Is the EFF the party of Fascism in a democratic South Africa?: An essay.

TOPIC: IS THE EFF THE PARTY OF FASCISM IN A DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA?: AN ESSAY.

“There are many who do not know they are fascist but will find out when the time comes”. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

INTRODUCTION.

Paul Trewhela, an author, essayist, political commentator and former political activist, opened up his Politicsweb article ‘Africa and the post-imperial British media and academic class’, which appeared on 01 December 2014, with this beautiful and powerful paragraph:

“It’s a curious thing, the post-imperial British media and academic class. One of its great phobias has been to investigate too closely the Cold War drama in southern and central Africa, to which it was emotionally, intellectually and often professionally transfixed. Commitment and engagement, yes! Proper investigative research, well, no…not the done thing, is it?”.

Unfortunately, the latest offering from this questionable post-imperial British gift that never stops giving regarding southern and central Africa comes from none other that the former British High Commissioner to South Africa, Robin Renwick. His book ‘Mission to South Africa’ firmly places him within, aligns with, and considerably extends this sordid emotional, intellectual and even professional post-imperial British attachment to and morbid obsession with southern and central Africa, which are rightly and justifiably decried by Paul Trewhela.

Which is a sad thing to note, really.

You would have expected better from a British official who for four years observed South Africa’s fragile political transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the comfort of the astonishing diplomatic opulence that is the gilded, chauffer-driven, golden-spoon-in-the-mouth and highly pampered life of a high-ranking British diplomat in a fellow Commonwealth member country of South Africa.

It is therefore the right thing to do to compliment Andrew Donaldson for his excellent review of Renwick’s book ‘Mission to South Africa’. From the review provided by Donaldson, it does seem like Robin Renwick’s book brims with some dubious and outlandish assertions, thinly backed by research or empirical evidence in some instances, about the political events and personalities during the era of our country’s precarious transition from apartheid to democracy, whilst also distinguished by rare, penetrative and deep understanding of South Africa’s political landscape at the time. (See Politicsweb article ‘Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid’, 24 February 2015).

As the UK ambassador to South Africa, Renwick was but one of many dramatis personae in the drama about South Africa’s transition to democracy. And for sure he was not a minor player. His role was unique and powerful as the UK’s official representative to South Africa, given the UK’s centuries-old and deeply troubled, as well as very bloody, colonial, apartheid-era and transition-to-democracy involvement in the turbulent periods of South Africa’s history.

His assertions still carry a dramatic irony nonetheless. This should always be born in mind. But they certainly cannot be ignored by South Africans, by the Britons and by anyone interested in SA-UK bilateral relationship.

Perhaps the most outlandish and dubious of Robin Renwick’s claims in the book is that the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or The Iron Lady as she became known to many around the world, was determined to see the end of apartheid. Now come on!

Donaldson quoted Renwick as writing about Thatcher that:

“She wanted to get rid of it, to help bury it”, in reference to apartheid and Margaret Thatcher’s attitude to it.

To tens of millions of then oppressed black and progressive South Africans, Thatcher came across as the West’s biggest defender of the racist apartheid dictatorship and of the apartheid prime minister PW Botha and his predations and brutalities against blacks, especially with regard to Thatcher’s indefatigable campaign to defeat any and all Commonwealth Summit actions against the apartheid rulers, and most infamously so at the Nassau Commonwealth summit. Any false pretense which Thatcher ever had that she “wanted to get rid of” apartheid, and “to bury it”, was itself gotten rid of and buried by her sickening lone-wolf diplomatic determination to block any decision by the Commonwealth leaders to impose further punitive measures against apartheid rulers like PW Botha.

What Margaret Thatcher desired to get rid of and to bury was South Africa’s anti-apartheid national liberation movement, for sure.

But where the overwhelmingly majority of South Africans, then and now, would agree with Robin Renwick’s assertion in his book is in his surprising but welcome characterization of apartheid leader PW Botha as “someone who was in fascist territory”.

Donaldson quotes Renwick as writing the following about PW Botha:

“I felt I was dealing with someone who was in fascist territory”.

The overwhelming majority of black and progressive South Africans agree that in PW Botha, aside from his minor positive measures like abolishing the pass laws, Group Areas Act and the Mixed Marriage Act, as well as in starting secret negotiations with Nelson Mandela in prison, we were in fact dealing with not just a vicious political bully and a white racist thug; not just dealing with a military psycopath and a heartless, remorseless and openly provocative white racist sociopath; but that we were in fact dealing with and confronted by South Africa’s own archetypical ruling white Fascist in a power position of ultimate executive authority, or “someone in fascist territory”, as Robin Renwick put it, and confronted by some political lunatic forever thirsty to shed the blood of innocent blacks, including through constant, unrestraint unleashing of crude, brute military and securocratic might of the apartheid state, to uphold a white supremacist, fascist ideology..

It is also opportune to compliment Robin Renwick too for reminding us about PW Botha’s political involvement with the white Afrikaaner fascist outfit, Ossewa Brandwag, which openly flirted and aligned with and staunchly supported Hitler’s Nazism in Germany and Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy.

Put in simple terms, this should mean that when we South Africans want to imagine what “someone in fascist territory” under conditions of our constitutional and democratic dispensation would look like, PW Botha should be the first person to come to mind. Because he was the real, Anno Domini fascist thing South Africa ever had, and hopefully, pray to God, will ever have.

Yes, white genocidal colonial conquest and racist Apartheid dictatorship did not just bring “civilization” to “black barbarians” of southern Africa, but also brought a racialist dictatorship and open white Fascism.

Against this background, it becomes clear that South Africa, in the person of PW Botha as its former prime minister and white Fascist head of state, is one of a handful of countries around the world which have had a Fascist as head of government or state. The other countries of the world which are in this rogue gallery of infamy would include of course Germany and Italy, but also Japan, Spain, Greece, Portugal as well as Chile under General Pinochet.

And so, you would think that, consequently, it would be easy, like a walk in the park, for South Africans to agree today as to what is Fascism, or who can legitimately and factually be regarded as a Fascist.

Not so fast, please.

It is not that easy. Not at all.

To establish such a national consensus, despite PW Botha having been “someone in fascist territory”, is as elusive as providing economic justice for all in post-apartheid South Africa.

Why is there this explosive national political discord and ideological conflict as to who in a democratic South Africa is a “Fascist”, or who is “someone in fascist territory”?

CHAPTER ONE.

In my Politicsweb article of 04 March 2013 under the heading ‘Where to the ANC Youth League post-Mangaung’, and in an attempt to provide some clarity to this vexatious question, I wrote:

“Nothing illuminates better the existential crisis of the ANCYL than the ease with which any political force in SA can today label the ANCYL as either ‘fascist’ or the facility with which SA commentators and opinion-makers can compare the (former) expelled ANCYL leader, Julius Malema, to either Hitler or Idi Amin or Emperor Bokassa or Benito Mussolini. (See Brendan Boyle’s The Times SA column ‘Politics, Policy and Power’ where he wrote an article entitled ‘Moral of the Juju show’, 07 February 2013, page 11).”

Recently on 20 February 2015 Politicsweb carried a piece by Jeremy Cronin, the SACP’s deputy general secretary and deputy Minister of Public Works, under the see-through and provocative title ‘Legislative disruptions: From the Nazis to the EFF’.

Cronin went on to write that:

“The Weimar Republic parliament was caught flat-footed by the onslaught of a dozen rowdy Nazi MPs back in 1928”, in an unflattering reference to the disruption by the EFF of the start of the 2015 SONA by president Jacob Zuma.

The crux of Cronin’s article was contained, I think, in this paragraph:

“Our own internationally hailed post-apartheid parliament was forged out of a common understanding that we were wrestling a democratic, multi-party space out of civil war and social division. Compared to other parliaments I have visited, our National Assembly has had a security light touch…Like the dozen Nazi MPs back in 1928, the EFF cohort has deftly exploited this reality. They are faithfully, if unwittingly, following Huber’s script of attempting to destroy ‘the parliament system from within through its own methods’ in spurious points of order, provoking evictions and perhaps over-reaction and then claiming victimhood”.

Although Cronin hedges his dynamite-laced statement against counter-arguments with several caveats and qualifications, such as “unwittingly” and “perhaps” and “like” and “deftly”, his message is as clear as it is unmistakable: He wants us to view the EFF as a fascist menace in the league, and of the logic, of “the dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” in Weimar Germany.

It is hard to think of a more scurrilous and execrable political and ideological imprecation against a political foe operating legally under conditions of democratic and constitutional legality, and permitted by our Independent Electoral Commission(IEC) to freely contest elections, as the EFF is in democratic South Africa, than this one Jeremy Cronin hurled at the EFF and Julius Malema.

It in fact amounts to a political blood libel, given the atrocious, genocidal and violent legacy of Hitler’s Nazis.

Our 1996 Constitution proscribes freedom of speech for inter alia hate speech and war propaganda. If it is true the EFF are Nazis, then they are running foul of our supreme law.

Thus Jeremy Cronin, by this accusation, has declared an ideological war to the bitter end against the EFF. It also means that Cronin believes that the EFF represents an immanent, imminent, direct and existential threat to the SACP. In this schema, for one to exist, the other must perish.

Clearly this idea of Cronin that the EFF’s parliamentary disruptions at the start of 2015 SONA are akin to the actions of “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” reveals that he himself habors totalitarian confabulations about the EFF and its leader Julius Malema, where no compromise with the EFF can be entertained whatsoever.

This obviously is dangerous political and ideological territory, if so.

Indulging in what the Russian strategic military planners would call “masquerading”, and avoiding to directly accuse the EFF of being “fascist”, or “neo-fascist”, or its leader Julius Malema of being a “Nazi” or “Fascist”, Cronin seemed to forget that he was part of the SACP leadership collective that issued, through Blade Nzimande, the SACP’s general secretary, a public statement carried by Politicsweb on 30 November 2014, following the first time the EFF chanted “Pay back the money!” in our elected national parliament to disrupt president Jacob Zuma’s speech, and which public statement appeared under the heading ‘White DA brat-pack collaborating with neo-fascist EFF – SACP’.

This statement read in part:

“But now there is a new toxic reality. The EFF, a demagogic, neo-fascist, populist formation has made it clear that it is prepared to erode the legitimacy of hard-won institution as it advances, hell-bent, its egotistic agenda”.

It is not quite clear why Cronin back-peddled a bit from calling the EFF “neo-fascist” in his latest article on the matter. But the small concession by Cronin and his “masquerading” do not become, as Vladimir Lenin, in another context, would say, “a small detail that becomes decisive”.

The small concession is the big, decisive detail!

