open Letter to French President Felix Faure on Alfred Dreyfus Affair in the late 19th century, as France’s greatest and most courageous author ever.

Monsieur President, je aim bien francais!

CHAPTER ONE.

And so, President Hollande, I think I have absolutely a firmer basis to call myself a true friend and lover of France, the French and things French, – a Francophile -, than I believe you frankly have to call yourself a friend and lover of Africa, the Africans and things African, – an Afrophile -.

Mr. President, for me Africa is uber alles, not a far-away neocolonial adjuct it may be to you and other French citizens.

Let me explain, just in case you misunderstand or misinterpret what I mean by this.

I remain acutely awake to the reality that France’s Africa policy is rotten to the core, beyond redemption, and that as France’s current president, you symbolize such a profound rot.

Mr. President, you are neither a friend of Africa, nor a lover of Africa. The fact is, you and the entire French policy to Africa remain very much abusive and condescending towards my African continent and its peoples. In addition, your country is a long-standing, great exploiter of Africa’s riches and resources, which have gone to build some of the world’s greatest palaces and architectural wonders in Paris and the rest of France. You are, therefore, quite clearly, the enemy and hater of Africa, by dint of the French state ideology and policy towards Africa, which you pursue and are implementing with a determination as focused as your half-squinting eyes. This is all nothing personal, Mr. President. I don’t care how you self-describe in this sense your soi-disant as French president. It is not your melodious words and declarations that matter to me, but rather your malodorous actions and deeds on and towards Africa that count. No doubt about that. Your ugly record on Africa speaks for itself. You and many of the French you represent do not really respect Africa, beyond the obligatory diplomatic platitudes and bonhomie. You, if anything, profoundly despise and dread any possibility of Africa one day becoming truly independent from the French economic and diplomatic patronage, or from the suffocating French sphere of influence. Even today, globally, you and France ego-trip on the French colonial-era Dahomy-type carry-high carts hoisted by Africans, at the expense of Africa.

If this were not the case, the first thing you would have done upon becoming France’s new, “socialist” president, would have been to put Africa-French relationship on a footing of equals. This French neo-colonial establishment towards Africa, including you and the French state you head, will never contemplate, let alone permit, such a paradigm shift and outcome. In your mind, Africa is crucial for the French DNA that allows France’s survival as “a globalized power, with a global reach.” In this crucial task of changing the essence of FrancaAfrique policy,, you have failed dismally. You continue the sordid French extractive policy towards Africa that was best described by the former Ivory Coast Speaker of Parliament and academic, Mr. Koulibally, writing about the unfair and unjust Francophone monitery union, as ruinous to Francophone Africa. You continue the unjust and exploitative French policy towards Africa that Al Jazeera TV recently described in a three-parts documentary on the history and current status of FrancaAfrique policy as “unjust”.

You do not represent a healthy break from the old FrancaAfrique, but a morbid continuity. And you know it, Mr. President, deep in your heart.

So indeed you are no revolutionary socialist.

Yet, because you fancy yourself a white French man superior to any black man and any African, you come hear, a wolf wearing a sheepskin, and you think South Africans will be fooled by your outward deceptive diplomatic finesse, and by the commercial contracts you are going to sign during your visit, as if our South African soul has “up for sale to the highest French bidder” hanging around it. You fool only yourself and your sycophantic presidential advisory team.

In my view, because of your support for and embodiment of the violent French policy towards Africa, especially your adventerous war in Mali, you deserve to share the bench with Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), alongside Henry Kissinger, George W Bush, Tony Blair, and, of course, the father of modern Drone Wars, Barack Obama. Your soldiers have killed too many innocent Tuaregs in northern Mali for you to saunter around South Africa as a free French man and a man of peace. Because you are quick to display a pretty violent streak when French interests are mortally threatened by Africa’s march towards self-determination in all its aspects, you are the bearer of French gifts your South African hosts should be very wary about. Preferably, you should be in the same league as the president of Sudan, Al-Bashir, or of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, both who are wanted by the ICC for genocide and mass killings, respectively. But again, who said this West-dominated world of international criminal justice is just and fair, or color-blind?

I therefore salute the decision by the AU Summit of Heads of State and Government to resolve to request the UN Security Council to stop the prosecution of the leaders of Kenya at the ICC, and to instruct African ICC member states to first canvass the AU before referring cases to the ICC or UN Security Council. That this AU decision comes on the eve of your visit to South Africa, is just a cherry on top, to my mind.

