Monthly Archives: March 2014

IT’S RUSSIA, NOT AFRICA, BLOODY STUPID: THE UKRAINIAN FASCIST PUTSCH, WESTERN DIPLOMATIC HYPOCRISY AND SOUTH AFRICA’S EFFEMINATE CRIMEA POLICY.

TOPIC: IT’S RUSSIA, NOT AFRICA, BLOODY STUPID: THE UKRAINIAN FASCIST PUTSCH, WESTERN DIPLOMATIC HYPOCRISY AND SOUTH AFRICA’S EFFEMINATE CRIMEA POLICY.

INTRODUCTION.

In one of its promotional audio clips, which has become a kind of its signature debate emblem, Power FM, the new Johannesburg, northern suburb-based radio station presumably catering predominantly to the so-called black  middle class of the Gauteng province of South Africa, former  president Thabo Mbeki can be heard, in his typical deep monotone voice, intoning:

“It would be good if, in the future, you heard people say, if you want to know the truth about what is happening in the world, switch onto Power FM.”

Or something to that effect.

In search of the truth about the volatile situation in Crimea, and the tensions over it between Russia and Ukraine, as well as between Russia and the West over Ukraine itself , I have been switching onto Power FM the last few weeks, taking a cue from Mbeki’s advice.

After all, I paid a warm tribute to Thabo Mbeki’s diplomatic panache in my Politicsweb article entitled “The master diplomacy of Thabo Mbeki”, which appeared on 18 April 2012. So, I normally take Mbeki’s glibs and recommendations quite seriously.

His Power FM one is no exception.

But, instead of enlightenment on the Crimean crisis of February-March 2014,  I have been hugely disappointed, if not outrightly misinformed, I believe, by Power FM.

Since the outbreak of the Crimean crisis, Power FM’s highly experienced radio journalist and host, Tim Modise, has made a regrettable habit of inviting Yarik Turiasnkyi of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), who has made it his business to spew out endless and unrefined Russophobe propaganda and mindless rants every time he is invited by the radio station to comment on the Crimean crisis, to his Power FM Breakfast Show.

Yarik’s general line is that the Ukrainian Constitution does not allow for the kind of referendum recently held in Crimea, which Russia supported and encouraged, and that Poland and the Baltic states are frightened by Russia’s activities in Crimea. He has proven  incapable of directing a single critical remark towards the post-Fascist putsch authorities in Kiev. His open Russophobe bias did not prevent Power FM from interviewing him several times since the outbreak of the Crimean crisis. Power FM’s granting of an opportunity to Yarik to over-indulge and revel in his unbridled anti-Russian intellectual fantasies is mind-boggling. So blatant has Yarik become in his anti-Russian sentiments that when, after his latest interview on Power FM, Tim Modise read the tweets sent by Power FM listeners, several Power FM tweeps correctly and bitterly complained about Yarik’s open anti-Russian bias.

The pertinent question of course is why, if Yarik Tuarianskyi feels so defensive and precious about the Ukrainian Constitution, he is unable to bring himself to condemn the thuggish Fascist criminal putsch carried out by Svaboda- and Right Sector-supported Euro Maidan protestors, which violated the same Ukrainian Constitution, Ukrainian legality and even the agreement entered into between the deposed Ukrainian government, the three mediating Foreign Ministers of the EU and leaders of the Euro Maidan protestors like the boxer VitalyKlitchko? Is this really such an unimportant and inconvenient small detail to be easily overlooked and brushed aside by Yarik?

Seemingly not satiated by Yarik Turianskyi’s one-sided and one-dimensional interpretation of developments around the Crimean crisis on Tim Modise’s Power Breakfast Show, Power FM’s Thabiso “TT” Thema invited him again on his Power FM Afternoon Drive Show on 24 March 2014. And again Yurik did not waste time to reveal his Russophobe instincts and mindset.

At this stage, what came to my mind is: Why is the Power FM radio station  not even deigning to be impartial and objective by giving a  pro-Moscow voice the same radio platform to counter Yarik Turianskyi’s shrill anti-Russian propaganda, whilst allowing his Russophobe feelings to run amok? Isn’t it that the Russian Federation maintains a big Embassy in Pretoria, which Power FM can invite in for a chat on the Crimea crisis? In addition, we have many Russian businesspeople and scholars who are plying their trade in South Africa, who regularly visit our country? Could the radio station not find one who could challenge Yarik Turianskyi’s pro-NATO, pro-USA, pro-western Ukraine, pro-Baltics and pro-EU blather on the Crimean/Ukrainian crisis? I believe, with a little effort, this could have been easily done by Given Mkhari’s Power FM.

Invited also by Power FM’s Tim Modise on 14 March 2014 on his Power Breakfast Show was another analyst, this time former South African ambassador to Turkey, Tom Wheeler,  who was hardly a major improvement on Yarik Turianskyi, and who proceeded to more or less regurgitate the same misleading line of reasoning on the Crimean crisis as Yarik Turianskyi, his fellow researcher at SAIIA.

Given that the ANC, South Africa’s ruling party, has so many of its cadres, including leading lights in our society like former president Thabo Mbeki, former Minister Ronnie Kasrils and our ambassador to China, Bheki Langa, who spent a good time of their lives acquiring their academic, revolutionary and anti-apartheid skills in Moscow and other Soviet cities during the struggle against apartheid, why couldn’t Power FM invite any of them in for a chat also?

Power FM management must certainly have come across these two passages from Vladimir Shubin’s biography of the exiled ANC entitled “ANC – A View From Moscow”:

“Ronnie Kasrils, who trained at Odessa together with Joe Modise and Mabhida, happened to be the only white , and many years later recalled that he was sometimes asked: “Pochemy byeli chelovek?’ (Why a white person?)” (page 48, 2008, Jacana Media).

Of course Odessa mentioned by Shubin is the same Russian-speaking part of the now much-contested southern Ukraine.

Shubin also wrote:

“In spite of their intelligence services, South African government officials and ‘experts’ knew surprisingly little about the Crimean training facility. Even though a number of South Africans who trained there were later captured, the name of the camp was never correctly recorded.” (page 64, ibid).

Here Shubin reveals that a number of ANC and SACP cadres were trained in Crimea, which has just been annexed by the Russian Federation.

A stronger and clearer historical connection between South Africa and Crimea is hard to come by. This alone should be a firm basis for all South Africans to be interested in the current crisis in Crimea and around southern Ukraine.

It would not be difficult for Power FM to locate a few of these surviving freedom struggle ANC and SACP veterans to interview about their own experiences of the Crimean peninsula and southern Ukraine in the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s.

These two SAIIA analysts, – Yarik Turianskyi and Tom Wheeler -, did not bother to mention Russia’s vital concerns about the pro-West Fascist coup against the deeply corrupt but legitimate and democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, the Fascist putsch’s blatant shredding to pieces of an agreement reached between the Yanukovych government and the more moderate Euro Maidan protest leaders, the post-Fascist putsch’s anti-Russian drive, including its decision to prohibit the position of Russian as Ukraine’s official language, nor did these two SAIIA analysts display keenness to factor in Russia’s historic, vital and  legitimate geostrategic interests in Ukraine. They neither mentioned the fact that Russia has been legitimately concerned, and even alarmed, by the West, and primarily the USA’s reckless determination to expand both NATO and the European Union (EU) eastward towards Russia’s own borders. Instead they played up the recent anodyne EU summit in the Baltics which sought to pave the way for Ukraine’s accession to the EU, a dubious project that has been pushed hard by the EU members in the form of Poland and the Baltic states.

This sort of one-sided and ideologically-driven diplomatic analysis and public discourse should be totally unacceptable in a non-aligned constitutional democracy such as post-apartheid South Africa is. South Africa has stopped to be a white outpost of Europe and the USA since 1994. We cannot afford to allow external disagreements and squabbles amongst foreign powers to color, in a jaundiced way, how we correctly assess South Africa’s long-term diplomatic interests, just so that we promote our own sectarian and sectional elite interests.

The era of pre-1994 knee-jerk anti-Russian, because it was also anti-Communist, reaction should be put behind us and in our occiput. It has no place in post-apartheid South Africa. This is so especially because Russia is a friendly capitalist market economy, a growing trading partner for post-1994 South Africa, a substantial investor in the South African economy, and an important emerging market in its own right. Russia is also a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), alongside South Africa and the western countries. In addition, Russia worked quite hard to have South Africa, even when many were arguing undeservedly so, to be included in the Brics grouping.

Power FM only slightly improved matters, following the savaging of Yarik Turianskyi by its tweeeps, by inviting professor Anton van Nieuwerk of Wits University to an interview on the Crimean crisis. He was also interviewed by Tim Modise on his Power Breakfast Show. Anton was undoubtedly much more balanced in his analysis of the Crimean/Ukrainian crises than either Yarik Turianskyi or Tom Wheeler. By far. He went out of his way, during the interview, to point to the fact that there were long-standing, historical ties between Russia and Crimea, which have existed for centuries, in fact since Crimea’s conquest by General Potomkin, one of Czarina Catherine the Great’s ablest Russian generals, in the late 1770s, until Crimea was gifted to Ukraine by the Soviet (and highly capricious, Ukraine-born) ruler, Nikita  Kruschev in 1954. He further indicated that Russia was legitimately concerned by post-Cold War NATO and EU’s expansion towards its borders. He conceded that Crimea was lost forever by Ukraine, “gone”, it’s gone, gone”, as he put it during the interview. He also crucially pointed out that the new authorities in Kiev were too corrupt, “maybe undemocratic”, as he put it, and that Ukraine remained highly unstable.

What I still fail to understand is why all these three South African analysts deliberately avoided to interrogate the openly Fascist nature of the Banderian, vicious, and deeply racist political outfits of Svaboda and the Right Sector of western Ukraine, who acted as the violent ram-rod during the Euro Maidan’s recent unconstitutional, illegal and illegitimate overthrow of a legitimate and democratically-elected Ukrainian government of the former, and deeply corrupt, president Yanukovych government? Why down-play the role in the Euro Maidan’s Fascist putsch of these wholly undesirable western Ukrainian political misfits, and their subsequent anti-Russian provocations, like the totally unnecessary toppling of the statues in western Ukraine of Russian generals that fought Hitler’s Fascist military and liberated Ukraine from Hitler’s genocidal regime? (Be reminded that after the end of apartheid, black South Africans did not set about willfully toppling the statues of racist and apartheid rulers like H. Verwoerd, DF Malan and J. Vorster). Why are these matters not foregrounded in these three analysts’ narratives about the current Crimean/Ukrainian crisis and the West/Russian tensions over Ukraine? For what purpose and to what end their omission?

I say Anton’s intervention was only a slight improvement because I was comparing how Power FM itself handled the Crimean crisis interviews with how it was treating another diplomatic crisis South Africa’s official foreign policy establishment was dealing with at the same time, namely the tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats by South Africa and Rwanda.