One grouping that has never hesitated, or pulled back, from name-calling the EFF is the public servant trade union NEHAWU. In the first of such an ideological salvo of NEHAWU name-calling the EFF as ‘proto-Fascist’, I responded with a Politicsweb piece of 17 September 2012 entitled “Malema the ‘Fascist’: A comment”, in which I bemoaned “…the ease with which elements in the SA white community and some SACP members and some COSATU unionists attach the term ‘Nazi’ or ‘Fascist’ or ‘proto-Fascist’, to Julius Malema…”

Matters have gotten more complicated since then, if also more fraught with danger.

In its latest cursing of the EFF and Julius Malema, NEHAWU released a statement in response to 2015 SONA on Politicsweb of 13 February 2015 under the heading ‘NEHAWU denounces loutish interjections by EFF fascists’. The statement in part read:

“It is pitiful to see a fascist organisation like EFF that thinks of itself as terribly radical and cutting edge undermining our democratic institution by indulging in shameless self-advertising and political striptease”.

[It seems in less than three years the EFF and Malema have graduated from being seen by NEHAWU as “proto-Fascists” to now being fully-fledged “EFF fascists”. NEHAWU does not provide any study course as to how this quick ripening happened. Similarly, the SACP does not explain how the EFF and Malema were “neo-fascist” in November last year and are today, as Jeremy Cronin puts it, like “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”. How does this growth happen? Who genetically manipulated and modified the mutant and abhorrent ideological maturation and strain of the EFF and Malema “in the fascist territory?”]

And so, with NEHAWU’s statement which “denounces” the EFF’s “loutish interjections”, we have firmly entered the obscene language and ideological parlance of pornographic vulgarity, thanks to NEHAWU’s animus towards the EFF. This obviously creates a fog of confusion as to the real meaning of terms such as “proto-Fascist”, “neo-Fascist”, “Fascist”, “neo-Nazi” “proto-Nazis”, “Nazis” and “Nazi MPs in 1928”, and even the much-in-vogue swear term of “counter-revolutionary”.

Not only were the gloves off, it seems. Off too were the loin cloths that cover erogenous zones of one’s ideological enemies, so to speak. What a gross-out!

Whenever intense personal animosity towards a foe or religion or sex or vulgarity enters ideological contradictions, they per force almost always make such ideological contradictions to become irreconcilable, immiscible and thus irresoluble, all at once. Such irreconcilable, immiscible and irresoluble contradictions thus end up leading towards one direction only – a social explosion, or inter-party violence and militant rivalry, far away from the framework of a democratic, constitutional discourse.

The recent violent and bloody pitched clashes between members of the SACP and ANC in the Mpumalanga province of our country, beamed to the whole nation and the world by the SABC TV, is but one such possible violent and bloody incidents between the SACP and EFF in the future.

What is not quite clear is whether the intense contradictions and differences between the SACP and the EFF really reflect the contradictions in our society itself. It is not even clear whether they reflect, in the Marxist jargon, contradictions between social relations and modes of production.

It is however undeniable that they indeed do speak to deep, mutual personal animosities between the leaders of the respective parties.

The real irony is that both the SACP and EFF self-describe and self-market in our politics as “Marxist-Leninist”. But they have reserved their most intense animus not for South Africa’s national and petty bourgeoisie – especially white monopoly and foreign capital – but, lo and behold, for each other.

This reminds me of why, at the height of his humiliation and denunciation during China’s Cultural Revolution, China supreme leader, Chinese Communist Party stalwart and the architect of China’s remarkable economic transformation in the last three decades, Deng Xiaoping, advised that:

“Criticism should be well prepared. Facts must be checked, and presented in a calm and reasonable manner…Political questions must be resolved in a political manner”. (Quoted by Deng Rong, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter, in ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution – a Daughter Recalls the Critical Years’, 2002, pages 14-15).

Unfortunately, in the political climate of the shrill and to-the-left-ideological-beauty-contest cacophony between the SACP and EFF nowadays, criticism, facts and opinions are not presented in a calm and reasonable manner. Often there is more heat than light in the conflict between the two.

The SACP and EFF should rather remember that George Orwell reminded us all that:

“The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, conman, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc, consists of words translated from Russian, German and French…”

Popular amongst the forces of the Left are also terms like “neo-Fascist”, “proto-Fascist”, “Fascist”, “neo-Nazi”, “Nazis”, “bourgeoisie”, “petty bourgeoisie”, “proletariat”, “AK 47”, “anarchist”, “inter alia”, “total victory”, “forward ever”, “semi-izhdat”, “propaganda”, “hegemony”, “ancien regime”, and “counter-revolutionary”, terms by and over which the SACP and EFF are battling against each other. This is another reminder of the Euro-centric origins of Marxism and Leninism, the most influential ideological strands among the forces of the Left worldwide, including on the SACP and EFF.

Perhaps the SACP and EFF’s more use of Afro-centric jargon peculiar to Africa and South Africa, including words such as “ubuntu”, “thandaza”, “uxolo”, “i’sonto”, “kgotso”, “lekgotla”, “rapela”, “tshwaraganang”, “saam werk”, “toenadering”, “vergadering”, “lief”, “make up and kiss”, “habari”, “maendeleo” and “simunye – we are one”, will help the two political formations to still their angry voices, mellow their hardened, ideological and unforgiving hearts, and maybe assist them to unclench their iron-fisted punches they are vigorously shaking, throwing and pointing at each other in angry mutual recrimination.

The SACP’s 30 November 2014 statement, which referred to the EFF as “neo-fascist”, pointed out to the growing synchronization, if not backroom collaboration and parliamentary coordination, between the EFF and what the statement termed ‘DA brat-pack’. And interestingly since the emergence of this ‘co-ordination’ between the ‘DA brat-pack’ and the EFF in parliament, what I referred to as “SA white community” in my Politicsweb piece of 17 September 2012, and what the SACP’s statement of 30 November 2014 referred to as ‘DA brat pack’, have suddenly ceased to harangue the EFF or Julius Malema as either Nazi, or Fascist, or proto-Fascist.

What occasioned, and thus can explain, this terminological back-peddling on the part of the “SA white community” and the “DA brat pack” regarding their erstwhile very hostile view of the EFF and Julius Malema? And what does this say about the opportunism, the malleability and the syncretic nature of South Africa’s muscular new liberalism, as represented by the DA and its leader Helen Zille, in their search for ultimate electoral and political power in democratic South Africa?

The big question is: Is it the EFF and or Julius Malema who have changed? Or is it the strategic political power and electoral calculus of the DA and Helen Zille at work here and which has necessitated change within the “DA brat pack” in our elected national parliament?

Or is it the SACP which is caught up in a time-warp-capsule since 2009, unable and unwilling to update its ideological hostility towards, and misplaced understanding, of the “radicalness” of the politics of Julius Malema, firstly as the ANCYL radical leader, and subsequently the founder and the leader of the EFF?

Or is Julius Malema succeeding in making what the SACP sees as his “neo-fascist” streak to be more palatable and useful to, or hidden from, certain powerful elements of our society? Is Malema duping his over a million voters who elected his EFF into our national parliament and some of our provincial legislatures in last year’s national elections?

To compound matters more, and to confound us all even further, president Jacob Zuma, as the leader of our democratic Republic, of the Tripartite Alliance, (which includes the SACP of Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin), and leader of the ruling ANC, went out of his way, in his Response to 2015 SONA, to specifically warmly, and in an unprecedented and salutary way, compliment Julius Malema for his (Malema)’s “constructive engagement with” his (president Zuma’s) 2015 SONA, thus publicly exulting him in our elected and democratic parliament, or what Jeremy Cronin calls “the democratic, multi-party space”. And the person president Zuma exulted as such has been compared by Cronin to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”.

Was president Jacob Zuma thus praising “someone in fascist territory”, to borrow Robin Renwick’s expression? Was the president praising what the SACP once termed “neo-fascist”? Was president Zuma appeasing the man who lead what NEHAWU describes as “EFF fascists”?

Are Julius Malema and the EFF really worthy of president Jacob Zuma’s high-to-the-heavens exultation in our elected national parliament? Does the president think that the EFF is a party he can do business with, to paraphrase former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s initial description of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbaschev, despite the growing, yawning ideological chasm between the ruling ANC and EFF?

Is the EFF the party of Fascism in a democratic South Africa?

Which is which? What is what? Who is fooling who?

Or is the joke on us as SA voters and adults?

George Orwell once said that:

“The word Fascism has no meaning except in as far as it signifies something undesirable”

He further stated, more germane to our discussion about whether Malema and the EFF are “neo-fascist” or “proto-fascist” or “Nazis of 1928”:

“…words are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgment”.

Absoluuuuuuutely!

One of the ANC’s all-time great, undisputed and organic intellectuals, Pallo Jordan, once offered a very brilliant, blistering, enervating and cogent critique of the SACP leader Joe Slovo’s historic, profound and path-blazing article ‘Has Socialism Failed?’.

In his intellectually awe-inspiring, incomparable, sublime and perhaps his best ever piece, Pallo Jordan stated, inter alia, that:

“Marxism prides itself in its ability to uncover the reality that lies hidden behind appearances. Marxists therefore cannot be content with expressions of shock, horror and condemnation: It is our task to explain what has led to the atrocities we condemn”. (See South African History Online, Pallo Jordan’s article “Crisis of Conscience in the SACP: Critical Review of Slovo’s ‘Has Socialism Failed?'”),

[NB: In his book ‘These Times – A decade of South African politics’, Ken Owen, the former editor of the Sunday Times SA, described the ANC’s Pallo Jordan as “an unusually interesting man who, unlike many ANC leaders, has a fine, well-trained mind”; 1992, page 256].

And so, the task is not to “be content” with just the opportunity “to express shock, horror and condemnation” in relation to what NEHAWU calls the “loutish interjections” and “striptease” of the EFF and Julius Malema’s alleged “neo-Fascism” or “proto-Fascism”. The task is to see what lies hidden behind the EFF’s red overalls, domestic maid dresses, the gumboots, the hard miners hats and its parliamentary behavior. The vital task and intellectual responsibility is “to uncover the reality that lies hidden behind appearances” of the EFF and Julius Malema, to quote Pallo Jordan.

Justice Pitso, South Africa’s former ambassador to Cuba, political commentator and public intellectual, in his article under the heading ‘A false conspiracy theory’, quoted Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, as cautioning thus against “a revolutionary phrase”:

“We must fight against the revolutionary phrase, we have to fight it, we absolutely must fight it, so that in some future time people will not say of us the bitter truth that a revolutionary phrase about a revolutionary war ruined the revolution”. (See The New Age, 25 October 2012, Opinion and Analysis, page 25).

Any revolutionary phrase which “ruins the revolution”, whether wielded by the SACP or EFF or anyone else, and when used to falsely hide or expose or promote real or ersatz Fascism in a democratic South Africa, must be uncovered behind appearances, in order for it to be defeated and buried for good.