I shall resist the temptation to make your visit to SA the basis of my quarrel with the president of Mali, who recently described you, so offensively, so incongruously and so incorrectly, as “a great friend of Africa.” You may be many things. You may be his great friend for giving him a job-for-pal presidential promotion, on a silver platter, on the back of French tanks and war planes, in a proud African country that should not be an extension of France. But a friend of Africa? My pitch black foot.

A neo-colonialist like yourself will not make me fall for your divide-and-rule policy and make me fight with other African leaders in your neo-colonial pockets. After all, without your invading armed forces in Mali, the Mali president would not be in power today. Same with the president of Ivory Coast and his French wife. Same with the new president of the Central African Republic and his anarchic, highly ill-disciplined, murderous and looting Seleka bandits, which seek to pass themselves for a reputable CAR national army. You, as Commander-in-Chief of French armed forces, should be dismantling France’s archipelago of death and destabilization, in the form of French military bases in several former Francophone African countries. You should not be using these French military bases in Africa to keep in power, or to catapult into power, some of your co-opted sahibs in Africa. So, of course these African sahibs of yours will whisper sweet nothings into your French ears, or utter mindless bon mot, just to humor you, and because they are obliged by circumstances created, in the main, by centuries of French colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa to, faute de mieux, accept French patronage and neo-colonial diktat over them. Of course they will be outraged when we point out their despicable dependence on France’s neo-colonial patronage. Of course they will be offended, your African sahibs, to hear us criticize their French masters like you. Malcolm X once described these types as “kitchen niggers.” And he was right.

Of course you, in turn, will point to your African sahibs as “examples” of how pleased Africans are with FrancaAfrique policy, French aid, French currency, French language, French culture, French literature, French influence, French cuisine, French wine, French perfumes, French high fashion, French football, and even, in some discreet instances, in some dark corners, with some of the young French ladettes for Berlusconi-type bunga-bunga merry-making. And here, understand me well Mr. President, I am not at all accusing you of poncing around whenever you visit African countries. Not at all.

But stuff all that up your right-wing armpit, Mr. President of France!

Those of us who read how former Panamese president (general) Omar Torrijos described to John Perkins, in his highly memorable Confessions of an Economic Hitman – Conversations with the General, his experience with US imperialism, know how your neo-colonial ilk operate across the developing world, are aware of your modus operadi across Africa, and we know you are up to no good for Africa. Regarding Africa, you are a predatory white European hyena, nothing more. You and France gain when Africa bleeds, when Africa is weak, when Africa is dependent on western alms and aid, and when Africa is on its knees, extending a begging bowl, perpetually being our Information Age’s avatar for human suffering, backwardness and human indignity. We know well that a strong Africa, a dynamic Africa, a truly independent Africa, an economically powerful Africa, and a proud and content Africa, is anathema to broad and fundamental French interests globally and in Africa. We are not deceived by your sweet tongue and savoury diplomatic smell emanating from the eau de toilette around your FrancaAfrique policy.

For starters, you and France view yourselves as equals to the whole African Union (AU), our continental body, on all matters pertaining to Africa. A single country, France, located outside Africa, sees itself as an equal to a whole continent of 54 countries and its continental body. What chicanery. The reason your country has for so long opposed UN Security Council reform is that you carry on with this false, self-serving and self-perpetuating canard that you are the voice, ears and eyes of Africa in the Council, that you look after the interests of Africa there. Would you trust an African country or the AU to do the same for France at the meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Would you agree that an African be the Managing Director of the IMF, instead of a French or European citizen? Would you? Of course not. This harmful pretense that you represent Africa at the UN Security Council has engendered a highly distorted, pernicious diplomatic relationship between your country and Africa, as some African countries depend on selective and tendentious briefings and leaks by French UN diplomats at the UN Security Council in New York. I witnessed this diplomatic perfidy as a junior diplomat in 1994-1997.

Mr. President, Africa does not need France to represent her at the UN Security Council, or for France to be Africa’s pointman in her dealings with other global powers, including at the table of UN Security Council permanent members. Africa can represent herself, including at this UN Security Council table, whilst France, like the UK, has to vacate its permanent seat to more deserving, rising and emerging powers like Indonesia or Turkey or Mexico, or Egypt or Poland or, – yes-yes -, even Zimbabwe. You frown at the mentioning of Zimbabwe? And why not Zimbabwe, given that it does not carry the slavery, racism and colonialism baggage, unlike France and the UK?