Here Power FM did something very right, which it needed to have done with regard to the Crimean crisis as well from the outset.

In one of his usual, octane-charged Power FM slots in the last two weeks, Eusebius McKaiser, another of the radio’s hosts, invited the Rwandan Ambassador to South Africa and the leader of the Rwanda opposition to a debate about the political situation in Rwanda, and the ongoing assassinations of Rwandan political activists based in South Africa. That the Rwandan Ambassador at the end threw a petty, undiplomatic, “the-guilty-are-afraid” tantrum, and sulked away from the radio debate, is not the point here, important as that may be in the circumstances. What I seek to impress here is how the same Power FM radio station dealt so differently with two major diplomatic crises of the past few months.

In one case, it did not seek to give official Russia, not even through the Russian Ambassador or the official spokesman of the Russian Embassy in Pretoria, a right of reply to the sort of scurrilous Russophobe propaganda and distortions by Yarik Turianskyi and Tom Wheeler of SAIIA, who bruited that Russia is the party at fault on the crisis over Crimea. Yet on another similar debate, Power FM correctly gave the Rwandan Ambassador to South Africa and Rwanda’s South Africa-based opposition an equal hearing, if not equal footing.

What explains this shoddy treatment of Russia in the South African media in general on the Crimean crisis,  despite the fact that Russia remains a major global power to this day? And what explains such “deference” towards Rwanda, a tiny, troubled central African country, which recently suffered genocide, but which now allegedly flagrantly violates our territorial and diplomatic integrity, and whose leader, the spindly president Paul Kagame, is accused by his implacable Rwandan foes of being modern-day Africa’s assassin-in-chief?

I suspect the history of anti-Soviet communism in this country,  and thus the sub-consciously-embedded, knee-jerk, long-held Russophobe political instincts account for the bigger part of the answer to these questions. But this type of Cold War thinking carries enormous risks, not just for our post-1994 diplomacy, but for our deeper discernment and nuanced appreciation of the post-Cold War emerging and troubled world as well.

In short, crude Russophobia, like crude Afro-pessimism and Islamophobia, is very dangerous for our country’s standing internationally, and for its internal social cohesion as well.

It should definitely be beyond the pale in our public intellectual discourse.

Commenting on South Africa’s great achievement in gaining membership of the elite group of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), which, as a result of South Africa joining it, became BRICS, I wrote in my Mail and Guardian article of  06 January 2012, which was under the title “Rivalries that could rock SA’s diplomatic boat”, that:

“…belonging to groups such as Ibsa and Brics also represents a monumental challenge to South Africa’s post-1994 diplomacy…It is conceivable that in the future, severe challenges will confront South Africa’s diplomacy not from the usual expected quarters, but as a result of South Africa’s membership of Ibsa and Brics. There lies the real danger to our country’s diplomacy in the coming decades.” 

The Crimean crisis represents precisely such a massive test for our diplomacy and real danger to our international posture, because Russia, one of the leading members of BRICS, rightly expects South Africa to be on its side in its confrontation with the West over Crimea, just as China and India, two other Brics members, have correctly and unambiguously pledged their unwavering support to Russia over the Crimean crisis.

Yet South Africa’s diplomatic voice on the Crimean crisis has been so muted, and so muffled, that it can be said to be highly effeminate indeed. It is sotto voce that has taken former president Thabo Mbeki’s Zimbabwe-era “quiet diplomacy” to unprecedented lows. When the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) recently issued a statement on the Crimean crisis, through its spokesman, Clayson Monyela, it was so muddled that it did not make sense at all. Monyela, speaking on one of the SABC3 prime-time evening news bulletins, “called on Russia to bring to a speedy end its ‘occupation of Crimea’, because South Africa opposes any ‘occupation'”.

Or words to that effect.

Say what?

Clayson Monyela further pledged that South Africa, as the rotating chair of BRICS, would convene a BRICS meeting to discuss the crisis. One assumes that the recent meeting of the BRICS Foreign Ministers in The Hague, Netherlands, held on the margins of the Nuclear Security Summit, was a follow-up to this pledge.

However, the government of president Jacob Zuma, and DIRCO in particular, should be complimented for belatedly coming around to rightly characterizing the unconstitutional, illegitimate, illegal and violent hooligan Fascist criminal putsch in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in February 2014 as “a coup.” Indeed it is. And better late than never.

But it is interesting to contrast South Africa’s either muddled or muffled or effeminate reaction to the Crimean crisis with the clear and strong stance of support for Russia taken by India and China. No wonder that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in his address to the Russian Duma on the Crimean crisis, specifically commended and mentioned this support of India and China for Russia, whilst he made no mention of South Africa and Brazil’s “support.”

Interestingly, the only South African daily that has mustered a very correct, if not courageous, perspective on the Crimean crisis is The New Age.

In its thunderous editorial of 07 March 2014, entitled “Hypocrisy stifles Ukraine,”  the paper provided the most correct and unambiguous analysis and assessment of the Crimean crisis yet. It started the editorial with the sentence that read:

“The double standards and duplicity of the West on Ukraine are breathtaking.”

Bravo.

And they indeed are breathtaking.

But the editorial ‘s most powerful paragraph read:

“So why is it acceptable in Ukraine where groupings, including extreme Nazi elements, occupied Maidan Square in Kiev and forced the duly- and democratically-elected Presiddent Victor Yanukovych to flee? Why was there no Western outrage over the toppling of the of Egypt’s democratically-elected President Mohammed Mursi last year and his replacement by a military junta”, The New Age editorial further asked.

Hear! Hear1 Hear!…Encore!

I now ask as to why Power FM’s Tim Modise and Thabiso Thema did not seek these answers from Yarik Turianskyi or Thom Wheeler of SAIIA, when they were interviewing them? Why not even try to get the answers from Anton van Niekerk?

Why not?

The New Age’s editorial further lambasted the West for vilifying Russia’s president Vladimir Putin as “‘a new Hitler’, for simply wanting to protect his country’s interests in the Crimea where its Black Sea naval fleet is based.” The editorial also correctly pointed out that “it is not in the interest of Russia, Europe and the rest of the world for Ukraine to split or become  a conflict zone”, but that “a good start, however, is for the West to cease its blatant lies about what’s really happening in Ukraine.”

The geostrategic interests of the West dictate to it to continue with, and not to stop, its lies about the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. No wonder the USA Secretary of State, John Kerry, who served the USA occupation army in Vietnam as a willing combatant (and must have mowed down innocent Vietnamese struggling for their national independence and their country’s unification), and who also voted for president George W Bush’s illegal and under “false pretext of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)” invasion of Iraq in the USA Congress in March 2003, has the nauseating temerity to now lecture the world that it is oh so 19th century for a country to occupy or annex another.

I could not agree more with the very substance and general sentiment of The New Age editorial of 07 March 2014 on the Crimean crisis. But this need to wean oneself from telling lies is not a challenge just for the West, as The New Age seems to argue.

There has been considerable and deliberate misinformation and falsification around the crisis in Crimea and Ukraine by influential public opinion formers and intellectual circles in South Africa as well, including by our media, which matter must be faced head on, without any equivication.

CHAPTER ONE.

Crimea has a way of imposing itself on the consciousness of South Africans, in ways that are as perplexing as they are inexplicable.

The first time I heard about Crimea was about thirty nine years ago, whilst I was doing what was then called Standard Four in my village under apartheid’s Bantu Education in 1975. My English teacher had fallen in love with Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1951 classic, Florence Nightingale. She was greatly inspired by Nightingale’s legendary nursing work during the 1954-56 Crimean War involving Russia, Great Britain, Turkey and France. My teacher’s love for Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale made her to side with the British during the Crimean War, and to turn herself, like our Yarik Turianskyi of today, into a Russophobe. From her I sucked the first lactose of Russophobe propaganda. And so she decreed that Woodham-Smith’s biography would be our set work. To my great surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the classic then. It would be one of the school texts that would arouse my initial literary and civic duty interest. But unlike my primary school teacher, it would not be Florence Nightingale’s humanist exploits during the Crimean War that would captivate my mind. It was her pre-Crimean life in Europe and the UK, as well as her very painful path to what today we commonly refer to as “self-actualization”. In fact, some of Woodham-Smith’s earlier paragraphs would arouse my passion for public service as well. As it was our practice then, I literally memorized these two quotes of Nightingale from the Woodham-Smith biography:

“My mind is absorbed with the idea of the suffering of man, it besets me behind and before…all that poets sing of the glory of this world seems to me untrue. All the people I see are eaten up with care or pain or disease.”

And,

“What can an individual do towards uplifting the load of suffering from the hapless and miserable?”

After reading these two passages from Nightingale’s letters, I would not be able to see the poverty around my village in the same way. Nor would I be able to further convince myself that there  was nothing I could do to help challenge the systemic structures that caused such deep village poverty, and chiefly the racist white minority regime that ruled South Africa at the time.

There was to be another big surprise in my life related to Crimea.

As a student in Moscow, the capital of the then Soviet Union, I was given the opportunity to holiday during the summer vacation in Sochi, very close to Crimea, in 1985. Again in 1986, six months after the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine, the ANC HQ in Lusaka instructed me, then the head of the South African (basically ANC) Student Union in the Soviet Union, to visit Kiev and to check on the other ANC students studying there, as to whether they had not been adversely affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Chernobyl is about 150 kilometers from Kiev, so the concern was real. For the three days I spent in Kiev, I slept on the bed of Fana Hlongwane, who would later become the Legal Advisor to former Defense Minister Joe Modise in Nelson Mandela’s administration. Fana slept on the floor near me whilst we stayed together in his Kiev University dormitory room. During the winter of 1986, I visited Sevastopol in Crimea. In those days, communication was still slow, with no Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or SMS. Thus I got to know Kiev, Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula pretty well.

This, and the fact that I spent the total of eight years in Moscow, Soviet Russia as a student, makes me, I believe, acutely attuned to the tensions rocking the historic relationship between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the concerns of the people of Crimea at this time of their development.

I have been there; studied there; I observed whilst there; learned whilst there; and left part of me implanted there – a small part of my soul. Thus when the Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean peoples hurt, I too hurt deeply inside.

The current crisis is the third time Crimea muscles itself into my consciousness. Only that now clearly the risks, the fears and the dangers are infinitely more than those that followed the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in April 1986 and my subsequent visit to Soviet Kiev that year.

The more pressing reasons for understanding the dynamics informing the Crimean crisis today, as well as the Russia/West confrontation over Ukraine, are less poetic and emotional, and more prosaic and rationalist.