There is no middle road about that, to paraphrase the title of SACP leader Joe Slovo’s most influential essay.

Is the now commonplace characterization of the EFF and Julius Malema as “neo-fascist” an instance of “a false political conspiracy theory”, to quote ambassador Justice Pitso?

CHAPTER TWO: THE TERM “FASCISM” AS A HIGHLY CONTESTED, DAMAGING BUT PERVASIVE SWEAR WORD IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICAL VOCABULARY OF TODAY.

That Jeremy Cronin is a leading SACP intellectual there can be no doubt. That he does not fear to raise difficult, controversial and even divisive issues for public discussion there is also no doubt.

His famous (some say infamous) two-part interview with Helena Sheehan, the Irish journalist, in 2001 and 2002, which was leaked and in which he warned the Thabo Mbeki-led ANC against the phenomenon of “Zanufication” of the ANC, is clear proof of Cronin’s intellectual courage. (See the SACP’s Umsebenzi Online of 06 April 2011).

He has also been very consistent in his critique of the “populism” of Julius Malema at least since 2009. At one point he even accused the ANC youth league and Julius Malema of supporting beneficiation of SA’s minerals because they were after “bling” and “jewellery”. (See SAPA, 22 November 2009).

He has in turn previously been accused by Julius Malema of seeking to be “a white political messiah” to black South Africa, which was a particularly stinging rebuke to a white South African who has dedicated his life to the liberation of South Africa’s black oppressed. (Ibid).

SACP leaders Jeremy Cronin and Blade Nzimande have also been at the forefront of the public discourse to out Julius Malema as “demagogic” and “a tendepreneur” par excellence. (See The Times SA, 13 June 2011).

On the other hand, Malema has in turn been quick to denounce the communist commitment of the two leaders, especially as regards what he (Malema) reckoned was the failure of these two SACP leaders to provide leadership to South Africa’s working class. He further accused them of having turned the SACP and COSATU into “lobby group” for deployment positions like mayorial positions. (See Thabo Mokone, ‘Malema knifes the SACP and Cosatu chiefs’, The Times SA, 14 June 2011).

The latest comparison of Malema with the Nazis of 1928 by Jeremy Cronin must therefore be seen against this bitter background. However, this particular comparison takes the poisoned and fraught relationship between Cronin and Malema, on the one hand, and between the SACP and EFF, on the other hand, to its lowest point ever.

Jeremy Cronin has also previously admitted that there was an element of “gossiping” during his interview with Helena Sheehan. By his own admission, it is not like he shies away from a “gossiping” session. It needs to be determined whether some of the denunciations he has leveled against Julius Malema and the EFF are not just glorified gossiping on his part, which he masks as impassioned political analysis. Cronin has also indirectly admitted to the tension that exists between him being a part of “the political Establishment”, – a deputy minister in the ANC-led government – on the one hand, and the need for him to speak “truth” to (and including media) power, as the leader of the SACP and the defender of the working class interests. In his 06 April 2011 Umsebenzi piece, he claimed that his deputy ministerial position in government has not dulled his “critical and self-critical abilities”.

But what then explains the fact that since 2009, when president Jacob Zuma ascended to power and up to date, neither Blade Nzimanda nor Jeremy Cronin, nor any other leader or member of the SACP, has authored and issued a no-holds-barred severe criticism of the Zuma ANC administration, the likes of what the SACP did under presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki with regard to what the SACP called “the 1996 Class Project”? Or indeed the likes of the devastating piece which ANC leader and Marxist Pallo Jordan penned against SACP leader Joe Slovo’s ‘Has Socialism Failed?”, in an open, transparent and lived intellectual experience of what China leader Mao Tse Tung encouraged when he exalted the Chinese masses to:

“Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools contend’.

What in the world then has “dulled” what Jeremy Cronin claimed were his “critical and self-critical abilities” since Zuma ANC (ZANC) hegemonic faction ascended to power in 2009 and made the SACP leaders like Blade Nzimande and Cronin part of the national Cabinet? Why has the SACP ceased fire in relation the job of exercising its “critical and self-critical abilities” as these, if still extant indeed, relate to the Zuma government, which has had, it should be pointed out, much more unprecedented allegations of mostly (unproven) scandal and malfeasance, as compared to previous ANC governments since 1994, for an example regarding the matter of the government’s upgrades at the Nkandla compound of president Zuma?

Curiously, it often seems that the first instinct of the SACP leaders like Jeremy Cronin is to come to the uncritical defense of president Zuma, whatever the merits or demerits of allegations, whilst going on a furious and ferocious ideological, majoritarian attack against any perceived slight from real and imagined foes such as the EFF and Julius Malema.

In my 30 October 2012 Politicsweb article under the heading “Jacob Zuma: Strong on affability, but weak on policy”, I pointed to the fact that the SACP has precisely failed to provide a very consistent, critical but constructive critique of the Zuma ANC (ZANC) administration, as if the SACP can switch on or off its tap of criticism of the performance of ANC administrations, depending on whether it fancies, or does not fancy, the ANC leaders in power.

The article, in part, stated:

“Even more startling is the SACP and COSATU’s complete lack of any consistent ideological critique of the class and political’orientation’…and nature of the Jacob Zuma government, or what others now mockingly refer to as the 2007 Polokwane Pirates’ Class of the Walking Wounded. That the SACP and COSATU have embedded themselves comfortably and firmly at the very centre of this power edifice, is no excuse for their failure to provide a coherent framework for ongoing ideological and political critique of the Zuma government”.

Three years later, neither the SACP nor COSATU has penned and published such a wanted and eagerly-awaited critique of the Zuma government they are tied to the hip to.

The highly acclaimed, persuasive and trenchant 17 December 2014 critique of the SACP by COSATU general secretary (GS), Zwelinzima Vavi, evidently done in his individual capacity, and not representative of the views of the whole COSATU leadership, and contained in his ‘Open letter to the leaders and members of the South African Communist Party’, has gone practically unresponded to substantially, except for a précis which promised a more substantive response at some unspecified time in the future, by the SACP and its leaders, despite earlier promises that this would be done niftily.

But when it comes to the EFF and Julius Malema, the SACP displays no such supine laziness to react or respond. Neither does the SACP turn the other cheek when slighted by either the EFF or Julius Malema. When the EFF disrupted the start of 2015 SONA, Jeremy Cronin penned his ‘Legislative disruptions: From Nazis to the EFF’ shortly thereafter. It was a response speed that was both amazing and refreshing. Here again, when his bluster guns are turned away from president Zuma and his Zuma ANC (ZANC) government, Jeremy Cronin, predictably and bug-eyed, regains his legendary and well-known “critical and self-critical abilities”.

[For my criticism and assessment of the EFF and Julius Malema, see my Politicsweb article ‘Julius Malema’s World War Z’ of 16 October 2013].

But why can’t Cronin be similarly nimble-footed with regard to a much-awaited SACP critique of the Zuma government, or the SACP’s response to the long, critical letter of Zwelinzima Vavi on the SACP?

What does this say about the SACP’s motives and motivation for attacking the EFF and Julius Malema?

It should be recalled that George Orwell said that “the word Fascism has no meaning except in as far as it signifies something undesirable” and that “words are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments”.

The SACP and Jeremy Cronin are certainly revealing a lot of “biased judgments” against the EFF and Julius Malema, especially as it relates to their use of the terms “neo-fascists”, “proto-fascist, “Fascist”, and the expression “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”.

To fully appreciate how deleterious this ideological dereliction of duty on the part of the SACP and its leaders, in terms of what Karl Marx called a “severe criticism of all that exists”, in this case in relation to the Zuma administration, means, one has to look at how the SACP has been unable to reverse the damaging neoliberal precepts of the ANC’s signature long-term, strategic development programme, namely the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP’s economic chapter, like its predecessor, GEAR, openly advances and advocates for economic neoliberalism, with nary a word of oppositional resistance from the SACP leaders serving in the Zuma government.

Cronin’s repeated assertion that the key agenda of the EFF, by calling for nationalization of mines, is to save struggling black mining moguls, is found not to be comprehensively dialectical and scientific. For an example he still needs to explain why Julius Malema at some point abruptly and unilaterally announced that the gold mines would not be nationalized because gold mining is expensive. (See news24, ‘Malema: Gold too expensive to nationalise’, 22 December 2013). What influence was brought to bear on Malema to do such a solitary, unilateral about-turn? Who brought to bear such effective influence on Malema to gain such a remarkable volte face in our politics’ infant terrible? For what gain for Malema and the EFF? What price tag is on Malema on the question of nationalization of mines? What will the EFF say when in the future platinum or diamond or iron ore or coal mining gets expensive? Will it abandon another of its radical nationalisation pillars? How did this new position of Malema affect those BEE gold mining moguls Cronin presumed were supportive of the EFF’s campaign for nationalisation of mines, in the hope that Malema would save their mining holdings from bankruptcy? Cronin di not provide clarity on these important issues. And, in any case, many of the BEE mining moguls, including some of those who own or part-own struggling mines, are fervent supporters and funders of the ruling ANC of president Zuma and the Zuma ANC (ZANC) government in which several SACP leaders serve as senior ministers and deputy ministers, including Cronin himself. Do these struggling BEE mining moguls so support the ANC because the ANC would save their struggling BEE mine shares as well? Or for what reason, according to Cronin’s logic, would they be supporting the ANC? At what point of supporting either the EFF or the ANC do these struggling BEE mining moguls become sponsors of the EFF’s radical economic agenda of nationalization of mines, just to save their struggling mines? Nary a word from Jeremy Cronin on these weighty conceptual and policy issues.

The SACP’s decision to locate itself in the proximity of the ANC’s power and patronage networks has been particularly damaging to its struggle against the politics of patronage (eg, Cronin’s warning against the Zanufication of the ANC under Thabo Mbeki), the reality and truth about which (i.e Zanufication of the ANC) the SACP should be speaking to any and all ANC factions in power, including the government of president Zuma. After all, the government’s department of public works is generally, even if sometimes unfairly, considered the most corrupt of government departments, because it deals with large amount of state property portfolio and tenders and public work programmes. Yet it is headed by two prominent Communists, namely Cronin himself, as deputy minister, and the SACP deputy chairman, and the former teacher and trade unionist, Thulas Nxesi as minister.

The more cynical of South Africa’s bitter and veteran anti-Communists, happy to take a swipe at Cronin and the SACP leadership, charge that there has actually been – horror of horrors – Zanufication of the Zuma government’s department of public works under two South African Communists, namely Thulas Nxesi and Jeremy Cronin!