Nothing illustrates better the ease with which the FrancaAfrique policy is capable of destabilizing our entire African continent than this: The AU has passed a controversial resolution to expel any member-state whose government comes to power through a coup or through any unconstitutional change of power. Good enough as far as the resolution goes. But what is the reality? Outside powers like your country can sponsor their paid agents in African countries to overthrow legitimate, constitutional governments. What is the consequence? The poor African country is expelled from the AU. And what happens to external powers like France or the UK or the US, who, as everyone knows, and as the Al Jazeera TV documentary on the FrancaAfrique policy made abundantly clear, can indirectly instigate coups and other forms of unconstitutional change of power in Africa? They go scot-free and are not punished by the AU whatsoever. The result is further deepening divisions and mistrust amongst African leaders, whilst the real outside instigators of coups and or other unconstitutional change of government in Africa smugly sit on the AU’s sidelines, happy at the mayhem they cause in Africa.

Currently Egypt’s expulsion from the AU, and its resultant war of words with the SA government, is a prime example of this point I am seeking to make. As a result, Western and other non-African powers are more involved in the Egyptian crisis than the AU. Very strange. Yet the new Egyptian army coup leadership will never turn on the US or European countries like France. They instead blast the SA government. Either the AU must revisit this resolution about unconstitutional change of power, or it must also impose stern sanctions on Western and other external governments that sponsor such coups and unconstitutional change of power in Africa.

Look now at what your country, the US, the UK and NATO, in defiance of the AU leadership, have created in Libya following their anti-Gaddafi “regime change” and their installation into “power vacuum” (and not into power) of armed, lawless Libyan militias, including some aligned to Al Qaeda, which account to no central Libyan government. Can the AU find a means to punish and sanction your country, France, as well as other Western countries like the US, the UK and Denmark, for the absolute mess they have created in Libya through their unconstitutional ouster of the Gaddafi regime? Or is it easier to expel the Central African Republic, or Madagascar, or Guinea, or Mauritania, or Niger, or Egypt, from the AU, than it is to confront powerful countries like yours, the US, the UK and other NATO members, who engage in or abet the same coups and or other unconstitutional change of power in Africa? Otherwise the AU is busy shooting itself in the foot, to the great satisfaction of the West, by this decision on unconstitutional change of power within AU members. To pick on the weak, just because they are weak, but allow the powerful to go scot-free, is not right and must end. At this rate, the western interferers in African affairs will soon instigate an alternative AU made up of expelled coup plotters, African unconstitutional regime changers and bloodthirsty power-mongers like the current CAR president, who came to power through the barrel of a gun.

Mr. President, you represent a French agenda fundamentally in contradiction with Africa’s agenda for renewal. Your sunshine smile during your visit to South Africa this week will not hide this fact. In her Guardian article of 15 September 2011, Angelique Chrisafis, reporting on your unpresidential “love-triangle”, described you as “portly joker.” Yet you and your FrancaAfrique policy are no “portly joker” to us Africans. You are a deadly, core anti-African and pro-French force, in the final analysis. And having read your former lover, Segolene Royal’s writings about you, you are neither a good, trustworthy man and lover, at a personal level, if her 30 year intimate knowledge of you is anything to go by.

We are not fooled by UNESCO either, which is based in your country, for conferring on you some dubious honor for your destructive military adventures in Mali, which the UN Security Council has controversial conferred some modicum of internationality legitimacy on. This dubious, undeserved honor and legitimacy, in my opinion, do not lessen the gravity of your direct responsibility for what will transpire in Mali in the next few decades ahead. To use the thin excuse of protecting the ancient Timbaktu manuscripts as a means to recolonize Mali, is totally unacceptable and intolerable. It is even less comprehensible why the same Paris-based UNESCO never conferred the same honor on former SA president, Thabo Mbeki, for the excellent efforts and financial support he and his former government expended on safeguarding the same ancient Timbaktu manuscripts pre-Mali civil war, for quite a long period at that. Why you, and not him, are more deserving of this UNESCO honor, when Mbeki never ordered the killing of a single Malian, whilst the French armed forces you command have killed at least hundreds of Mali’s Tuaregs in north Mali? This funny UNESCO gesture is as ill-advised as the Nobel Peace Committee conferring on US president Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, or the UN’s secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, promoting the UN Security Council resolution authorizing your armed forces to slaughter the forces belonging to former Ivory Coast president Gbagbo during the recent Ivory Coast civil war, in order to advantage a side that was a favorite to France in the civil war. This too is a war crime that should be prosecuted by the ICC, which has unfairly decided to prosecute only one side of Ivory Coast civil war that was led by former president Gbagbo.

At this rate, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netenyahu would not be amiss to entertain the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize for Israel’s continuing long-standing, brutal and inhuman occupation of, and sustained, ongoing repression in, Palestine. Why not? And who would blame him for entertaining such a zany idea, in the circumstanes?