In one of the footnotes to his Das Kapital, Karl Marx quotes an authority on how by 1647 Holland had risen to become the world’s pre-eminent and undisputed superpower, after dominating the East Indian trade, its colonies in east Asia like modern-day Indonesia, and by ruthlessly exploiting its possession scattered around the world. In all likelihood, our forebears at the southern tip of Africa had heard about none of the epoch-making Dutch world pre-eminence. Yet five years later, in 1652, the very same dominant and hegemonic Dutch were knocking on the doors of our shores, metaphorically speaking, seeking new colonial conquests in our lands. Napoleon Bonaparte soon rose to make France another dominant European and world power. At the peak of his war conquests across Europe and the world, he was able to conquer the Cape colony, briefly, as France’s. He was thwarted later by the British, whose Industrial Revolution and global naval supremacy made them the new global superpower. In turn the British super-imposed themselves as our colonial masters for centuries to come. And during its rise as a new global industrial power and global hegemon, the USA saw nothing wrong in stealing over 100 million, by highly conservative estimates, of our able-bodied black Africans as slaves to work on its cotton plantations. When the Russian Czars occasionally permitted open and unrestraint pogroms against their Jewish populations, many of the Baltic and Russian Jews ended up on our shores. The clearest and most tragic awareness our African forefathers gained that the first world war was afoot was the sinking of Mendi and the perishing of our gallant black soldiers onboard, who had been frog-marched in the service of the British empire’ war with imperial Germany. Again during the European slaughter and genocide of the second world war, our people were frog-marched to fight for the white European empires, even though they did not fight in the literal sense, as they were made to do manual work. Soon followed the Cold War, during which our African countries were made to fight proxy wars of the two super-powers, namely the USA and the Soviet Union.

The moral of all this is that even when Africans had absolutely nothing to do with the quarrels and fights amongst Europeans, or between the Europeans and Americans, they often were the ones who paid the highest price, whether as slaves uprooted to the Americas, or as colonials occupied by European powers, or as minions of super-powers’ proxy wars during the Cold War.

There is nothing to say that the current confrontation between the West and Russia over Crimea will not again harm Africa and the Africans the most. Our tragic and sad history does indeed prove that ignorance has never been bliss for Africans. Nor has it ever guaranteed our immunity from unprovoked aggression and interference in our affairs by Europeans and or Americans. Our neutrality and innocence as Africans have never moved their stony and cruel hearts, nor prevented them from unleashing their unspeakable savagery and outright barbarity upon our African people.

To pretend otherwise is to ignore the bitter but voluble lessons of Africa’s history in the last five centuries. It is a patent dereliction of duty before Africa’s future generations. History shall not absolve us of such calculated historical ignorance and intellectual-cum-diplomatic passivity.

So, we need to follow the Crimean and Ukraine crises with uncharacteristic keenness and sharpness of the mind, so that we can avoid the kind of catastrophes that befell our African forefathers during previous and past quarrels and wars between Europeans, or between Europeans and Americans, from which catastrophes Africa has barely recovered.

The other compelling reason for keenly following the developments around the Crimean crisis was provided by the biographer of Adolf Hitler, and the author of the book “Fateful Choices – Ten Decisions That Changed The World” (The Penguin Press), Ian Kershaw, who demonstrated that “fateful choices made by the leaders of the world’s major powers within a mere nineteen months, between May 1940 and December 1941” provided the contours for the course of the second world war, and the post-war world we live in today.

We Africans need to know what types of decisions are taken by the same “world’s major powers” – namely, Russia, USA, Germany, UK, France, and other European countries, in the next nineteen months since the start of the Crimean crisis, and how such decisions will affect Africa’s future for the next century or even the next five centuries.

There are two important starting points to this end.

The first one is to have a good appreciation that in Russia, the USA, and the West in general, still face quite a considerable and formidable foe.

Russia is by far the largest country in the world. Its conquest of pieces of territories from Georgia in 2008, following a brief war between the two countries, and now its conquest of Crimea, means that the world’s largest country by land mass, which occupies one sixth of the earth’s surface, has also been effectively the only country in the whole world since the second world war, which has been adding new territories through military conquests, to its land mass. Russia has the world’s seventh largest population at 150 million people (after China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan, in that order). Its population and economic growth rates are not quite on steroids, but they remain formidable. Russia has by far Europe’s largest population, which is almost two times bigger than the next biggest population in Europe, meaning Germany’s. Russian land mass is only about 20% European and 80% Asian, thus Russian president Putin’s pet project of Eurasian Custom Union (ECU), as a counterpoint to the EU, is very compelling for its weak neighbors. It is important though to also bear in mind that close to 80% of Russians live in the European 20% of the country. But the import of all this is that USA president Barack Obama’s “pivot to the East” will have to, at some point, contend with Russia as both a Pacific and Eurasian power. Russia has the world’s largest tactical and strategic (including intercontinental, which can easily destroy the USA many times over) nuclear arsenal, by far bigger than the combined nuclear arsenal of the USA and NATO. In the Manichean, Lockesian post-Cold War world we live in, you need to walk around with an impressive swagger, whilst carrying a massive nuclear stick behind your back. It came as no surprise then when Robert Gates, the former USA Secretary for Defense in the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, revealed in his newly-released memoirs, Duty, that former USA vice president Dick Cheney was pushing hard for the de-nuclearisation of Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Imagine where Russia would be today under such a scenario. You in fact do not need to imagine such a scenario – just look at the self-same Ukraine, which, like South Africa and Kazakhstan, followed the USA’s questionable advice and denuclearized. It is this fact of massive Russian nuclear arsenal that has made the traditional USA military hawks, (others refer to them as the USA’s Neo-Nazis, given how Senator John McCain happily interacted and shook hands with leaders of western Ukraine’s Fascist Right Sector leaders in Kiev prior to the thuggish Nazi criminal putsch in Kiev), to readily concede that war with Russia over either Crimea or Ukraine “is off he table.” But it is also a fact which explains why the western countries of France, the UK, USA, and even NATO over Libya, are so happy to recolonize some African countries through the so-called R2P, because Africa lacks “the massive black nuclear bomb” to back up its unsteady and weak swagger on the global stage. The West cannot forget that “it’s Russia, not Africa, bloody stupid”, which they are dealing with over the Crimean crisis and the tensions over Ukraine. This lesson is not lost on black Africans, believe you me, despite bizarre protestations to the contrary by official African leaders, elected or otherwise. Russia is rich in a variety of minerals and natural resources like oil and gas, water, land, diamond, wood and forestry, gold, uranium, etc. Russia now has the world’s fourth biggest currency reserves after China, Japan and South Korea. Russia is a capitalist country, with a two-trillion dollar economy, although it will now more likely follow the more authoritarian model of tough internal political control of China, while freeing the capitalist potential of the Russian people across its vast land mass. Russia is a multinational state that include white Europeans (Russians proper), Moslems, Mongols, Chinese, Jews, Germans, Finns, Tartars, Cossacks, Ukrainians and other nationalities. The white European Russians however make up about 80% of the Russian population. Russia has a highly advanced space programme, which the USA uses to send its own cosmonauts to space. By its sheer continental size, massive European population, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and its independent streak, Russia will always be very threatening to elements of the West’s elites. These qualities also make it impossible for Russia to be subservient and submerged under the USA-dominated system of unipolarity and Washington Consensus. Yet again, this quality differentiate Russia from Africa.

It is Russia, not Africa, bloody stupid.

CONCLUSION.

The real challenge before Russian president Putin is not whether the West will impose token or serious sanctions, but whether he can allow for the real and authentic development of unfettered Russian capitalism. If he unleashes the authentic and free development of Russian capitalism, something which Russia has never experienced since its founding in Kiev-Rus in the tenth century, then Russia will emerge even a greater global superpower at the end of the putative western sanctions than it emerged at the end of the second world war. And it is also this, if permitted, which will ensure that Russia does not lose Cold War 2, as it did the first Cold War.

But it is also absolutely vital that as president Putin and the Russians stare down the dark, menacing and ominous revenge-ist Fascist and neo-Nazi scumbags gathering apace in Kiev under the tutelage of the USA, EU, NATO and Germany, it should confront its own vile demons of despicable racism and Fascist thinking of Russia’s far-right in its dealing with both Russians of a darker hue from the south of Russia, as well as with Africans and the black folk from around the Diaspora, who are living, studying or visiting Russia.

Otherwise Russia’s understandable abhorrence and opposition to western Ukraine’s Tsotsi-style Fascist and Banderian criminal scumbags of Svaboda and Right Sector will just be a proxy for Russia’s greater nationalist project of dominating both eastern and western Europe.

The second matter to bear in mind is how much the leaders and elites of the USA and EU have miscalculated in their dealings with Russia over both crises in Crimea and Ukraine. I am not just referring to the West’s bizarre support to the Fascist-dominated post-coup government in Kiev. In light of the West’s previous support for legislated racism and apartheid in South Africa, and the West’s calling of the ANC, PAC, BC and Nelson Mandela “terrorists” for fighting for the freedom we enjoy today, this line of thinking in the West has a rather disreputable pedigree. This is better revealed, as The New Age editorial of 07 March 2014 asserted, by the West’s ongoing and deeply shameful support for the vile and brutal military junta in Cairo, which, like the western Ukrainian hooligan Fascist criminal enterprise passing itself off for some semblance of a functioning government in Kiev, came to power through a mass-manipulated, unconstitutional , illegitimate and illegal coup d’Etait, which overthrew a legitimate and democratically-elected government. Yet this does not trouble the West’s conscience as much as the Crimean crisis seems to.

Following the illegal NATO aerial bombardment of Libya and the ouster and extra-judicial execution of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi by the USA/NATO/EU and UN secretary general-supported Libyan and Al Qaeda-aligned Islamic extremists, thousands of black Libyans and black Africans in Libya were either summarily executed or illegally interned in inhumane prisons by these vile Libyan militias. At no stage did the USA, EU, NATO and the UN secretary general call for these lawless Libyan militias to be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Yet a few years later, less than 100 Euro Maidan protestors in Kiev were shot dead by snipers from rooftops of buildings around the major Kiev square. According to the leaked telephone conversation between the EU’s Foreign Policy chief, Catherine Ashton and the Estonian Foreign Minister, the Estonian Foreign Minister was informing Ashton that his information from Kiev was that the Euro Maidan ultra-radicals of Svaboda and Right Sector Fascist outfits did some of the killings of the Euro Maidan protestors from the rooftops of Kiev buildings. But this has not deterred the USA, EU, NATO, and Germany-supported hooligan Fascist putsch rump government in Kiev to call for unconstitutionally ousted former president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, to be referred to the ICC.

Are you able to pick out the difference in the way these western powers dealt with post-Gaddafi Libya and post-Yanukovych Ukraine? The death of less than 100 East Europeans against the deaths and or illegal internment of thousands of innocent black Libyans and black Africans in Libya following the ouster of Muamar Gaddafi? Where is the scale of justice?

It is all such downright hypocrisy, which stinks to high heavens, if you ask me.