So two negative dynamics are at work for the SACP here: Firstly, it has been woefully incapable of resisting the neoliberal offensive of the ANC NDP’s economic prescriptions; and secondly, it has located itself in the proximity of the ANC’s patronage networks, especially by heading the government’s department of public works.

For the SACP and its leaders like Jeremy Cronin, this situation too is a “toxic reality” (to quote Blade Nzimande’s 30 November 2030 statement on the EFF’s chant of ‘Pay back the money’ in parliament’).

Writing about a similar development in Zimbabwe, which also accounts for the current collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, Fay Chung, the former Chinese-Zimbabwean ZANU-PF freedom fighter, exile and Minister of Education, stated:

“The situation was exacerbated by the change in ZANU PF’s ideology from nominal socialism in 1992 to Structural Adjustment’s version of liberal capitalism. While Marxism-Leninism had already been abandoned by 1976, long before independence, nevertheless its rhetoric still lingered for a decade after independence. It also served an important function as a benchmark for measuring what was being done by government. The poor regarded socialism, however ill defined, as representing their interests”. (Fay Chung, Reliving the Second Chimurenga – Memories from Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle’, 2006, page 265).

Fay Chung further stated that:

“Structural Adjustment was interpreted by the ruling political class as licence to enrich itself. The first decade of independence had seen a small number of blacks becoming rich through property ownership rather than through industrialization. A small number had managed to link up with large multinational companies, which still continued to lever enormous political power. Structural Adjustment ushered in a period of increased corruption by the political class, which saw the opportunity to secure a large share of the economy through the political support they were able to give to the private sector ventures from outside…One phenomenon of patronage politics was that the masses could vote for the best patron who would provide the most for the community, irrespective of ideology or race”. (Ibid, pages 266-269).

Interestingly, one of the bitterest disputes between the SACP and the EFF revolves precisely around the question of who has access to the patronage networks of the ANC government. Was it Julius Malema in his previous incarnation as the leader of the ANC youth league? Or is it now the leaders of the SACP who head the national department of public work, the Eastern Cape province, other Ministries and national departments and other provincial legilstures and provincial departments, as well as municipalities across the length and breadth of South Africa? How does this reality of state power – what the SACP’s former chairman and the current secretary general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, once called ‘the sins of incumbency’ – affect the SACP’s ideological posture, given what the the Marxist theoretician Milovan Djilas wrote about the rise and hegemony of “The New Class” in former Soviet states, which bureaucratic “New Class” was made up of Communists deployed in the state, and who did not own, but “controlled”, through entry-ism, access to enormous resources at the disposal of the Communist-dominated states?

Have Jeremy Cronin and the SACP interrogated the worrying potential and immense possibilities that the black economic empowerment (BEE) rent-seeking economy, as well as the SACP’s close proximity to, if not embeddedness in, the ANC’s patronage and tendepreneurial networks across the country have spurned, out of the SACP member-deployees in the South African democratic State, an autonomous, powerful, power-hungry and unaccountable new social formation – a new bureaucratic, lupine, parasitic class – such as Milovan Djilas’ bureaucratic “‘New Class”? What measures has the SACP put in place to forestall and guard against the emergence and consolidation of such a predatory and avaricious South African Communist Party-originated “compradore”, parasitic and lupine bureaucratic “New Class” within the South African State, which may seek to organize and constitute itself as a “Communist quasi-State within a democratic South African State”?

The SACP and COSATU openly and warmly welcomed the Zuma national government’s decision to place five Limpopo provincial departments under administration and to send a Treasury-led national task force there, as this was, allegedly, linked with factional fights within the ruling ANC and a way to politically get to Malema. The two fraternal organisations were similarly very supportive of calls for the so-called ‘Lifestyle Audit’ to be done on Julius Malema, when he was still the ANCY youth league’s leader. No other ANC, SACP, COSATU and ANC Youth league leader has since been publicly subjected to such a ‘Lifestyle Audit’ call, despite many instances of unaccounted for instant accumulation of opulence being reported about in our media. This reveals the tactical opportunism and politicization of the laudable fight against corruption in our country.

Who is a “patron” (to borrow Fay Chung’s term)? And who is a “tenderpreneur” (to borrow a term that the SACP leaders almost single-handedly invented for our political partois speech)?

In his excellent essay quoted above, Pallo Jordan correctly stated that:

“Historical materialism teaches that the basis of class lies in the social productive relations, and not in the real or apparent relative affluence of individuals”.

Has the emergent and growing collaborative relationship between the tenderpreneurs and the parasitic, lupine State bureaucracy’s “New Class” created new threats to our further democratic advances? Is this the social productive relation on the basis of which the SACP has defined and determined the EFF as being “neo-fascist”? Or what is actually the class and dialectical materialist basis of such a characterization by the SACP of the EFF and Julius Malema as “neo-fascist”?

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels stated:

“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter its degree of development at the time”.

Jeremy Cronin and the SACP need to explain why they condemn the EFF which, to quote the Communist Manifesto, “bring to the front, as a leading question…the property question…” And Cronin and the SACP need to urgently expatiate on what precisely is the class basis of the politics and behavior of the EFF and Malema, far beyond the myopia-endowed #”tenderpreneurship” Twitter hashtag. In that way, they will assist South Africa to uncover and see what really “lies hidden” from our public’s view by the EFF’s red overalls, gumboots, Makarapas and domestic maid attire “striptease” appearances.

(See my own understanding of what Fascism, according to the Communist International [Comintern]’s leader and one of history’s greatest anti-Fascist fighters and theoreticians, Georgi Dmitrov of Bulgaria, is and means in my Politicsweb article of 17 September 2012 under the heading “Malema the ‘Fascist’: A comment”).

Since the EFF is, to again quote the Communist Manifesto, “against the existing social and political order of things”, Jeremy Cronin need to clarify why they do not regard the EFF as a “revolutionary movement” (Communist Manifesto), but as a counter-revolutionary, neo-fascist outfit. How do Jeremy Cronin and the SACP arrive at this definition, which was deployed on Julius Malema and the ANC youth league at the time, long before the EFF, the EFF’s red overalls and maid dresses and hard miners’ hats (Makarapas)? In actuality, these imprecations were hurled at Malema long before what NEHAWU describes as the “striptease” of the “EFF fascists”.

To hear Jeremy Cronin tell it, you would be made to believe that the horror of Fascism started only when “a dozen Nazi MPs” in Germany’s Weimar republican parliament caught the rest of the other overwhelmingly majoritarian parliamentary factions “flat-footed”, as he put it in his piece.

This piece of subjectivised, mechanically transposed German history in 1928 is cut and pasted to exactly fit with Cronin’s overall “majoritarian” ideological offensive against Julius Malema and the EFF. Of course the EFF has a very short history of less than three years. But with regard to the history of German Fascism, we would need to start not at the point when “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” intimidated the supine and prostrate and weakling Weimar Republic caught “flat-footed”. We would need to go back a decade at least, at the end of the First World War and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Nigh, we will need to in fact go much further back to how the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck used militarism, stunning military conquests and the German martial traditions to smash France in 1871 on his military victory sprint to create the first, powerful united Germany in history.

[The birth of South Africa’s negotiated settlement, after protracted multi-party negotiations at CODESA, which were preceded by “civil war and social division”, could not be further from how Otto von Bismarck forged a united Germany on the military defeat of Austria and France. Whatever the negative effects and consequences of South Africa’s “civil war and social divisions”, they can never compare to the utter, nihilistic destruction of the First World War on European countries, including Germany].

Suffice to quote here what Paul Kennedy in ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’ wrote about the specific period just prior to the appearance in Germany’s Weimar parliament of “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928′:

He wrote that:

“Even before the First World War, political groups across Europe had been criticizing the arcane, secretive methods and elitist preconceptions of the ‘old diplomacy’, and calling instead for a reformed system, where the affairs of state were open to the scrutiny of the people and their representatives” (Vintage Books, 1989, page 284).

Kennedy further wrote that:

“But the problem with ‘public opinion’ after 1919 was that many sections of it did not match that fond Gladstonian and Wilsonian vision of a liberal, educated, fair-minded populace, imbued with internationalist ideas, utilitarian assumptions, and respect for the rule of law”. (Ibid).

And lastly, Kennedy wrote:

“To hundreds of thousands of former Frontsoldaten across the continent of Europe, disillusioned by the unemployment and inflation and boredom of the postwar bourgeois-dominated order , the conflict had represented something searing but positive: martial values, the camaraderie of warriors, the thrill of violence and action. To such groups, especially in the defeated nations of Germany and Hungary and in the bitterly dissatisfied victor nation of Italy, but also among the French right, the ideas of the new fascist movements – of order, discipline, and national glory, of the smashing of the Jews, Bolsheviks, intellectual decadents, and self-satisfied liberal middle class – had great appeal. In their eyes (and in the eyes of their equivalents in Japan), it was struggle and force and heroism which were the enduring features of life, and the tenets of Wilsonian internationalism which were false and outdated”. (Ibid, page 285).

[In contrast, in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, there is a very broad, overwhelming public support for the values, principles and the liberal, democratic political freedoms and liberties provided for in our 1996 Constitution, including in our Bill of Rights. Julius Malema is today a politician and public figure thanks to the freedoms of speech, expression and association provided for by the 1996 Constitution. Equally, the EFF’s parliamentary contingent owes its existence to elections guaranteed by our Constitution. So, a “neo-fascist” streak in the EFF and Malema, unlike with regard to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”, would have no basis whatsoever in political heuristics and the socio-economic milieu of post-apartheid South Africa. Even the extant and horrible apartheid-inherited inequalities in our country, including economic inequalities, would never justify either a “neo-fascist”, or a Zimbabwe-style political and strategic response from the EFF and Julius Malema.]

Jeremy Cronin is correct in his article to remind himself and us of Karl Marx’s maxim about history repeating itself first as a tragedy, and secondly, as a farce, which regressive evolutionary idea Marx borrowed, holus-bolus, from Hegel. Cronin was right to so remind himself because any reading of how Paul Kennedy described the European scene prior to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” catching the Weimar parliament “flat-footed” would affirm to him that any comparison between Julius Malema and the EFF with “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” is misleading, false, distorted, unhelpful and mischievous in the extreme, although it may be theatrically entertaining.

The crux of the issue is that the Weimar republican politicians during the war interlude at the turn of the 20th century were almost as equally to blame for the rise, growth and ultimate triumph of Hitler’s Nazis as the European fascist, genocidal politicians were.

This should really be the take-away lesson from this sordid and tragic European history for the SACP and the ANC. Even if Malema and the EFF wish to emulate Hitler and Mussolini, they will only succeed on the basis of the utter and complete failure of our current constitutional and democratic dispensation to fulfill its promises and constitutional mandate, just as Germany’s Weimar republican politicans were such tremendous failures.