If you really deserve the UNESCO prize for your naughty activities and military adventure in Mali and Niger, why didn’t you volunteer to do the same, alone, in Syria, as you did in Mali? Both are former French colonies after all. What is the differentiator between them then? Is Syria not a far worse civil war and humanitarian situation, much more deserving of French military intervention than Mali? Did you need the US military cover to intervene in Mali? Why didn’t you go into Syria as a Terminator of the Allewites and other Syrian minorities? Why did you declare yourself ready for militarily intervene in Syria, but only if the US initiated the unlawful military aggression against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus? Instead, you went into Mali like the Terminator of Mali’s oppressed and marginalized Tuaregs – no hesitancy, no qualms. In Mali, you claim to be fighting Al Qaeda-aligned terrorists. In Syria, you are the chief western patron and comforter of Al Qaeda-aligned anti-Assad terrorists, supplying them with finance, intelligence, military know-how, French special operation forces to train them, and even providing them with French diplomatic cover around the world? Mali and Syria, viewed in one, uninterrupted continuum, show the true, unethical basis and texture of France’s foreign policy under your presidential stewardship

The point is that you have only pure contempt for African armies’ fighting capabilities and prowess, especially in former French colonies. But the thought of Hebullah in Lebanon/Syria and of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards sent fear-factor jingles up your head, regarding a possible quagmire intervention in Syria.

After Napoleon, weak African countries are where modern-day French generals seek to outdo Clausewitz in their military fantasies and war theories, and where they accumulate undeserved military honors. It is why your defence force is running amok in several of these former French colonies in Africa. Your French armed forces would never dream to do the same in Vietnam, or Louisianna in the US, or in Waterloo in Belgium, or on the approaches to Moscow in winter, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or even in Syria. Africa, for lazy French military planners and strategists, remains the template on which to play out their wildest military fantasies, without fearing to be clobbered Dien Bien Phu-style for doing so, whilst registering easy military victories over “Don Quixotic windmills-type” African armed forces. Because many African states remain so weak and fragile, partly due to your country’s FrancaAfrique policy.

It is no wonder that a recent opinion poll in France on your performance as French president, revealed an interesting facet of France. According to this opinion poll, a clear majority of the French people completely disapproved of your presidential performance on domestic French issues, eg on the economy. But, very oddly, a healthy French majority approved of your military adventure and naughty military games in Mali. So, were it not for Mali, the French public would have dismissed you completely as an unmitigated presidential disaster, according to this opinion poll. Put differently, I understood this French opinion poll to have said that the majority of the French people think you are a bad president for them domestically, but that you make an outstanding, terrific French president on Mali, an African country; a rather particularly confounding and peculiar French way of assessing their state leaders’ presidential all-round performance. What is a reject in France should be houte couture in Africa, seems to be the French reasoning according to this opinion poll.

What utter hogwash.

In such a situation, what would ever incentivize a serving French president to bring to an end French military adventures and naughty activities in Africa? It makes perfect domestic and electoral sense for a French president to therefore continue with France’s destabilizing neo-colonial FrancaAfrique project ad infinitum, which was started by former French president and War-time hero, de Gaulle. Thus French president’s gain is Africa’s loss.

CONCLUSION.

Mr. President, I was greatly amused to listen this past Saturday to the interview CNN’s Richard Quest conducted with your Finance Minister, Pierre Moscouvici, on the margins of the World Bank’s meeting in Washington, in which Moscouvici bizarrely complained about “French-bashing.” Well, to paraphrase a famous, hilarious and cartoonist SA Vodacom advert, “the French have been doing it in Africa”, meaning the French have been Africa-bashing, literally and physically, since the first French colonialists set foot on the African soil, leaving utter destruction, bloodbath and underdevelopment in their wake. And now that the world is refusing to plant a French kiss on Minister Moscouvici’s cheek, he is crying foul and declaring it all a horrible “French-bashing”, and the end of the world as the French know it. Just imagine what your Finance Minister would do were he to be told that Francophone Africa has served irrevocable divorce papers on France, and that it has renounced the unequal monetary union with France.

Or maybe we do not really have to imagine it. Maybe this is the real cause of the calamity that befell Ivory Coast under its former president Gbagbo, now languishing at the ICC.

So, I should not have been amused by your Finance Minister’s interview with CNN’s Richard Quest. This is serious and deadly.