The ineptness of the USA, EU, NATO and German diplomacy over Crimea and Ukraine is most disturbing. The 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine should have been for the West a dress-rehearsal for the current tensions over Crimea and Ukraine.

The Economist cover story for its 27 November-03 December 2004 edition read “Ukraine on the brink.” On 06 December 2004 Newsweek magazine led with the cover story “Can Europe Help This Man? – Ukraine’s Yushchenko brings His Country To A Historic Crossroads.” On July 2006 Time magazine led with a G-8 Report under the cover story “The Power of Russia’s oil.” On 17 July 2006 Newsweek magazine led with the cover story that read “How Putin Runs Russia – And Why Europe Should Fear The Results. Plus: Who Needs The G8?”

But arguably the best analysis of post-Soviet Ukraine, and the post-Orange Revolution dynamics in that sad country, which, to all intents and purposes, would be correctly called “a failed state” if it were located in Africa, was provided by Arkady Moshes in June 2007, in a brilliant article under the title “Ukraine: Domestic Changes and Foreign Policy Reconfiguration.’ (See http://www.StrategicStudiesInsttute.army.mil/). Moshes’ piece remains indispensable read in trying to understand how the West has so horribly blundered and mishandled its strategic, vital and transformational relationship with Putin’s Russia since 2000 to date, especially over Ukraine.

All these western media platforms provided amazing, and even predictive, analyses of post-Soviet Ukraine, which, seemingly, the West’s policy wonks and political leaders decided to ignore. As a result, the crisis, and Russia’s annexation, of Crimea has literally hit the West’s political elites between their eyes, like an Icelandic volcanic eruption, completely clouding their view and immobilizing their sense of what is right and wrong in their important dealings with an assertive, swashbuckling, rising and resurgent Russia under president Putin.

The stark, precipitous decline in the EU’s overall strategic brilliance and mastery of its geostrategic environment was best captured by the former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing in a 26 March 2007 interview with Newsweek magazine. In that prophetic interview, D’Estaing declared, in answering one of the questions posed to him by Newsweek as to whether he “hadn’t imagined a bunch of new countries coming in” into the EU :

“Nobody had. [In 1978], when I asked the German chancellor, a remarkable man, Helmut Schmidt, about German reunification, he said, ‘it will happen one day, but not in my lifetime.’ We didn’t see it coming. Yet after it happened, Europe said, ‘Come in, right away’, without reflection, without organization.” (Article, “The Lack of Vision Thing”, Newsweek, 26 March 2007, page 37).

The race for NATO and EU’s eastward expansion towards Russia’s western borders, primarily driven and stoked by the USA’s imperial agenda to attain what Condoleezza Rice, the former USA National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under president George W. Bush, referred to as the USA’s post-Cold War imperative for a “full-spectrum global dominance”, which really boiled down to the USA’s single-minded determination to do everything possible to prevent the emergence of another competitive global superpower rival, like the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, is really at the root of the Crimean crisis and the Russian/West ongoing confrontation over Ukraine.

Western Europe and the EU may still pay a very heavy price for their blind and uncritical faith in unbridled and ‘hyper-frenetic’ USA’s imperial global unipolarity and its ahistoric, as well as unreasonable, agenda to prevent both Russia and China, or any emerging power for that matter, breaking out to become the world’s second and third or fourth global superpower(s), alongside the USA itself.

The EU should rather listen to the recent advice of the self-same former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who has recently been quoted by the German press as bitterly decrying the West’s confrontational posture and policy towards Putin’s Russia over both Crimea and Ukraine.

Can western Europe and the EU leaders regain their mojo for the “Vision Thing”, to paraphrase Newsweek of March 2007?

11th Cedia blog.
28 March 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA).
Cedia Email Address: isaac@cedia.co.za
Cedia Website : http://www.cedia.co.za
Cedia Blog : https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
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THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES: PART THREE.

Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa

TOPIC: THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES –  PART THREE.

“When we accuse others, we make rhetoric. When we accuse ourselves, we make poetry.” WB Yeats.

CONCLUSION.

Our political opposition revels in rhetoric, whilst being perennially incapable of producing uplifting oppositional poetry. This makes the ruling ANC doubling lucky, despite it being in the worst place now politically in all its history. Firstly, it becomes quickly clear from the rhetoric of the opposition parties that in fact, the only thing the opposition parties hate much more than they hate the ANC is one another. Secondly, the entire internal political culture of our opposition parties falls far short of what the ANC has to offer in terms of its internal “democratic centralist” culture. So the opposition parties are not just weak relative to the dominant ANC. They are also weak when viewed against one another, and on their own…

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THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES: PART THREE.

TOPIC: THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES –  PART THREE.

“When we accuse others, we make rhetoric. When we accuse ourselves, we make poetry.” WB Yeats.

CONCLUSION.

Our political opposition revels in rhetoric, whilst being perennially incapable of producing uplifting oppositional poetry. This makes the ruling ANC doubling lucky, despite it being in the worst place now politically in all its history. Firstly, it becomes quickly clear from the rhetoric of the opposition parties that in fact, the only thing the opposition parties hate much more than they hate the ANC is one another. Secondly, the entire internal political culture of our opposition parties falls far short of what the ANC has to offer in terms of its internal “democratic centralist” culture. So the opposition parties are not just weak relative to the dominant ANC. They are also weak when viewed against one another, and on their own individually. These parties are thus unappealing to the majority of the South African voters not just as compared to the ANC, but also when viewed in their own right as well. That amounts to a double-jeopardy weakness, if not a double whammy.

What is more, our opposition parties, who make a living by daily and routinely criticizing the ruling ANC, have a deep dislike for criticism directed at them. This is not just a question of defensiveness on their part. It is fundamentally a matter of an unacknowledged inferiority complex on the part of our opposition parties brought about by their supernumerary nature in our politics (over hundred political opposition parties for a country with 25.3 million registered voters), as well as by their legendary political failures to perform their basic and historic oppositional role to the satisfaction of the black and democratic majority in our country.

Our opposition parties are hardly paragons of correctness and virtue when it comes to matters of their internal party political health. Many of them are in fact self-pathologised in their glaring inability to bring order and stability in their own internal affairs. Chief amongst the political opposition’s pathologies is their incapacity to develop consented to, time-tested and predictable rules for party leadership succession.

The greatest political achievement and legacy of the 1871 Paris Commune of Workers was the consecration of the democratic principle of recall of elected officials by those who elect them. As Frederick Engels put it in his 1891 Preface to Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France, the Paris Commune “…realized the urgent need to safeguard itself against its own deputies and bureaucrats by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall any time.”

It is sad to note that South Africa’s relatively new democracy has no recourse to “safeguard itself” from the failing opposition parties, because our democracy lacks the fair dinkum mechanisms to recall leaders of failed, failing and malfunctioning opposition parties, including those splitting along factional lines, in the interest of enhancing the quality of our democratic and multi-party parliamentary system.

So, despite the obvious fact that i’Nkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s IFP party has lost control of its former KwaZulu Bantustan administrative powerbase, has lost the power to govern the KwaZulu Natal (KZN) province, has lost control over several KZN municipalities and has also lost many of its own members to the now resurgent KZN ANC, as well as to the newly-established National Freedom Party (NFP), IFP party members seem to lack genuine and transparent internal, democratic IFP means at their ready disposal “to safeguard themselves” from the spectacularly failing and geriatric leadership of i’Nkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who has been the IFP leader much longer than the much-reviled president Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has been our northern neighbor’s head of state. If the IFP’s recent political and electoral setbacks are not reason good enough to “recall” the aged IFP leader, what is? Do members of the IFP really believe in the naughty idea that i’Nkosi Buthelezi is irreplaceable and indispensable? Are IFP members hoping that death will intervene on their behalf and achieve for the IFP leadership succession what it achieved recently for the Minority Front?

Despite driving COPE into the mudsludge through his leadership battles with Mbazima Shilowa, Terror Lekota is still assured of continuing leadership of the truncated rump of what is left of the cannibalized COPE. And he is just very happy he has politically survived to see another day in the South Gauteng court in his bitter fight with his former colleague, Shilowa. The thought that he should tender his resignation for his role in disappointing over 1 million voters who chose to trust and believe in COPE in the 2009 election does not ever cross his mind.

There is no laughter in the UDM power corridors at the silly boast by General Bantu Holomisa that his party will grow its national vote from less that 1% to about 6%. If you hear Holomisa say it as he is feted by our liberal commercial media, you would think that he is about to inflict a massive defeat on the ANC with his envisaged increase in support for his Eastern Cape-based party from near zero to 6% in the national election this year.

Some of our single-digit percent tiny opposition parties are now just too embarrassed to even hazard a prediction regarding their electoral performance in the election this year. They all ooze the staggering pessimism of the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes. “It is all useless. All useless”, they appear to murmur under their frustrated, electoral breath.

Yet even they have leaders who refuse to develop democratic mechanisms to allow their own members to “safeguard themselves” from their leaders, who overstay their welcome, by recalling these failing leaders of their parties.

It is difficult to square the opposition parties’ election-time political value proposition that the South African voters must “recall” the ANC government from power, through the ballot, for its numerous service delivery failures, whilst the same opposition parties are unable to demonstrate the same high-mindedness within their own party ranks when their leaders chronically underachieve and ritually post opposition leadership delivery failures, as if such opposition failures are a permanent badge of some bizarre political honor.

More interesting to note is that the ANC in the last twenty years of our democracy has exercised the Paris Commune’s recall principle more often than most of our opposition parties. In the last twenty years, the ANC has had three democratically elected leaders (Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma). It has had four Heads of State in the same period (Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe and now Jacob Zuma). And even before 1994, the pre-power and freedom struggle-era ANC had recalled its leaders like Josiah Gumede in the late 1920s, Pixley la ka Seme in the late 1930s, Dr. Xuma in the late 1940s, and Dr. James Moroka in the early 1950s. And, to boot, the ANC recalled its former leader Thabo Mbeki twice within the space of less than a year as the party’s leader, and as its leading deployed cadre at the head of South Africa’s democratic State.

This represents an astonishing exercise of and recourse in the Paris Commune’s principle of political recall of deputies that has no equal on the African continent, and most certainly no equal in South Africa.

Contrast this encouraging and dynamic recall pattern on the part of the ANC with the political deadwood situation on the Paris Commune’s principle of recall of elected leaders within our opposition parties.

Since its formation, the FF Plus has experienced one of the worst political leadership cronyism ever practiced by white Africans anywhere on our continent since the end of colonialism, with the Mulder brothers dominating its leadership like they are British royalty (hoping they don’t take the comparison with the British royalty as an insult, in light of the Anglo-Boer War), practically since its inception. But when cronyism is exercised amongst white South Africans, seemingly it is not found by some amongst our white-led opposition parties to be as repulsive and offensive as when it is revealed that our Parliament’s Speaker, Max Sisulu, and our Minister of Public Service, Lindiwe Sisulu, are brother and sister.