Even in the worst case future scenario of South Africa’s unimaginable future collapse on the level of Weimar parliament’s collapse, it is hard to see and imagine how there can be any “bitter spot” confluence of myriad of such tremendously negative factors – or the eruption of an absolutely perfect economic, political, democratic and constitutional storm – to make Malema or EFF’s Fascism ever possible, let alone unavoidable and victorious, in South Africa. After all, we do not need the bogeymen of European Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini to scare us into vigilance or frighten us with dramatic evocations of German Fascism’s boots, hats, salutes and beer-fuelled “Hail Hitler” shouts in a rickety, jerry-can, socially discredited and politically cowed as well as cowered Weimar parliament in 1928.

We have our own home-grown, “local is nie lekker nie” white Fascism’s bogeyman to nightly remind and frighten us enough about the destructive outcome of the genocidal ideologies of Hitler’s latter-day disciples, black or white!

And the key point is precisely that our own home-grown, “local is nie lekker nie” white Fascism did not announce its arrival using the theatrics and the tragicomedy akin to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”. These vilest white Fascists here at home under Apartheid gave the pretense of respecting the white racist parliament, correctly played by the parliamentary rules, correctly rose up on a parliamentary point of order or a point of privilege, wore designer suits, bespoke shoes and spoke the polished and velvet parliamentary language to rival the one used in the British parliament. They did not disrupt a single parliamentary session, not did they conspire to “collapse” the white racist parliament. They in fact elaborately hid their true fascist intents behind perfect bourgeois political and parliamentary mannerisms.

Mr. Jeremy Cronin, for God’s sake, these local white Fascists under Apartheid even permitted the courageous lone opposition voice of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP)’s Helen Suzman, and treated her with utmost respect, proper parliamentary decorum and bowed to parliament’s presiding officer before leaving the parliamentary floor.

But this did not mean they were lesser Fascists nevertheless.

That is why Pallo Jordan was so correct in advising us that the thing that distinguished Marxists from other political formations is that they uncover what lies hidden behind appearances. They are not deceived, nor taken in by forms. They search for what lies behind forms – they look for the content and the real meaning of things.

We had our own white Fascist in PW Botha not a long time ago, as the UK Robin Renwick’s book has just reminded us all. Our memories of PW Botha’s fascist rule are still very fresh. And none of us with a sane political mind would want to subject our people and country again to the heartless, brutal, murderous and “the white season” of the 1980s decade – of death squads, military occupations of our townships, of unending assassinations, of invasions of our neighbouring countries, of extreme civil and domestic strife, of States of Emergency, of acute economic near-collapse, of our sons and daughters fleeing to neighboring and far-flung countries to seek political refuge, of our political leaders being incarcerated for decades in our notorious prisons, and of mutinies and popular insurrections in our townships and dorpies and villages.

Those who would attempt such a fascist scenario for our future would be smashed and defeated, even before they finish they own first Night of Broken Glasses or their own Night of Long Knives.

If this is by any chance the “neo-fascist” future scenario Malema and the EFF are planning for our country, they will be destroyed and paraded at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Jeremy Cronin seems bent to scare himself to death with visions of South Africa’s “neo-fascist” future, courtesy of Julius Malema and the EFF. In point of fact, there is a much greater danger of “neo-fascism” erupting as a fellow companion of the vile, sporadic and violent xenophobic attacks that are quickly developing, sadly, as a hallmark of our black townships and black areas. Therein lies the danger of disgruntled black petty bourgeois Fascism, something Cronin should pay greater attention to.

Fascism has the same snowball-chance-in-hell prospect in the future of democratic South Africa as indeed Communism has! Meaning almost zilch such future prospect. Jeremy Cronin, as a Communist leader, should know this political truism better than most of us.

And Cronin may just want to tell us what is the organic difference between the open white Fascism of Eugene Terreblanche’s AWB and its current followers, who flout Swastikas-adorned flags, do “Hail Hitler” salutes, wear brown shirts and brown boots adorned with Swastikas and the faces of Adolf Hitler, which invaded and “collapsed” the CODESA talks in Kempton Park for a day, which maims and kills innocent blacks, which spreads their hate ideology and memorialises Hitler’s Nazis, on the one hand, and what he, the SACP and NEHAWU allege is the “neo-fascist” agenda of Julius Malema and the EFF, who have co-opted the ANC’s Freedom Charter. How come an openly white Fascist and racist grouping like the AWB can be said to be in the same camp – “the fascist territory” – as a “revolutionary movement”, the majority of whose members came from the ANC, a political party that self-defines as a “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” formation, I mean the EFF?

It is true, however, that almost every political parry or government has its moment of fascist madness. That is altogether a different, albeit still very serious, matter.

The ANC revealed its fascist madness through the Marikana massacre and its torture camps in Angola during the exile years. The USA revealed its fascist madness in Vietnam. France did so in Algeria. The USA and Britain revealed their fascist madness through their rogue regime changes in Iraq and Libya. Angela Merkel’s Germany has just revealed its fascist madness through its foolish and disastrous support of the fascist government of president Petro Poroschenko in (western) Ukraine, and its self-destructive attitude towards eastern Ukraine, Russia and president Vladimir Putin. The USSR revealed its own fascist madness by invading its eastern European client states and Afghanistan. Israel is revealing its fascist madness by continuing to occupy Palestine and by waging wars against the tiny Gaza Strip. Irag’s Saddan Hussein revealed his fascist madness by invading Iran and Kuwait. China revealed its fascist madness by invading, unprovoked, India and Vietnam respectively. Belgium had its fascist madness in the Congo through King Leopold. Japan revealed its fascist madness through its brutal colonial occupation of China and Korea. Australia revealed its fascists madness in its extermination of the Aboriginals and their continuing neglect and marginalization. Uganda revealed its fascist madness through Idi Amin, and the Central African Republic is currently putting its fascist madness on display and previously through Emperor Bokassa, etc, etc.

But all these incidents do not come near to being even close to the whole enchilada, unbridled, full-blown and full form Fascism of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in 1928 and subsequently, until the Fall of the Third Reich in 1945.

What today comes the closest to a full-blown Fascism, in the classical sense that the Comintern’s Georgi Dmitrov defined it, is really the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or the so-called the Islamic Caliphate of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi cutting across Iraq and Syria.

It is very possible that once in power, like the ANC has already done, the EFF will also reveal its own fascist madness episodically, just like president Robert Mugabe did in Matabeleland in 1982 and has been episodically doing since 2002.

But Fascism as such in future South Africa? So unlikely it is definitely most improbable.

So Jeremy Cronin, being a world-renown poet himself, was, I suspect, taking poetic license and liberties with the dramatic expression about “a dozen Nazi MPs in Weimar parliament in 1928”, and his “From Nazis to Malema” sub-title of his article. He most probably was trying to forestall, through scaremongering, the possible electoral growth of the EFF in future elections.

One of the key blind spots in Jeremy Cronin’s turbulent relationship with the EFF is his hardline, doctrinaire, undifferentiated and totally dismissive political attitude towards the EFF, and towards Julius Malema especially, as if neither has any self-redeeming political quality to them.

Yet Cronin, in his 06 April 2011 Umsebenzi article, wrote that “we need popular power to counter and transform other key nodes of power, not least big corporate (including media) capital”. As to why Cronin refuses to view and regard and to include the EFF as part of “popular power” which he envisages, and, as he says, is needed “to counter and transform”, as he put it, “corporate [including media] capital”, is not explained.

This dismissive attitude of Jeremy Cronin towards the EFF and Julius Malema, including his readiness to even cut and paste the tragedies of Germany’s Fascism history in order to scaremonger, reminds one of what Franz Fanon wrote about cognitive dissonance:

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable called cognitive dissonance. And because it is important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief”.

Cronin seems determined to allow the reality of the emergence of Malema’s EFF as the third biggest electoral and democratic force in our fifth parliament not to alter his ‘core belief’, as Franz Fanon would put it. He would rather rationalize through ‘a revolutionary phrase’, to ignore and to deny the evidence about the surprising, relatively good EFF electoral performance in our last national elections. He clearly reckons that the relative success of the EFF portends a deeply worrying semiotics about the possible dire future of the SACP as a viable force of the Left.

Jeremy Cronin seems to be succumbing to “cognitive dissonance” (Franz Fanon) when it comes to Julius Malema and the EFF, I am afraid to say.

I believe that Cronin can surely do better than that.

Not so, Jeremy?

CONCLUSION: WHERE TO THE SACP’S MANDARINS ON THE “NEO-FASCIST” MALEMA AND THE EFF?

One of the occasions in which Jeremy Cronin unleashed his very considerable and highly impressive theoretical capability and strategic mind was during his interview with Howard Barrell in Lusaka, Zambia, on 16 July 1989, during the ANC and SACP’s exile years.

Relevant to our discussion of the ill-tempered and acrimonious Cronin-Malema political and personal dynamic is how, in that interview with Howard Barrell, Cronin tackled, at some length, the vexatious political issues of the ANC’s “vanguardism” and “hegemony” and “strategic leadership” of the liberation struggle at the time. Sometimes I wonder if it is not Jeremy Cronin’s own specific, and possibly outdated, understanding of these very important revolutionary concepts in the Marxist lexicon – the concepts of “vanguardism”, “hegemony” and “strategic leadership” -, as he expounded to Howard Barrell more than a quarter of a century ago in Lusaka, which hold him back from exploring a different relation paradigm towards the EFF and Julius Malema. I am often minded that it is these very crucial concepts which go to the very heart of why the SACP and its leaders have adopted such a confrontational, nihilistic, if not totalitarian political posture towards the EFF and Julius Malema. (See O’Malley Archives, Cronin, Jeremy, [First Interview] with Howard Barrell, 16 July 1989, Lusaka). It does often seem that what the SACP, Cronin and other South African Communist leaders seek to achieve, in relation to the EFF and Julius Malema, is to firstly deligitimise them as effective and meaningful political factors in our “democratic, multi-party space”, as Cronin put it in his article on “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”, and to ultimately render them politically unthreatening and harmless, say the way COPE now is to the ANC, or the way the PAC has for so long been to the ANC and the SACP.

It must be upfront conceded that the way the SACP and ANC leaders dealt with the youth insurrection of Julius Malema’s ANC youth league, until the expulsion of Malema from the ANC, was a master stroke. The SACP played a pivotal role in the neutering of Malema’s youth revolt within the ANC through the relaunching of the Young Communist League in December 2003. That the ANC youth league of today is very much a shadow of its former, glorious “king-maker” self, is evidence of the great success of the SACP strategy to neutralize what was an emerging anti-communist militancy within Thabo Mbeki-era ANC youth league.