One African caricature which is popular in the West is that there is nothing African leaders like than the chance to go on official duty to capitals of major western countries, which, without fail, double up as shop-until-you-drop-dead-in-the-middle-of-New York’s-Fifth Avenue therapeutic sessions for their incurable shopaholic First Ladies. But a more accurate caricature may be of a French president’s love-affair with visits to former French colonies in Africa. Again the recent Al Jazeera TV documentary gave a glimpse of this French foreign policy facet, focusing particularly on the nepotistic former French president Francois Mitterand and his son’s excursions into some of the Francophone countries in Africa.

The only difference is that the French leaders, when they visit Africa, “shop”, for lack of a better term, for whole African elites, whole chunks of African economies, and whole national industries in African countries; whilst African leaders’ wives shop for clothes, underwears, hats, bangles, goggles, purses, perfumes, jewels, game consols and expensive cars, when they “shopaholic” in western capitals.

Lastly, President Hollande, you and your FrancaAfrique team go around Africa using the possibility of an Afrcan permanent seat in a reformed UN Security Council to play South Africa against Nigeria, or Algeria against South Africa and Nigeria, or all these three countries against Egypt, and all these four big African countries against the smaller Francophone countries. However, the truth is that a real, honest UN Security Council reform in the future should result in France and the UK losing their permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Period. Both of you are have-been powers, who are desperately clinging to an outdated UN Security Council veto and your useless nuclear arsenal to remain relevant in global affairs. That and your warmongering readiness to join in any and all US military campaigns against any perceived US enemy in the developing world, unless the UK Parliament thinks otherwise, make you and David Cameron poodles of US policy of military aggression around the world, and thus most unsuited to wield the veto concomitant to being a permanent members of the UN Security Council. Without the current veto and your warmongering, your country France, and the UK, would be second-tier world powers. In fact, in the next twenty years, none of your two economies will be in the top ten economies of the world by the measure of purchasing power parity. In the next thirty years, Nigeria, a glorious African power on the rise – an awakening black giant -, will have a much better prospect of being in the top ten of world economies by purchasing power parity, than your two countries’ declining and moribund economies. Yet your country France, like the UK, craves nothing more than to fancy themselves as “the international community”, or some world powers. Wake up and smell coffee.

So, Mr. President Francois Hollande, keep your France and let us keep our Africa.

And just to remind you, all of west and central Africa is an intrinsic part of Africa, and has never, is not and will never be an extension of France, however much the French men like yourself and their dependent African sahibs delude themselves.

Even better still, keep your neo-colonial feet from the sacred soil of Saartjie Baartman, whom your country and French eugenists so viciously dehumanized. Call off your state visit to our country, if you still can. That would be a good gesture to Saartjie Baartman, I presume, who will violently rotate in her new burial home in South Africa, upon hearing the sounds of your footsteps on our sacred South African soil. You and your countrymen have already caused her too much pain as it were. Let her be and rest peacefully. Feet off our country, I say to you. Your visit this week will not achieve anything for Saartjie Baartman, but will serve to arouse her angry, ancestral spirit again. This will most certainly cause you to lose the next French presidential election, believe you me, and quite possibly to Dominique de Villepin. But if you fail to cancel your visit, at least go and be cleansed by African traditional healers near Saartjie Baartman’s grave, and offer her a public French presidential apology, on behalf of the whole French Republic, for defiling her in French eugenics laboratories for so long. That would be a small gesture from you, but a good start to connecting with Africa on an equal footing, at least spiritually.

But because I know you will not heed my advice, I call upon you to at least take note of the wise words of one of the greatest Frenchmen ever to live, one of France’s beautiful white men, besides Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Satre, I mean Jean-Jacque Roussouw, written in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and on Social Contract:

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”

Sadly, Mr. President Francois Hollande, were Jean Jacque Roussow to rise from the dead this week, to witness your first presidential visit to post-apartheid South Africa of Saartjie Baartman, he would most probably declare, dolefully:

“Africans are born free, but everywhere France and other western countries want to put neo-colonial chains back on them”.

I hope you will use your presidential visit to SA this week to, at least, publicly commit France to putting a real end to her perfidious neo-colonial FrancaAfrique policy.

That would be something. That would be true, presidential noblesse oblige.

Monsieur President Francois Hollande, s’ il vouz plait, vouz ne bienvenue pas ici a Afrique du Sud!

Merci!

2nd Cediablog

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://www.cedia.co.za
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
isaac@cedia.co.za
Twitter : Cedia6
Facebook : Cedia Cedia
LinkedIn : Cedia Cedia
Google+ : isaac mogotsi
Cedia Pay-Off Line: Dynamic Thought – Positive Action.
Cedia Directors : Isaac M. Mogotsi – Executive Chairman; Saul S. Pila – Chief Operating Officer.
14 October 2013