“It is all useless. All useless”, collectively harrumphs our political opposition at the alleged ANC nepotism and cronyism, foolishly mimicking the Book of Ecclesiastes.

The IFP, UDM, COPE, ACDP, SACP and APC have not once experienced a change of guard in leadership in the last twenty years, despite the appalling record of the political opposition’s electoral performance. Even COSATU has been led by only one general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, since 1994. In the same period, the DA, the official parliamentary opposition, has changed guard only once, from Tony Leon to Helen Zille. Only the Minority Front seems to have matched the record of the ANC’s leadership change, though not through some forward, strategic planning on their part, but partly due to the passing on of the Bengal Tiger, its founder and former leader, and partly due to the political ineptitude and unchecked political ambition of the Bengal Tiger’s wife, the controversially chosen successor to the Bengal Tiger, which was a quiddity act of dynastic perfidy on par with the Mulder brothers’ cronyistic leadership dominance of the FF Plus.

This stilted atmosphere in the opposition parties’s top leadership echelons, in terms of leadership succession, does not, however, restrain their voyeuristic interest in the now chronic, ritualized, quinquennial, and massive leadership contretemps within the ANC occasioned by leadership succession battles. Once every five years, our opposition parties effectively decamp from building their party structures and focus, solely and in a highly prurient way, away from their own parties’ political programmes and become entirely consumed by the ANC leadership battles. They, to all intents and purposes, resort to owning the ever bedazzling story about the ANC succession battles, without the burden of having to pay subscription fees and signing on the dotted lines of the ANC’s membership forms. They follow such ANC leadership battles with an eye for minute details normally found in a disciplined follower of the Bold and the Beautiful TV soap opera. These opposition parties take political bets on their leadership favorite in such ANC succession battles. Many of these opposition parties effectively become overt partisans on one or the other side of the ANC leadership succession wars, completely forgoing their avowed political independence from the ANC. These opposition parties, at such a time of ANC leadership succession battles, bank more, for their political and electoral future and survival, on the outcomes of such internal ANC succession battles, than they do on their own party’s attractiveness, organization, influence in society, electoral message, political vision and party leaders. When their favorite horse in the ANC leadership race loses and gets humiliated, as is often the case, these opposition parties, in a deeply amoral political act, then avenge for their wrong bet on the winner, by making his life in our national Parliament a veritable living hell every time he appears before their Members of Parliament in our legislative capital, Cape Town.

In the last twenty years, the failure of established opposition parties to regularize how they deal with the Paris Commune’s political principle of recall of elected deputies and leaders has resulted in great damage to themselves. The failure of the IFP to accommodate the legitimate leadership ambition of Zanele kwaMagwaza-Msibi, the IFP’s former chairperson and the current National Freedom Party (NFP) founder and leader, led to the splintering of the IFP, and the indibutable haemorrhaging of its traditional support in Zululand of the KZN province. The bitter internal leadership fights have permanently hobbled the PAC, like forever. The BC split into AZPO and the Socialist Party of Azania has fatally compromised the attractiveness of Steve Biko’s BC ideal. If these two factions of the BC Movement cannot re-unite between themselves, how do they hope to unite the black folk in South Africa against continuing blatant racism in various facets of post-apartheid South Africa? Former Bophuthatswana Bantustan’s tinpot dictator, Lucas Mangope’s party, United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP), unceremoniously kicked him (its founder and long-time leader) out of its leadership, with the help of our courts, in the manner so foul and Machiavellian, that it bears close comparison with the Mafia’s criminal hanky-panky in Mario Puzo’s crime novel, The Godfather. It must be a measure of the extent of God’s righteous fury that even the two predominantly black political parties in South Africa identifying themselves as Christian – the ACDP and UCDP – cannot find in themselves to practice the Bible’s injunction to love and forgive their neighbor, and unite for the sake of presenting the ruling ANC with some sort of serious Christian party opposition on its center right. The less said about how Agang leader nearly abandoned her own party she formed, in favor of the more enticing “political kiss of death” offered by the disastrously conceived DAgang, the better. The DA nearly tore its entrails out during the bitter and vicious internal party campaigning a few years back over the leadership of its parliamentary caucus, which resulted in Lindiwe Mazibuko delivering an enervating political defeat on the DA’s white stalwart, Athol Trollip. The terrible fall-out from that DA leadership contest, including Helen Zille embarrassingly calling one of her party’s rising black stars, without any sense of irony, “Hitler”, is still being felt to this day. The dirty and vicious contestation over leadership is rendering COSATU asunder before our very own eyes. The long-held prediction about the imminent collapse of the Tripartite Alliance no more sounds far-fetched, just because of COSATU leadership’s failure to develop time-tested mechanism for the realization of the Paris Commune’s democratic principle of electors having the right “to safeguard” themselves from the leaders and deputies they elect “by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall any time”, which recall right must, if needs be, apply equally on the COSATO general secretary and president, for the sake of the survival of COSATU as a potent workers’ shield. Unfortunately, COSATU, a workers’ federation, has honored the recall principle of the Paris Commune of Workers more in breach.

What most of our opposition parties’ leaders have demonstrated over the past twenty years is their unflagging determination to “safeguard themselves” from those who put them in the leadership positions in the first place, by declaring themselves, almost without exception, above the laudable Paris Commune’s recall principle. On this basis alone, it is hard to see which one of our opposition parties really deserves to oust and replace the ANC as our country’s ruling party, if their leaders work so hard to entrench themselves in their elected position, for so long. These opposition parties, in this regard, have really never covered themselves in glory. Quite the opposite. As a result, the cult of personality has developed around just about all of the leaders of our opposition parties, especially the leaders of the IFP, ACDP, DA, COPE (what remains of it), APC, FF Plus and Agang. This highly deplorable trend towards political idolatory, and towards building personality cults around leaders of our opposition parties, has lately been eagerly joined by the newly-launched Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which has taken the cultish hero-worshipping of its leader, Julius Malema, – it’s so-called “Commander-in-Chief” -, to a totally new, dizzy, stratospheric level.

The most glaring example of this personality cult around a leader of an opposition party is that which was recently offered by the Agang leader’s recent embarrassing antics of publicly violating every conceivable foundational principle of modern, self-respecting political parties by agreeing secretly to “black front” for Agang’s main political competition, the DA. But instead of throwing Agang’s Code of Conduct at their founder and evidently chief financier, and instead of summarily expelling her, the poor Agang members begged their first “sell-out” (to the DA) leader to come back and to lead them again, as if they could not find amongst themselves someone else to replace Dr. Ramphela Mamphele as the head of the new party. If this does not make Dr. Mamphele to feel irreplaceable in Agang, I don’t know what will.

Some opposition leaders have in fact reduced their political parties to nothing more than personal fiefdoms, money-making schemes for personal aggrandizement, as well as employment agencies for their family members, cronies, favored and fervent supporters, henchmen, boot-lickers and, allegedly, for their innumerable concubines as well. The appetite of foreign funders to pour huge sums of politically-driven money and questionable electoral expertise into South Africa around election time has helped to profoundly distort the true quintessence of our political opposition, and has kept the corrosive, if not cancerous, habit of useless political existence amongst many of our opposition parties as the driving objective of their political agendae.

In all this, South Africa’s twenty-year old democracy is the biggest loser. And this behavior on the part of many opposition parties represents a stunning betrayal of their oppositional agency as our democracy’s guardians over our political overlords (the ruling ANC).

However, the uninspiring way the opposition parties handle their leadership succession and contestation does not prevent them from day-dreaming that they will inflict electoral defeat on the politically and electorally powerful ANC come the 2019 national election, and even, most improbably, in this year’s election. One is reminded of what the titan of American literature, Ernst Hemingway, remarked about, when he once wrote that “all bad writers are in love with the epic.” He should have added, for the sake of the current generation of opposition leaders in post-apartheid South Africa, that “all bad opposition politicians are in love with a political epic – their wet dream to inflict an electoral defeat on the ANC.”

Of course the reason our opposition parties are in their existential crisis today is that they really do not take kindly to, and do not embrace, constructive criticism directed at them. This is so because the narcissistic leaders of many of these opposition parties like to listen to the echoes of their own voices in their party chambers. Such leaders are snooty, self-revering, implacably self-assured, and, above all, very stubborn.

Yet in the Good News Bible’s Books of Proverbs 29:1-2, it is stated:

“If you get more stubborn every time you are corrected, one day you will be crushed and never recover.”

For our recklessly stubborn opposition parties, that day of reckoning is nigh, meaning 07 May 2014, our national election day.

Contrary to the wide=spread prediction by our political opposition and punditry that the ANC’s electoral support will be reduced to 60% or below, many in South Africa may still be surprised, in line with the Book of Proverbs 29:1-2, to discover that our opposition parties have once again been mightily crushed by the ANC under the much-ridiculed Jacob Zuma, even going as far as securing 70% or more of the vote.

Beware of the ANC’s Ides of May in KZN, Mpumalanga, Free State, Northern Cape, North West and Eastern Cape.

10th Cedia Blog.
08 March 2014.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA).
Cedia Email Address : isaac@cedia.co.za
Cedia Website : http://www.cedia.co.za
Cedia Blog : https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
Cedia Facebook : Cedia Cedia
Cedia Twitter : Cedia6
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Cedia Directors : Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi – Founder and Executive Chairman; Mr. Saul Pila – Chief Operating Officer.
Cedia Pay-Off-Line : Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.

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THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES

TOPIC: THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES.

“It is also true that every new movement, when it first elaborates its theory and policy, begins by finding support in the preceding movement, though it may be in direct contradiction with the latter…In time…the new movement finds its forms and its own language.” Rosa Luxemburg, the great German Social Democrat/Communist, Reform or Revolution, (1900).

PART TWO.

In the last twenty years of our  post-apartheid democracy, South Africa’s opposition parties have hankered after the past and scavenged this past in search of a winning political formula to power, and all in vain. What they have not succeeded to do so far though is to find “new forms and own language” that allow them to connect with the vast majority of our voters, at both an emotional and intellectual levels, better than the ANC. Our opposition parties have not been able “to elaborate…theory and policy” that can gain them popular support, legitimacy and consent. Whilst our opposition parties are “in direct contradiction” with the “preceding movement” (in our case the ANC), they are unable to completely cut the apron strings that still attach them to “the preceding movement”, one way or the other.  In the memorable words of Rosa Luxemburg (ibid), “the new green seedling” of our post-apartheid political opposition to the ruling ANC has not “broken through its husk.” It is still entrapped in the “husk” that is the miasma of the opposition leaders’ egos, vainglory, self-interest, short-termism, petty mindedness, lack of clarity on theory, policy and strategy, unseemly public squabbles (whether it’s the terrible and terrifying recent DAgang meltdown, the bitter hatred between the DA and the EFF, the ethnic demons between the IFP and the UDM, the undisguised intolerance amongst the various BC factions, the ghosts of the various and warring PAC cliques endlessly at each other’s throats, the eternal suspicion between the FF Plus and every other black-dominated opposition party, as well as the unedifying ideological backstabbing that goes on between the ACDP and every South African agnostic, non-believer, African animist, Christian apostate and avowed atheist in the political opposition), and the opposition parties’ inability to correctly study and draw lessons from what it is really that continues to make the ruling ANC to tick so, twenty years after the advent of our democracy.