It is also clear that the SACP has not yet really developed and designed a correct and effective strategic and tactical response to Malema’s incendiary, insurrectionary youth politics since he was expelled from the ANC. What SACP’s Blade Nzimande referred in November 2014 as “toxic reality” of the growing collaboration between “DA brat pack” and Malema’s “neo-fascists”, as well as president Zuma’s parliamentary compliment to Malema in his Response to 2015 SONA, is indicative of the limitations of the SACP’s strategy of “Nazifiction” of the EFF and Julius Malema through smear, innuendoes and outright gossiping.

But the thing that bitterly taunts Cronin, the SACP and the ANC is that Malema was not politically finished by his roughly-handled expulsion from the ANC by the ANC disciplinary appeal committee led by the current ANC and South African deputy president and the darling and the ultimate poster-boy of our country’s neoliberal crowd, Cyril Ramaphosa. If anything, Malema continues to give his former fellow ANC comrades good grief. It is conceivable that one day in the misty future South Africa will thank Malema and his EFF for proving the ANC’s canard that “it is cold outside the ANC” to have been untruthful.

The SACP needs to come up with a better long term strategy and short-term tactics than just calling the EFF and Malema as “neo-fascist”. And the sooner it does that, the better.

And here is why the EFF’s 25-member parliamentary contingent is such an immanent, imminent, direct and existential threat to the SACP.

No, not because the EFF MPs behave like, and are reminiscent of, “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”.

There is a much more prosaic and less florid explanation to the apoplexy of the SACP, and Cronin in particular, in relation to the EFF’s parliamentary contingent:

Just prior to president Jacob Zuma rising to deliver his Response to 2015 SONA, one of the MPs in our National Assembly rose on a point of order to ask if it was parliamentary for Blade Nzimande, ANC MP, to wear an SACP insignia in parliament. Seen from my TV viewer’s point, it seemed that Nzimande had put on a red SACP logo pin on the front upper pocket of his dark suit jacket.

Nzimande then stood up to offer clarification. And it is his answer that I believe largely explains the SACP’s huge, unprecedented ideological and political offensive against the EFF, its relatively puny parliamentary contigent, and specifically Julius Malema.

In brief, Nzimande explained that he did not break any parliamentary rule by spotting his party’s logo, because he was spotting a logo of a party (the SACP) which was not represented in our parliament. The presiding offer concurred with him and his explanation was sustained and carried the day. Nzimande was allowed to continue to spot his party logo on his jacket, which party is not represented in parliament, because it has never won a single democratic vote in any election on any level since 1994. This is so because the SACP has never contested elections during the entire lifespan of South Africa’s democracy.

In his official statement on the occasion of his announcement of the dramatic changes twenty five years ago that permanently changed the face of South Africa, former apartheid president FW de Klerk harshly criticized the fact that, although the SACP has not contested any election and has not won a single vote, it has a preponderant influence on the ANC and on our National Democratic Revolution (NDR).

Yet not far from Nzimande was the EFF’s 25-member parliamentary contingent milking the national publicity afforded to it by the TV broadcasts of parliamentary proceedings to the last drop. Even more than that, the EFF’s mere red, shouting attire, in a sartorial taunt of the SACP’s Red October red attire, announces it to millions and millions of TV viewers and radio listeners and social media pundits,who now tune in the Parliament Channel on TV in unprecedented numbers since the EFF’s advent in parliament.

The EFF’s so-called “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” radical youth revolution is being televised, broadcasted on radio and evangelized across new social media platforms since their relatively good showing in our last national elections, thanks to their red-attired parliamentary contingent!

Contrast this good parliamentary fortunes of the EFF with the fact that the attires of the other parties represented in parliament make them all indistinguishable from one other at a passing glance on TV. The EFF’s attire stands out and cries “It’s us here the EFF; Pay back the money!”. On the other hand, the SACP is not represented, and is nowhere in parliament to milk the free, national publicity of what has become our politics’ biggest national stage, until the next local elections next year – our national parliament.

In the interregnum between elections, the EFF is the publicity king over the SACP, except for a tiny, invisible pin on the jacket of Blade Nzimande in parliament, who still has to first justify why he wears a logo of a party unrepresented in parliament.

Even when the SACP members take to the parliamentary floor to speak or make a point of order or privilege, they do not rise as SACP MPs, as the “dozen Nazi MPs in 928”, or as the EFF’s parliamentary contingent in our fifth national parliament, routinely did and do. Presdient Zuma does not even compliment the SACP as he did the EFF’s Julius Malema.

No wonder one thinks that the SACP members who are MPs on the ANC ticket must be feeling surly, churlish and very chaffed at the huge free publicity exposure its nemesis, the EFF and its policies, are getting. In practice, the EFF is ascending in the popular imagination, thanks to their presence in the fifth parliament and what the ANC and the SACP call the EFF’s “publicity stunts”, or NEHAWU describes as “striptease”. Their parliamentary presence has turned the Parliament Channel on TV into very, very popular slot competing with our country’s most watched soapies

Whilst this unprecedented public interest in and fascination with the going-ons in our parliament must be good for our democracy, it is not that clear that the SACP is reaping collateral benefits from such public excitement about our parliament. As the EFF is ascending in the public imagination, it is eclipsing the SACP’s public profile as the latter struggles for undivided voter and viewer attention.

The SACP does not have to break its long-standing, historic alliance with the ANC, nor does it have to hasten the collapse of the Tripartite Alliance, to address this strategic, existential threat to itself. It just has to acknowledge that more – much more – needs to be done by itself to strategically respond to the emergence and rise of the EFF and Malema as a formidable national political factor.

I would suggest that one of such responses by the SACP should be that it is allowed by the ANC in the future to contest municipal, provincial and national elections in its own right, even if it ends up with only one or two or a handful of MPs in our national parliament initially.

But that will at least give the SACP a parliamentary and legislative platform to give voice to its communist convictions and policies.

The SACP leadership should also remember what Zimbabwe’s former Education Minister, the Chinese-Zimbabwean, Fay Chung wrote about in relation to the Zimbabwean masses and ZANU-PF’s post-1976 “ill-defined” Marxist rhetoric:

“The poor regarded socialism, however ill-defined, as representing their interests.” (Ibid).

And this too is key to the SACP’s understanding of the powerful influence and the attractiveness of the rhetoric of Julius Malema and his EFF exercise over our black petty bourgeois and poor and unemployed masses.

South Africa’s Communists, especially our committed white communists like Jeremy Cronin, may want to academically and theoretically argue, as well as expatiate endlessly, until they are blue in the face, on whether Malema and his EFF’s “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” socialism is “scientific” or “toxic” or “neo-fascist” or “striptease”. But our indigent, unemployed and petty bourgeois masses will go with and vote the socialism and “Marxism-Leninism” that are beamed to them in their living rooms from our national parliament through the statements of the EFF’s 25-strong, boisterous and clearly attention-seeking parliamentary contingent, and not the stodgy, unexciting, old-age, pontificating, snooty, Croninistically curmudgeonly and rules-based “scientific socialism” of the SACP’s backroom Central Committee, Politbureau and SACP conferences, which are never broadcasted to the masses directly, and which in any case are wrapped in arcane and difficult-to-access deep academic jargon favored by Jeremy Cronin.

Jeremy Cronin can compare the EFF to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” as much and as long as he wants, but what our masses hear through the Parliament Channel is that Malema and the EFF give them hope and are fighting in their corner, whilst they do not hear the Communist voices booming from our parliament and provincial legislatures.

It is highly grotesque, and in a sense politically tragic, given the glorious struggle history and credentials of South African Communists (SACP), that much younger parties like the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), DA, African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), United Democratic Movement (UDM), Freedom Front Plus (FF+), COPE, EFF and others, with hardly any comparable struggle background and history, can be represented and heard in our elected national parliament and provincial legislatures, even if through the mouth of a single MP, whilst the singular, vanguard and vibrant voice of South Africa’s Communism is stilled by its alliance with the ANC and COSATU.

It cannot be true that in its ideological analysis and understanding of the current juncture of South Africa’s evolving political and power dynamics, the SACP is convinced that its primary focus must be to launch a sustained ideological, majoritarian offensive against the EFF and Julius Malema, because the EFF as “neo-fascist” has become what Blade Nzimande once described as “a threat to our democratic advances”.

This ill-thought approach reduces the SACP to the low level of the EFF, or rather elevates the EFF to the lofty level of the SACP. It also makes the SACP to come across as petty-minded, unimaginative and stirred, if not shaken.

Whatever its appearances and rhetoric, whatever its current political posture and fashionability, whatever its parliamentary behavior and its radical politics, the EFF is a small fish in a small pond, with only 6% representation in parliament. There are much bigger fish swimming in the sea, like the DA, with which the SACP has to contend. The EFF is a lizard in a river brimming with crocodiles.

But if you hear the SACP obsess about the EFF and Julius Malema, you would be forgiven for thinking that the EFF won close to 40% of the vote in last year’s national election. In fact, thanks to the SACP’s unrelenting, majoritarian attacks on the EFF, the latter probably enjoys about 40% of popular imagination today.

The foremost, the primary and the biggest threat facing the SACP are the growing and intense internal contradictions and contestations within COSATU and the ANC which are rending both apart. The SACP leaders must display what Nicos Poulantzas, in the classic ‘Fascism and Dictatorship’ termed ‘pertinent effects’, which gives arise to social formation at a political and ideological level, in their strategic and tactical response to the emergence and rise of the EFF and the unique political personality of Julus Malema.

The expulsion of Julius Malema from the ANC has not resolved the ANC’s acute and fast ripening internal contradictions and contestations. It is true that the EFF’s mode of political operation may be exacerbating, but is certainly not causing, some of the ANC’s own internal contradictions and contestations.

For the SACP to misread this EFF dynamic is to play into the hands of Julius Malema.

Even if Jeremy Cronin and the other SACP leaders succeed to vanquish, tame, domesticate and slay what they view as the “neo-fascist” dragon monster represented by the EFF and Julius Malema, they will not have resolved a single of the acute and deepening internal contradictions and contestations eating away at the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance’s own strategic core and the center of its gravitational pull.

Only when the South African Communist voice, as embodied by the SACP, begins to contest our democratic elections at all levels of elected power and to again boom across the length and breadth of our country; only when South African Communism, as represented by the SACP, has the courage and conviction to stop hiding behind the ANC and to represent itself in our national parliament; only when the masses of South Africa’s people begin to hear the voice(s) of the SACP’s elected representatives who would have emerged from under the ANC’s anorak; and only if the SACP finally stands on its own feet, in its own right, will the SACP begin to have a modicum of a chance to politically out-compete and defeat what it sees as the theatrical Fascism of the EFF and Julius Malema.

After all, the fate and unity of both the ANC and COSATU no more depend on the SACP alone. Other internal Tripartite Alliance forces, and other forces external to the Tripartite Alliance, may break the Alliance, as is happening with COSATU, and thus expose the SACP to the harsh and unforgiving headwinds of our politics. And then the SACP’s detractors will proclaim: Slovo said Socialism has not failed, but we say the SACP has failed!

To fight a fight, your own head must be in the ring to take the other fighter’s punches and blows. No good fight is ever fought behind someone else’s mask. To truly and thoroughly enjoy your favorite tune, you must be ready to go out and sing it in the rain, and not expect to come in the house dry, because you spent the whole time in the rain ducking and diving in order to eschew being hit by the torrent of rain drops falling from the sky.

For how long can the ANC be the SACP’s umbrella? Especially in our stormy, turbulent political times? For how long?

The SACP must take off the ANC mask from its face and start to contest power in its own right. Otherwise it may soon find out that with its unbendable commitment to neoliberalism of the NDP, the ANC has flown too close to the Sun, and its wings will be melting during the next municipal and two national elections.

The SACP must start now to put on, flap about and use its own wings to fly solo in all the “democratic, multi-party spaces” we wrestled through “civil war and social divisions”.

Some of us may even be interested in and attracted to such an independent SACP.

In his interview with Howard Barrell in Lusaka in 1989, the ANC and SACP’s then youngish white revolutionary, Jeremy Cronin, revealing flourishes of strategic brilliance and great intellectual promise as well as strategic leadership nous, said the following about the ANC’s leadership of the then raging anti-apartheid national liberation struggle, strongly emphasising that he believed that the ANC leadership:

“…are very mature and deep and have a very excellent, I would say, revolutionary grasp. It’s not only a mature leadership, but it really is an extremely mature, deep leadership, I would say, in that sense that’s been very important, and possibly the most important feature: that it has been quite strategic in broad terms and has been able to sort of ride a complex situation that has unfolded…again I think the movement is exhibiting considerable maturity and a combination of revolutionary principle and tactical flexibility, so I think it gets that right. So it is able to offer broad leadership extremely well, I think”.

Why then is the SACP of today, co-led by Jeremy Cronin, and operating in a constitutional democracy, cornering itself into this tiny rat corner, where it furiously boxes with and flails at the mobile “neo-fascist” shadows of the EFF and Julius Malema? Why has the SACP of a much more mature Jeremy Cronin abandoned its previously-admired ability to display and deploy “…a combination of revolutionary principle and tactical flexibility”? Why is the SACP so obdurate, dogmatic and doctrinaire in how it relates to the EFF, even much more than the DA of Helen Zille? Have the SACP’s frustration with, anger at and one-dimensional opinion of the EFF and Malema completely clouded its assessment of the latter two?

Given the highly complex and unprecedented political situation unfolding today before the SACP, exacerbated by the emergence and rise of Malema’s EFF, the SACP leaders like Cronin should rise to the occasion in ways and manner Cronin so well observed, studied and captured in the exiled ANC leadership in his interview with Howard Barrell in Lusaka in 1989.

If the current SACP leadership cohort does that in the current juncture of South Africa’s democratic development, especially with regard to the EFF and Julius Malema, future generations of young South Africans may one day in the future use the same pathos and breathless language akin to the ones Cronin employed to describe the exiled ANC leadership’s astonishing strategic depth, tactical brilliance and unbending commitment to the core liberation principles which underpinned its anti-apartheid freedom struggle.

If Cronin convinces the SACP leaders and himself to emulate the deep ANC strategic leadership lesson he noted back in 1989, then we would truly not have to be bothered for a second by the dark and overly pessimistic mutterings of Robin Renwick, the UK’s former ambassador to South Africa, about post-Nelson Mandela South Africa and the quality of the current ANC leadership cohort, as reported by Andrew Donaldson’s Politicsweb article quoted at the beginning of this article.

Nor would Jeremy Cronin’s perceived abuse of the scarecrow of Julius Malema’s “a dozen Nazis in 1928” ever come to pass in the future democratic South Africa.

Because the truth is that only a powerful, rejuvenated, strategic, broad-minded, ever growing and an independent South African Communist Party (SACP), which is not driven by petty-mindedness, is not paranoid, is not parochial, and is not strategically and politically inept, is our best, first and last guarantee against any future emergence and triumph of Fascism and bourgeois as well as religious fanatical totalitarianism – (whether black or white) – in South Africa, including even the SACP- and NEHAWU-alleged “striptease” neo-Fascism of Julius Malema and the EFF.

It was why the white Fascists of Apartheid made their first opening, strategic, massive, critical and devastating repressive and undemocratic move against the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) of Moses Kotane, Yusuf Dadoo, JB Marks and Ruth First, the predecessor of the SACP, when they launched their all-out fascist war offensive in 1950, two years after seizing power, against our country’s freedom, liberation and democratic forces.

—————-END—————

19th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
28 February 2015

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
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Good Morning Ms. Zelda van Riebeeck. White Racism and the Resurgence of the Revanchist Pro-Apartheid Nostalgia in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Are we there yet?

TOPIC: GOOD MORNING MS. ZELDA VAN RIEBEECK. WHITE RACISM AND THE RESURGENCE OF THE REVANCHIST PRO-APARTHEID NOSTALGIA IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: ARE WE THERE YET?

“We are racists,
We are racists,
And that’s the way we like it”.

“We are racists,
We are racists,
And that’s the way we like it”.
(A profoundly vile ditty chanted, unprovoked, by the white English racist football scumbag yobbos at a Paris, France underground station against a lone black commuter, CNN, 18 February 2015).

“No matter how much respect, no matter how much
recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I’m concerned,
as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this
country, it doesn’t exit for me”.
Malcolm X, the African American anti-racism Prophet, 1964.
(Quoted by Cornel West, the African American author of Race Matters, 2001, page 53).

INRODUCTION.

It will not surprise observers of South Africa’s racial relations in the post-apartheid era if soon a video emerges, or is unearthed, showing either some white primary school pupils, or some white university students, or some inebriated white restaurant patrons performing a cruel, racist dance or Black Face ritual on some unsuspecting blacks, whilst singing along the lyrics of the vile ditty and doing an imitation of their racist English football Neanderthal counterparts quoted above.

What in Europe is passed and fobbed off by the middle and upper classes, with upper lip condescension, as the misdirected misbehavior of some fringe, indigent elements of society, in South Africa that quickly becomes vogue amongst some of the white racist so-called sophisticates of the middle and upper classes and their offsprings.

A recent litany of open white racist incidents against defenseless blacks attests to this truism.

It looks like when Europe and North America sneeze their blatant, despicable various forms of racism, as the racist English Chelsea FC yobbos did few days ago in Paris, parts of white South Africa catches a full-blown influenza of subliminal or crude racism.

The recent blatant, violent incidents of white racism in South Africa, including in Cape Town, Western Cape, against blacks mirror some of the recent vile incidents of crude, open white racism in Europe and North America.

The question therefore is: Why is there this resurgence of white racism in South Africa twenty years after the end of legislated racism as was embodied by Apartheid?

I think that there are four indicators which can assist us to correctly answer this vital question.

The first of these four indicators can be found in the 21 October 2004 The New York Review of Books article by Neal Ascherson headlined ‘Africa: The hard Truth’, which was reviewing Howard W. French’s book ‘A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa’. In this article, Neal Ascherson wrote the following about South Africa:

“It has to be said that sustained political anger is rare in Africa. Years ago, a white radical working to subvert the apartheid regime in South Africa said to me: ‘The most disastrous trait of ordinary African people is their infinite capacity for forgiveness, their sheer inability to keep up resentment’. He gave a wry smile”.

Even a white South African radical working to subvert the apartheid regime observed this “disastrous trait” in us black South Africans?

Is it any wonder that South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma during his 2015 State of the Nation (SONA) address today received the loudest applause from the Members of Parliament (MPs) and the parliamentary gallery when he stated that we have forgiven the oppressive deeds of whites under colonialism and Apartheid, just as former president Nelson Mandela did previously, and that we now embrace whites with open arms? Not few white South Africans must have too given “a wry smile” at this statement of president Zuma. In fact, president Zuma informed the parliament and the nation how he never gets angry, even if he is called (evidently even by white racists) by such an offensive and insulting term as “‘i’nja’ in Zulu – a dog”, as he colorfully put it today to another boisterous round of applause from the assembled.

The second of the indicators that can help us to answer the question as to why there is a baffling growth of revanchist pro-Apartheid nostalgia in democratic South Africa is located in the premier global mouthpiece of big capital around the world, including in South Africa. In its 12th October 1996 issue, the UK The Economist, under the headline ‘After he’s gone’, and writing about former president Nelson Mandela, concluded the article with the following of several of its penultimate sentences about Mandela’s post-apartheid South Africa, two years after we attained our freedom:

“The aim must be a fair society for all, created by sweeping away the legacies of apartheid as fast as is compatible with nurturing stability and economic growth”. ((Page 18).

The admission by president Jacob Zuma in his SONA address today that black South Africans own only 3% of the blue-chip companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is just one of the measures underlining how post-apartheid South Africa has dismally failed to live up to even the barest minimum of expectation put forward by The Economist that we needed to aim for “…a fair society for all, created by sweeping away the legacies of apartheid”. What president Zuma did not even mention is that the top chief executive officers (CEOs), chief operating officers (COOs) and chief financial officers (CFO) of the 97% (by the president’s own statistics) white-owned blue -chip companies on the JSE are over 90% manned by white South Africans. Nor did he have time to mention that whilst over 90% of white South Africans live in our best suburbs, cities, towns and dorpies, almost 100% of the miserable villages, peri-urban settlements, squatter camps ringing our urban centers and our townships, almost all of them which are exclusively poor, highly depressed economically and where practically no inter-racial interaction happens amongst all of our people, are almost 100% populated by black South Africans.

The Economist (UK) would, I believe, agree that this is neither “as fast as possible” a situation towards creating “a fair society for all” in post-apartheid South Africa, two decades after the end of Apartheid.

In the economic power relations and economic ownership spheres, we have, in the last two decades, hardly started “sweeping away the legacies of apartheid”, as The Economist (UK) must have expected us to have done by now.

The recent tragic outbreak of black township xenophobic attacks by some of our fellow black South Africans against foreign small traders in some of our black townships is perhaps the saddest but most telling symptom of this failure on our part to create an all-inclusive economic society in our country. It is so unfortunate that president Zuma paid only perfunctory attention to this phenomenon of growing xenophobia in our country. (See my recent Politicsweb article “Xenophobia – ‘the bitch is in heat’ again”).