The political opposition’s failure to provide visionary leadership is at the heart of the political crisis confronting our garrulous but waddling opposition parties and at the core of their inability to come up with a more superior vision for South Africa than the ones the ANC offered in 1912 (to unite all the African peoples and tribes in South Africa), in 1955 (the ANC’s Freedom Charter declaring that South Africa belongs to all who live in it), in 1969 (the ANC Morogoro, Tanzania conference’s decision to open ANC membership to all South African freedom-loving and anti-apartheid democrats), in 1985 (the ANC Kwabe, Zambia conference, which opened all the ANC leadership echelons to any deserving South African committed to its Freedom Agenda), in 1989 (the Harare Declaration as a basis for negotiations with the apartheid regime), and finally, in 1994 (Nelson Mandela’s beautiful and immortal 08 May Presidential Inaugural Address, which announced South Africa’s post-apartheid freedom and democracy and extended our new democratic, human rights and constitutional cover to all who live in South Africa, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion, conscience, color, sexual orientation and disability). The current combined political opposition in South Africa is neither able to match, let alone surpass, the clarion vision of the PAC founder, Robert Sobukwe’s call for “the return of Africa”, or, less so, the young Steve Biko’s clarion BC vision of Black Power and Black Pride. At best, the political opposition’s vision today is just a soupcon of the warped and arrested thinking of the minds of our political midgets.

The cumulative positive effect of all the momentous, historic ANC visions, at various stages of its progressive political evolution in the last hundred and two years, in its struggle against racialised discrimination, has been to build for its itself a huge, almost inexhaustible and almost unsurpassable reservoir of political goodwill amongst the overwhelming majority of black South Africans, and now increasingly, amongst less racially bigoted white South Africans since 1994.

Those who misunderstand our politics miss this point that it was not so much the armed struggle, nor the stirring political urban popular struggles of the 1980s, which created this almost unassailable political legacy and aura for the ANC. To labor under such a half-truth, if not a falsehood, is to condemn yourself into believing that the ANC will go the way of other liberation movements on the African continent, and thus to wait in vain for the ANC to wither and to be toppled from power after 20-30 years of its government’s rule by a disillusioned public. No other liberation movement in the world took over hundred years to develop the theory and strategy for the politics of its society; and no other liberation movement in the whole world has successfully cohered over a century around a set of visions it developed, in response to new and emerging political needs and challenges, as the ANC has done.

This really, in a nutshell, is the political secret of the ANC’s Coca-Cola recipe for political power over the last century and two years – its ability to provide leadership on a correct and responsive vision for our country and its struggling people. You fail to grasp this needle, you will never defeat the ruling ANC as a political opposition.

Where the South African opposition parties do stand a better and historic chance now in the post-Nelson Mandela era is with regard to the rare opportunity afforded to them to outperform the ruling ANC, in terms of the vision-thing, in the area of advancing a more progressive and superior economic agenda for post-Mandela South Africa. A simple start in that direction would be for the opposition parties to rally around the call for economic justice for all, a once-off apartheid sin and wealth tax, which proposal was once advanced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also to rally around calls for an Economic CODESA to build a common, national and all-encompassing South African consensus on our way forward economically and in terms of our society’s social cohesion, and to agitate for the creation of the Sovereign Fund to manage the windfall represented by South Africa’s over $2 trillion mineral cachet still lying unexploited in the bowls of our land. Such a Sovereign Fund could be managed by a multi-party team, with the help of reputable local and international developmental institutions. It is crystal clear why blacks lost out on apartheid economic development. But it is not so clear why there is no proper planning now to ensure that the over $2 trillion mineral wealth beneath the earth is used and inspanned to develop the historically disadvantaged black communities. These few demands can and should become the minimum economic platform for a new political alignment of the new forces of the Left.

In this area of economic jutice for all, the ANC is failing its own glorious traditions of coming up with the kind of visions that subjectively and objectively carried and propelled the entirety of our progressive and democratic thinking to a totally new, qualitatively higher level. The ANC’s National Development Plan (NDP) woefully fails to take our society to a completely and qualitatively new, progressive level of collective thinking, although subjectively the ANC will not tire from grandstanding and pretending otherwise. The NDP won broad parliamentary, elite and neoliberal political support in our society not because it had something new to add to our various national debates – it was merely a collation and rehash of previously expressed thoughts and proposals -, but because it sought not to shake up and upend our apartheid-era, inherited socio-economic apple-cart. That the ANC at the end “farmed out” the NDP’s economic chapter to a little-known and quite frankly dodgy Tripartite Alliance Task Team (about which so little is heard in the time of election campaigns afoot at present) to relook and redesign it, following the strong public outcry against the NDP’s economic chapter, is enough evidence that the ANC is failing its historical political duty to provide quality, visionary leadership, and to become a rallying point for coalescence of all democratic forces in favor of transformational change in South Africa.

Whether the EFF or NUMSA’s envisaged Unity Front is the kind of right political response, in the circumstances, or the desirable basis that can help translate this visionary weakness of the ANC into a powerful, alternative political force for progressive socio-economic change, still needs to be seen.

However, it is obvious that all the opposition parties in our parliament, which have supported and endorsed the ANC’s NDP, can never have the capacity within themselves to offer South Africa an alternative, more superior, progressive economic vision than the ANC’s Edward Bernstein path of gradualist, crony-capitalist economic reform of the current status quo, grudging acceptance of the deterministic, if not fatalistic, inevitability of the Francis Fukuyama-type triumph and permanence of the world-wide capitalist model, and a complete surrender to these powerful global forces of neoliberalism, which is what is embodied and signaled by both GEAR and the NDP’s economic chapter. It is also no wonder that all the opposition parties to the right of the ANC’s center-right neoliberal economic thinking, including the DA, IFP, ACDP, COPE, Agang and FF Plus, amongst others, as well as the centrist opposition parties like the UDM, APC, AZAPO, PAC (at least the Letlapa Mphahlele PAC faction in Parliament) and the SACP (at convenient times and when it does not play a lap-dog role to the ANC), will forever be unable to offer a more superior economic vision to the ANC’s, because they are tied to the hip to the dominant global neoliberal economic thinking, as embodied by the NDP, which they either support, or have pledged to support, on condition of minor, and not substantial, modifications to it, something the ANC will be more than prepared and willing to throw to them as a sop.

The opposition parties’ various, boilerplate iterations of their economic policies, viewed against the backdrop of the ANC’s NDP, remind one of the witty remark of the African American author and civil rights activist, James Baldwin, that “the worst imitation is an imitation of an imitation”. Outside the EFF and NUMSA’s envisaged United Front, the economic visions of the other opposition parties represent merely an imitation of an imitation (NDP) of an imitation (GEAR). And, ultimately, GEAR itself was a humungous imitation and shameless aping of the Washington Consensus’ neoliberal economic thinking.

The deep crisis of the opposition parties lies in and is demonstrated by the fact that they cannot conceivably outdo the formidable anti-apartheid struggle credentials of the ANC, as the DA recently very painfully discovered through its zany #KnowYourDA public relations disaster, whilst the ruling ANC has also outflanked the center rightist opposition parties from the center right, by turning itself into a competent manager of a market-friendly, apartheid-inherited, majority black-excluding, big white capital-led capitalist economy in South Africa, and has, since its adoption of GEAR in 1996, worn and proudly shoulder-dusted off its epaulettes across western capitals as the strident, born-again and unapologetic African high priest of the Washington Consensus. The ANC government’s annual Budget Statements, since 1997, were and are intended to be a loud drum-beat for the ears of the markets and the world, designed to clearly telegraph the unwavering ANC’s ideological and political commitment to neoliberalism, despite its hollow, devious “turn-left” rhetoric and automobile indicators, especially during election times.

Thus the ruling ANC has brilliantly outplayed, outfoxed and out-gamed the combined neoliberal political opposition in South Africa on both the economy and politics. It may not be a politically principled move, to be sure, but electorally, it is a highly effective stratagem, as it leaves the neoliberal political opposition in our country gasping for air, like a shawl of sardines discarded on dry, scorching land, unable to offer any serious opposition and a sign of life, except the slow-death movement of their hapless, dry mouths and slow-twisting tails.

As a result, the most portent and effective critique our combined parliamentary opposition parties can marshal and direct at the ruling ANC to date is often highly personalized attacks on ANC leaders, anchored as these attacks are on the personal and ethical failings of individual leader(s) of the ruling ANC, like the ongoing morbid fixation with Jacob Zuma’s unending scandals, whilst broadly consenting to the broad neoliberal political and governance paradigm of the ruling ANC, which Zuma leads. This is a failure of opposition imagination, amplified by the latest trick of DA’s Helen Zille to lately profusely praise former ANC and SA president, Thabo Mbeki, as a step-ladder to issue more cauterizing moral and ethical condemnation of president Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki’s successor in the SA and ANC presidency. What Hellen Zille, the DA and the rest of the political opposition conveniently overlook is that Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma are proud inheritors of the self-same neoliberal economics and politics adopted and promoted by our first post-apartheid Nelson Mandela administration between 1996-1999. On neoliberalism, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, despite sniping at each other on such contemporary and contentious political questions of our time as the quality of the ANC leadership today and on tribalism and on the meaning of the Nelson Mandela political legacy, sing from the same Hymn Book and are still very much soul-mates on the necessity and efficacy of neoliberalism in South Africa. On this important ideological point of massive rupture in South Africa’s political and economic thinking today, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma play on the same side of our ideological divide and for the same ruling ANC’s beleaguered economic team. And on neoliberalism, the two ANC leaders work and think very much alike, as they once did in exile in the 1980s, when they were, like the Bible’s Cane and Abel, secretly negotiating with representatives of the apartheid regime, away from the public eye. This commonality between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma our political opposition seems to miss or to choose to ignore.

As Rosa Luxemburg put it, “the green seedling has not broken its husk.” And so it is with our political opposition.

On the other hand, meaning on the Left, as a matter of fact, the greatest weakness of the new political project that is the EFF is that, in an incomprehensible vacuum-cleaning-sweep-like tactical move to build the broadest support as quickly as possible amongst tiny opposition parties, and in time for the national election in May this year, it (the EFF) has been forced to enter into either totally unsavory working relationships, or into some form of deeply unprincipled alliances, with the NDP-supporting parliamentary opposition parties, or what we otherwise term the official political opposition class, like COPE, UDM, PAC, AZAPO, APC, and even the deeply traditionalist, patriarchal, Zulu nationalist/tribalist and neoliberal IFP. That the IFP should and does represent a complete antithesis and full negation of the EFF’s political and ideological agenda, there cannot be doubt. Yet the EFF has catapulted itself into this Pact with Faust it entered with the IFP, to paraphrase Ronnie Kasrils, irrespective of this fundamental contradiction between it and the IFP. It is an ideological dilemma and contradiction which the EFF can skirt around for now because the country is swaddled in an election-time excitement and euphoria. But the EFF cannot sustainably claim that it is offering South Africa a breakthrough and a new economic blueprint, based on nationalization of mines and land-grab without compensation, whilst building power and elite alliances and blocs with some of the most retrograde, most conservative and most right-wing black political forces in South Africa, which forces stand in “direct contradiction” (Rosa Luxemburg) to the EFF’s own radical, “protest” economic vision.

Something WILL have to give in the near future.

(See former SA government minister and SACP/ANC’s Ronnie Kasrils’ the Guardian article entitled “How the ANC’s Faustian Pact Sold Out South Africa’s poorest”, which appeared on 24 June 2013. Amongst other insurrectionary and insightful things he stated, Kasrils wrote:

“From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the ANC’s soul got under way and was eventually lost to corporate power. We were trapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry out, we ‘sold our people down the river'”. [Previously Kasrils served as deputy minister and full minister in ANC’s post-apartheid governments. So he should know what he is talking about when he says that the ANC “sold our people down the river.” Many within the ANC have dismissed Kasrils’ musings as “a post-power, bitterness-driven rant.”).

The EFF’s “Pact with Faust” it entered with the IFP does show up the EFF as also being caught up in the unprincipled search and pursuit of power, for power’s sake, and not entirely motivated by some loftier and nobler political and economic imperatives to do with the socio-economic status of our desperately poor and unemployed, as the EFF likes to claim publicly.

The more promising attempt by NUMSA and allied COSATU unions to build a new United Front around a new economic vision for South Africa, is hamstrung and deeply compromised by the foolhardy, inexplicable, inexcusable and totally indefensible decision on the part of NUMSA to tie the fortunes of such an envisaged United Front project and a new progressive economic vision, to the internal COSATU battles over the case against COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi’s lunchtime, office sexual peccadillo. It is a strategic and tactical blunder for which NUMSA, its leaders and the NUMSA-envisaged United Front will pay for dearly in the future, politically speaking, especially in the context of ongoing national debates about patriarchy and gender discrimination. This will in the future be viewed as “the original sin” of NUMSA-envisaged United Front, especially as NUMSA’s support for Vavi, (as much as the USA’s Democratic Party’s past support of slavery is viewed as its “original sin”, politically speaking), although tactically is proving a highly effective stratagem to tear apart, open up and to helter-skelter divide the neoliberal-led COSATU leadership, it will in hindsight be seen to have been a profoundly deplorable concession to black African patriarchy, conservatism and to have been totally gender-insensitive. In the future, NUMSA and its envisaged United Front will be made to pay a huge political price for this ill-thought support for Zelinzima Vavi, in his ongoing internal leadership battles with the current COSATU leaders.

Indeed, in the New International Version Bible, The Book of Matthew 16:26, it is asked, rhetorically:

“What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul.”

In its internal COSATU factional battles on behalf of COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, the NUMSA leadership must be careful not to lose the war by selling out its soul to black African patriarchy, black political conservatism and South African male chauvinism. Even if it would then succeed to destroy COSATU’s current neoliberal leadership and gain all of South Africa’s political spoils, NUMSA and its United Front would have paid too much a price for its Pyrrhic victory.

The sum of all this is that so far, no opposition formation has yet developed anything approaching the ANC’s prolific vision constructs of 1912, 1955, 1969, 1985, 1989, and 1994. Nor of Robert Sobukwe in 1958 and Steve Biko in the late 1960s. This is despite, and maybe even in spite of, the ANC’s flop in developing its latest, post-Mandela vision by way of the NDP. And this is what makes the ANC, even under the deeply flawed, scandal-prone, embarrassing and highly controversial Jacob Zuma leadership, such a politically dominant alpha dog.

It does not help matters very much that the EFF’s election manifesto reads like a dreamland protestor’s fantasy wishlist, where any conceivable, outrageous and even implausible demand finds place of honor, as long as it riles the ruling ANC and rubs it the wrong way. Whilst the NDP plays agnostic on the economic vision for South Africa aligned to the ANC’s Freedom Charter, the EFF’s election manifesto is heaving heavy from the burden of mostly impossible, if not infantilized, economic demands.

One thing that the ANC and EFF’s economic visions share though is that they are and will both be incapable of extricating South Africa from its deepening economic and developmental crisis; because they both are nothing but flights of fancy, albeit in opposite directions, which completely ignore the on-the-ground realities of pot-apartheid South Africa. In the end, when the fat lady stops singing, the ANC’s NDP and the EFF’s manifesto will also share this one common feature – that they will be found and declared failed economic policies, like the RDP and GEAR policies in the past were. There is absolutely no way either will ever succeed in the real life of South Africa’s political economy. The ANC’s NDP seems decidedly strong on its emphasis and promotion of social cohesion, whilst deliberately weak or agnostic on the pressing need to enhance economic justice for all. On the other hand, the EFF’s election manifesto’s economic proposals seem to be decidedly strong on emphasizing and promoting a strongly interventionist economic justice model as soon as practically – and even, more importantly, impractically – possible, whilst paying scant regard, and mere lip service, to the enormous costs to our country’s social cohesion such a deeply subjectivist and voluntaristic political-economic approach will incur in the short, medium and long term. There undeniably cannot be sustainable social cohesion in our country without deep-going economic justice for all, to the very same extent that the Freedom Charter rightly declared that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. On the other hand, economic justice for all in South Africa is inconceivable and implausible in the circumstances of massive social dislocation, societal strife and communal discord, such as any serious and subjectivist implementation of the EFF’s economic blueprint will, as sure as sunrise, engender; because social cohesion is the only meaningful and truthful basis of and guarantee that any economic justice for all will be long-lasting, if not permanent.

Therefore the principal political and electoral task before South Africa’s opposition parties is to strive to find a creative golden medium between the conservative and neoliberal economic vision of the ANC’s NDP, which is supported to the hilt by our collective parliamentary opposition, on the one hand, and the more populist, and even insouciantly radical, economic package of proposals contained in and espoused by the EFF’s election manifesto. Finding such an economic golden medium will give the insipid, uninspired and directionless opposition parties a new political purpose in our democracy, and a new elixir for their continued meaningful existence over the next twenty years or so of our democracy. It may also just help to resolve the crisis of chronic electoral underperformance by our political opposition, which has become a near-permanent hallmark of our democratic and multi-party parliamentary system. The morbid extent of the opposition parties’ inspidness and lack of political joie de vivre is shown by the fact that it took the formation and launch of the EFF to revitalize and renew a lot of them, like the UDM and the DA, for different reasons of course, and that they hope that the new-fad public excitement and frisson around the new and electorally untested EFF will hoist their small boats upward, electorally speaking.

The Good News Bible, in the Book of Matthew 6:33-34, states that:

“Instead, be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what he requires of you, and he will provide you with all these other things.”

Building on this injunction of the Book of Matthew, Ghana’s first post-independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, intoned:

“Seek first the political Kingdom, and everything else will be given to you.”

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the advent of democracy in South Africa, building on the Book of Mathhew and on the father of post-colonial Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah’s injunctions, the tens of millions of South Africa’s desperately poor and structurally unemployed and unemployable, now themselves loudly shout to South Africa’s combined political opposition:

“Seek first for us the economic Kingdom in South Africa, and everything else will be given to you by us, including our vote.”

Can the opposition parties open their ears, open their eyes, open their hearts, open their minds and then open their mouths, and begin to sincerely emote in solidarity with this injunction of our poor and unemployed/unemployable?

Above all, can South Africa’s opposition parties gain a correct reading of our current political moment, on which they can base, correctly, their vision, political theory, philosophy, strategy, and electoral tactics?

In this regard, it would be helpful for our opposition parties to remember what Mark Twain once wrote:

“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

Good free advice for our opposition parties. Get your facts first, and you may not even need to distort them as you please afterwards.

9th Cedia blog
03 March 2014

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre For Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address: isaac@cedia.co.za
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THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES.

TOPIC: THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES.

“Resistance among the powerful is natural when change clashes with their self-interest.” Essay, So my floor became my sisters’ ceiling, Warren Buffet, chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway, 02 May 2013.

PART ONE.

In one of his more delicious waggish remarks of unforgettable levity, the great American author, Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, wrote:

“Imagine you are an idiot. And imagine you are a member of Congress. But I am repeating myself.”

Is it too impolite in today’s South Africa to ask someone to imagine that he is an idiot, and to also imagine that he is a member of any of South Africa’s opposition parties, only for him to discover it is all tautology?

But listening to the brimstone and acid rain overflowing verbiage of post-1994 opposition parties in South Africa hollering against the ruling African National Congress (ANC)’s administrations in the last twenty years, you will not at all be reminded of Mark Twain.

Forget it.

The daily doomsday political sermons and pontification of the opposition parties in our democracy would instead harry you forth to the Good News Bible’s Old Testament, the Book of Micah 7:2-5. In this chapter, this is how Israel’s Moral Corruption is condemned:

“There is not an honest person left in the land, no one loyal to God. Everyone is waiting for a chance to commit murder. Everyone hunts down his own people. They are all experts in doing evil. Officials and judges ask for bribes. The influential person tells them what he wants, and so they scheme together. Even the best and honest of them are as worthless as weeds.”

We can broadly agree that, on the whole, it is in these damning biblical-scale terms of the Book of Micah that our opposition parties, especially Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance (DA) and its predecessor, the Democratic Party (DP), have mischaracterized, and continue to mischaracterize, in the main, what they depict, often incorrectly, as the ANC government’s Moral Corruption since the advent of our democracy in 1994. In the post-apartheid South Africa, which has been governed by the ANC without interruption, and whose 20th anniversary we are celebrating this year, the opposition parties seem to be convinced that “even the best and most honest of them (ANC leaders, members, supporters and voters) are as worthless as weeds.”

This is harsh. This cannot be the whole truth, quite obviously.

According to our opposition parties, South Africa has effectively become a dystopia under the ANC government. It is a searing, unforgiving, a-tongue-for-a-tongue Old Testament-style and Dante-sque political verdict on the ANC government’s performance in the last twenty years of our democracy by our combined political opposition.

But are our opposition parties accurate in their overall assessment of the performance of the ANC government in the last two decades? And, as the Bible asks, who, after all, are they, including the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), to play God and to stand in ceremony and pass judgment over the ANC government’s performance?

In the Good News Bible’s Book of Matthew 7:1-5, it is written:

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”

To the extent that our opposition parties see the speck in the eye of the ANC government, it is time we analyse the log in their own eye, and why, in the last twenty years, they have failed to remove it from their eye in order to better their myopic political sight. During the commemoration of 20th anniversary of our democracy, it is the right time to measure our opposition parties with the same tape they use on the ANC government. And since our opposition parties have harshly judged the ANC and its government in the past two decades, this is the right time to use their own judgment on the ANC government to pronounce judgment on them as well, in accordance with the Book of Matthew’s injunction.

Contrary to what the Book of Matthew advises about judgment, there is a frightening fallacy doing rounds among many opposition parties in South Africa that to criticize any of our opposition parties is to commit a sinful act of unpardonable betrayal of our democracy, and to effectively give the ANC and its government an unwarranted free pass and an underserved blank cheque. In line with this convoluted thinking, it is alleged that any criticism of the opposition parties is basically a back-handed compliment on the ruling ANC.

This is a stretch of the skin of a back tooth.

It is the strengths of the opposition we should sex up, and downplay the successes of the ANC government, the opposition’s argument seems to go. What this type of thinking reveals is the inability of our political opposition to carry out some collective self-criticism in the time of the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy and our fifth national election this year. That there is a crying need for our opposition parties to carrying out self-criticism and self-introspection, there cannot be doubt. And a more propitious moment than now is hard to imagine.

Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, wrote the following about the importance of self-criticism for a political party:

“The attitude of a political party towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and if it in practice fulfills its obligation towards its class and the toiling masses. Frankly admitting a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analyzing the circumstances which gave rise to it, thoroughly discussing the means to correcting it – that is the earmark of a serious party; that is the way it should perform its duties; that is the way it should educate and train the class and the masses. (Lenin, Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).

Most interestingly, Helen Zille, the leader of our official opposition in parliament, had this to say during her heated Fourth Great Twitter War (first one was on “professional blacks”, the second one on “refugees from Eastern Cape”, and the third one was waged against the leader of her own party’s youth wing) against the City Press’ journalist, Carien du Plessis:

“Criticizing biased, unprofessional and inaccurate journalism does NOT undermine media freedom. It promotes it.” (@HelenZille tweet of 23 February 2014 at 5:48 pm).

By the same token, it should be easily understandable to Hellen Zille, the DA, as well as the rest of our opposition political parties that, to paraphrase Hellen Zille, to criticize our biased, unprofessional and often inaccurate (as well as under-researching) opposition parties in South Africa does not undermine our democracy or our multi-party parliamentary system, nor does it threaten the freedoms we happily enjoy under our Constitution. On the contrary, such a fair, frank and constructive criticism of the performance of our opposition parties, such as contained here, promotes our democracy and the health of our constitutional order. It also must assist the opposition parties to gain a more realistic, and not illusory, measure of themselves and their overall political and electoral performance and societal impact. Because what is good for the media goose, according to Helen Zille’s tweet above, must also be good for the party political opposition’s gender.

Unlike the ANC in the last two decades, none of our opposition parties has ever undertaken public, transparent, serious and vocal self-criticism, cause-correction, internal self-renewal, ideological detour (such as the ANC’s adoption of the National Development Plan, [NDP], which represents an unmistakable, unambiguous, emphatic and resounding rejection and betrayal of the ANC’s own Freedom Charter) and a robust study of its mistakes and weaknesses in the last twenty years. Most surprisingly, there has not even been a think-tank in South Africa that has done a comprehensive, no-holds-barred study and analysis of the performance of all our opposition parties during the entire lifespan of our democracy. This failure alone clearly shows that our political opposition does not take its own obligation towards its membership and the South African voters seriously. It also attests to the fact that our political opposition does not display the requisite political maturity, frankness and earnestness in assessing why it has dismally failed to dislodged the ANC from power in the last two decades, and why, even today, it does not come near to doing so. Nothing else shows clearer the poverty of the philosophy of our opposition parties ranged against the ruling ANC, than this abysmal failure to self-critique and cause-correct in public, not as individuals or individual leaders per se, but in the deep ideological and theological sense both the Good News Bible and Vladimir Lenin, as quoted above, called upon.

I have personally long contended that the weaknesses and failures of our democracy are therefore as much a function of the complacency and weaknesses of the ruling ANC, as much as they are a function of the impotence and ineffectiveness of the opposition parties, individually or combined. The two features constitute two sides of the same coin – the unsatisfactory state and the discernible, declining quality, some even go as far as claiming the muscular dystrophy, of South Africa’s democratic governance today. The necessary correction of the former feature depends on the satisfactory modification, for the better, of the latter feature.

Twenty years into our democracy, the preponderant, blinkered and self-serving focus on the performance of the ANC and its government alone, which is not accompanied by an equal, shared and similar rigorous focus on the unacceptable performance of our political opposition, impoverishes our democracy and detracts from the undoubted richness of our constitutional order. The absence of the fierce, sustained, public, transparent and unrelenting critique of the performance of democratic South Africa’s political opposition in the last two decades is the biggest reason, and the most accurate explainer, of why there has not yet arisen a credible opposition to the ruling ANC, which political opposition is able to seriously threaten the complacent ANC’s hold on national power. This is also a very accurate predictor of why our combined political opposition will continue to profoundly disappoint. What is really needed now is not so much more criticism of the ruling ANC, – this will come anyway, even uninvited -, but less delusional praise-singing for and complicit condoning of South Africa’s opposition parties, especially the DA’s failing oppositional role, since it is also a governing authority in the Western Cape province.

What can be said with absolute certainty is that any assessment and critique of South Africa’s opposition parties will never be dull. This is so because nowhere else in the whole world is there a political opposition made up of more colorful and more interesting dramatis personae. Amongst other members of its cast, the SA opposition is led by such a mélange of truly mind-boggling political characters as a white South African Jewish lady (Helen Zille), a former Transkei Bantustan tin-pot military dictator (Bantu Holomisa), a former longest-serving Zulu leader of a Kwa-Zulu Bantustan (i’Nkosi Buthelezi), a white Afrikaaner right-winger and Afrikaaner Volkstaat advocate (Pieter Mulder), AZAPO’s leader and an ardent adherent of Black Power and Black Consciousness Movement ( Jacob Dikobe), a Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania leader (Letlapa Mphahlele, if his leadership is not contested by his own party in our courts or in our national Parliament), former jailbirds and crime graduates (Kenny Kunene and Gayston McKenzie), an unashamed black, wealthy, but politically naïve female neo-liberal and SA’s first avowed black neocon, who once was a World Bank executive (Dr. Ramphela Mamphele), a “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” former ANC youth league leader and corruption-accused (Julius Malema), a now-retired-now-not-retired Afro-spotting black Christian fundamentalist (Reverend Kenneth Meshwe), a former Robben Island political prisoner, perennial party-hopper and self-described angry man (Mosiua Lekota), a leader of the Minority Front advocating for the interests of South Africa’s minority Indian community, but which forever sounds like a fawning and self-ingratiating poodle of the ruling ANC (Roy Bhoola), South Africa’s own white Swedish daughter-in-law and Trotskyite-sounding female radical (Liv Shenge), a pugnacious and tenacious Socialist academic (American professor Patrick Bond of the University of KzaZulu Natal), a former general secretary of the radical Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) (Mbhazima Shilowa), and even a dagga-smoking and foul-mouthed DA’s AbaThembu King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, to name but a few of over hundred of them. Were they to be locked in Noah’s Ark to save the human species from an ANC-inspired deluge, they would end up slaughtering one another in a bloodbath mountain-high enough to keep Noah’s Ark afloat for a long time. It is a Bible’s Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). I wager that not even George Orwell’s Animal Farm has more fascinating characters, although the political depravity and duplicity of Orwell’s literary characters in Animal Farm may ring true for many of our political opposition leaders of today. This is not a rainbow. This is more like controlled political pyrotechnics for self-demolition.

But if the head spins at the potpouri of our differing opposition leaders, then you will drop stone-dead trying to go through the maze that is their many and equally varied alternative visions for South Africa. Many of these are just confabulation, quite frankly, and nothing more. But to simplify matters, let’s just say the opposition parties’ visions in their manifestos, as well as their proposals, in a word, cancel out one another, and basically leave the ANC the only drunk and groggy political animal still standing and lording it over the country inn, his sombrero almost covering his face and blocking his eyes from view, because of his inebriated, unsteady political swagger, and left to repeatedly shoot himself in the foot, through one great scandal after another holy scandal, in the correct knowledge that there is not going to be any threat of him ever being overpowered, disarmed, tied down and replaced as the brazen sheriff in town by our opposition parties, individually, severally, or collectively.

Our last man standing (ANC) is clearly now punch-drunk from power he has democratically monopolised in the last twenty years. And there is absolutely nothing the current bedraggled opposition parties, even if they were all to combine under one opposition umbrella, are capable of doing about it. In the last four national elections, and several municipal elections, the combined South African political opposition has never been able to collectively win over 38% of the vote. To say this is a spectacular democratic failure on the part of the opposition parties is the biggest political understatement of the last two decades. In fact, the most an opposition party has done electorally was to secure 24% in the last municipal elections and about 17% in the 2009 national election. For the rest, they all secured single digit voter support, percentages-wise. Amazingly, it is from the opposition-supporting “Miss class” (a quixotic term taken from Helen Zille’s Twitter War with City Press’ Carien du Plessis; see quote above) from whence the loudest condemnatory noise come every January at the time of the release of the national matric results by our national Department of Basic Education. Our political opposition, including the “Miss class” supporting most of it, screams murder, and throws obscenities and profanities at the direction of Angie Motshekga, the Minister of Basic Education, for daring to lower our matric pass mark to 33%. The whole charade is that our opposition parties, every election since 1994, have been dismally failing their political and electoral matric, hopelessly failing to convince the South African voters to give them anything close to 50%, which is a pass mark they clamor for and want to be the pass mark for our matriculants. It is all such a nauseating political street drama by our political soubrettes in opposition. And our young minds in our schools can clearly see the hypocrisy and deceit of it all.

Why is it that our political opposition leaders do not agree to be judged to be “a bunch of losers” (to borrow Sport Minister Fikile Mbalula’s puerile and putrid expression) if they fail to win a combined 45% in any election in our country, whether national or municipal? By the way, this is still far short of the 50% pass mark they clamor for our matriculants, and far short of winning them national political power.

What explains this undeniable and deeply depressing sorry state of our political opposition at the moment of the ANC’s greatest weakness as a ruling party in South Africa, as we celebrate 20 years of our democracy?

8th Cedia blog.
01 March 2014.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address : isaac@cedia.co.za
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