A recent report by one of our weekend newspapers (Sunday Times SA, 15 February 2015) showed how white teachers continue to constitute over 80% of the teaching staff at numerous private schools and colleges, as well as formerly white-only Model C schools in our country. And we also know that in our rural villages and depressed township schools, the teaching is done almost exclusively by the black staff. This is so more than twenty years after the advent of our democracy.

For sometime now Xolile Mangcu, author and public intellectual, has been writing numerous articles about how the teaching staff at our elite universities like the University of Cape Town, where Mangcu teaches as an assistant professor, the University of the Witwatersrand (where I post-graduated in 1992 when the teaching staff was still over 80% white, close to 25 years ago), Rhodes University (interestingly a so-called hotbed of some of our so-called white English-speaking radical academics and intellectuals) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, to name only a few, continue to be over-represented by white professors, including foreign ones, in their teaching compliments.

All this unchanged reality is so more than twenty years into our democracy.

I believe that even The Economist (UK) must be surprised that we have not moved as a post-Apartheid society “as fast as is compatible with nurturing stability and economic growth” in creating “a fair society for all”, especially in vigorously challenging blatant white hegemony in the country’s production of knowledge, culture and hegemonic, ruling ideologies in the post-apartheid era.

21 years into our post-apartheid constitutional democracy, South Africa remains far from the ideal of being “a fair society for all”, as I believe The Economist (UK) would readily concede.

The third indicator which may provide us with a reliable source of the answer to the question previously posed is located in Michael MacDonald’s book ‘Why Race Matters’. In it, MacDonald wrote the following about the enduring power of white racism worldwide:

“When they established slavery, for example, whites were not motivated by racial prejudices or solidarities. According to Frederickson, ‘Africans and other non-Europeans were initially enslaved not so much because of their color and physical type as because of their legal and cultural vulnerability’. Frederickson’s whites, looking for land and labor, directed themselves to those who had them. It happened that those who had what whites wanted were “brown” (and later ‘black’) and did not want to give them. To get them, whites required superiority…Until the arrival of Britain in the nineteenth century, Frederickson’s whites did not regard their supremacy as superiority, did not insist that their power reflected their worth. Whites took for granted that they were better than browns and blacks, of course. But prior to British intervention they did not regard their supremacy as something that had to be justified by superiority and did not regard superiority as something that originated in color. In fact, they stumbled onto color as a means of organizing rather belatedly “. (2006, pages 34-35).

It is in this paragraph that Michael MacDonald helps us to understand with blinding clarity as to why, as the African National Congress (ANC)’s Morogoro conference in 1969, which adopted its Strategy and Tactics guiding document, was so correct in stating that in the context of South Africa’s colonialism of a special type, it will not be enough to replace white oppressors with black oppressors – that a mere change of guard at the levers of political power will not suffice. Anti-racism and non-racism alone in post-apartheid South Africa are not enough to create what The Economist (UK) called in 1996 “the aim” of “a fair society for all”.

It is also why 20 years after the legal abolition of legislated white racism in South Africa, some of the white racists, including the ones born after the end of Apartheid, or the so-called ‘Born Frees’, as the recent appalling racist rape incident at the Northern Cape Agricultural College involving brutalizing white teens showed, still display such open revanchist pro-Apartheid sentiments, and why many black South African victims of these racist attacks in the main remain the meek victims of such abominable white racism.

It is because many white South Africans do not care much about our skin color anymore as the basis of their sense of racial supremacy, after their successful colonial conquest of the land and wealth of our country; neither do they now insist that their political power reflected their worth, as this is now achieved by their privileged economic position; nor do they now argue as in the past that their racial superiority justifies their supremacy and hegemony over post-apartheid South Africa, other than as a metaphor for their enduring desire to retain that which they conquered from blacks by force, namely the land, all the other wealth and our people’s cheap labor that was subsequently created from the colonial conquest of black South Africans.

It is no wonder that the moral outrage of Xolile Mangcu about the patent lack of demographic representativity in the professorial staff at our elite universities will not make the consciences of so-called radical and left-leaning white professors working in these elite universities to commit class suicide in favor of disadvantaged blacks and to shaft themselves aside in favor of new black professorial entrants into our elite universities. Nor will the JSE blue-chip companies and their CEOs, COOs and CFOs on their own do much to change, for the better, apartheid-era inherited legacy which president Jacob Zuma bemoaned today.

In the main black South Africans remain powerless because white South Africans in the main continue to wield enormous, preponderant and demographically unrepresentative economic power in our country. As the government does not tire from reiterating, our democratic government controls only 30% of our gross national product (GNP), whilst the 70% is controlled by the private sector, which, as the JSE statistics quoted above reveals, is controlled overwhelmingly by white South Africans.

This is really the powerful source of post-apartheid white racist arrogance, pro-Apartheid nostalgia and the very basis for the resurgence of revanchist, racist sentiment in certain white circles in our country.

In his book ‘The Master Strategist – Power, Purpose and Principle’ Ketan J. Patel, the founder and head of the Strategic Group at Goldman Sachs, wrote the following about what he called “domination”:

“Domination results from sustaining one-sided power in relationships;
To dominate, you need to possess a one-off advantage of sufficient scale to create sustainable distance between yourself and others. (NB:Apartheid spatial development? [My own words]);
To dominate you need a renewable advantage and invest to renew that advantage;
To sustain domination, targets must be willing to be dominated;
Domination leads to predatory behavior, because it becomes habitual and steps are taken to sustain the power position beyond its ‘natural’ time”. (NB: White domination of the economy has outlasted the legislated white racism of Apartheid. [My own words]).

And, most importantly for understanding the latter-day racism and resurgence of pro-apartheid nostalgia in a democratic South Africa:

“Domination can also be achieved through wealth. The basis of strategy then becomes the acquisition of wealth. Wealth can form an effective barrier to prevent others gaining power. Wealth can lead to power. Without an effective strategy to maintain effective barrier to others gaining power, the power will dissolve. With the dissolution of power, the wealth dissolves too.” (2005, pages 76-77).

For white South Africans, no doubt, post-apartheid South Africa offers the certainties of domestic and international legitimacy and respectability, as well as their clear consciences which are at ease with themselves. But still, Apartheid offered them the basic non-ambiguities of clarity and simplicity of power hierarchies and the concomitant privileges and comforts such apartheid-era power hierarchies offered.

The fourth indictor is provided by no less a personage than Frederick Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism and Thatcherism (see ‘The Mad Monk’ in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s book ‘The Commanding Heights – The Battle for the World Economy, 1998, pages 74-106). In his classic ‘The Road to Serfdom’, under the chapter headlined ‘Planning and Democracy’, F.A. Hayek wrote:

“When individuals combine in a joint effort to realize ends they have in common, the organisations, like the state, that they form for the purpose, are given their own system of ends and their own means. But any organisation thus formed remains one ‘person’ amongst others, in the case of the state much more powerful than any of the others, it is true, yet still with its separate and limited sphere in which alone its ends are supreme. The limits of this sphere are determined by the extent to which the individuals agree on particular ends; and the probability that they will agree on a particular course of action necessarily decreases as the scope of such action extends. There are certain functions of the state on the exercise of which there will be practical unanimity among its citizens; there will be others on which there will be agreement of a substantial majority; and so on, till we come to fields where, although each individual might wish the state to act in some way, there will be almost as many views about what government should do as there are different people”. (2005, pages 63-64).

In terms of our domestic situation in the post-apartheid era, I understand Hayek to be pointing to the need for black progressive South Africans to establish a near unanimous consensus on the need for economic justice for all in the next two decades, and that such a consensus should buttress the societal push to make our state and particularly our government to go much further beyond the tired rhetorical-only commitment to radical economic transformation.

Why is post-apartheid societal unanimity about the need to create what The Economist in 1996 defined as “a fair society for all” so elusive, when we can all easily agree that South Africa, in line with the Freedom Charter and our 1996 Constitution, belongs to all who live in it, both black and white? Why is it that we can say that South Africa belongs to all, when in practice we also live the dangerous reality that our national economy is dominated by a white minority?

Why, two decades after the end of Apartheid, is the situation still obtaining where powerful minority interests in the economy still shape the mandate of our transformation agenda towards redress of what The Economist (UK) in 1996 called “apartheid legacies”?

Why have we collectively, in the last twenty years, behaved as if the almost total exclusion from the benefits of our mainstream economy of tens of millions of formerly oppressed and dirt-poor black South Africans is as natural as their skin color, or as natural as the Sun rising from the East? Why do we, in relation to this South African-colonialism-of-a-special-type fact, “lack sustained political anger”, and are just too willing to put on display “an inability to keep up with resentment” (Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books, 21 October 2004)?

Few things illustrate the enormous power of economic minority interests in our country like the long-term strategic foresight in the book ‘The Scramble for Arica in the 21st Century – A View from the South’ which was authored by Harry Stephan, Michael Power, Angus Fane Hervey and Raymond Steenkamp Fonseca. Towards the end of this book, the authors, presumably all privileged white South Africans, debating the leadership succession battles within the ANC and South Africa at the time, reveal a simple but strategic choice and consequently unashamedly promoted the candidature of the current ANC and South African deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa thus:

“First, he was the lead negotiator in the transition to the new government of national unity. He has the respect of the market and certainly will not create uncertainty at the international game board. But more importantly he has the credentials of a union stalwart and should be able to tap into the roots of the workers’ forum. Thus he has the ability to pay off both sides in the struggle for efficiency at the market level and equality and jobs at the worker level. Backing from the ANC leadership, particularly from the powerful clique that run Mandela Foundation, should trump the populist aspirations of the Zuma faction, which has garnered huge support from the rank and file”. (2006, page 327).

Do the authors of The Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century openly allege that the Mandela Foundation is “run” by “the powerful clique” which throws its political weight around in internal ANC power struggles to influence the outcome of the ANC succession battles to their liking and the liking of certain ANC power-brokers? Really? Since when?

Most remarkably, the authors of The Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century wrote this about deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa a year before the infamous and chaotic ANC Polokwane elective conference, where Ramaphosa’s presidential ambition was not even in the least entertained; it was written six years before the ANC Mangaung elective conference in 2012, where Ramaphosa’s long-held presidential ambition was given a huge shot in the arm, when he was elected the ANC deputy president; it was written six years before the tragic Marikana massacre and Ramaphosa’s alleged controversial involvement in the “tragic incident” (to quote the ANC’s jargon) through his emails to his fellow Lonmin mine bosses and his communication with senior Cabinet members on the unfolding violent Marikana miners’ strike at the time; and it was written a solid eight years before Ramaphosa ultimately, after a very long wait, ascended to the deputy president’s executive office at the Union Buildings, as the deputy to president Jacob Zuma.

To say the authors of The Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century had impressive analytic nous on Ramaphosa’s presidential ambition will be an understatement. In simple terms, their analysis has been born out to be spot on.

The question is why did the authors of The Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century have this amazing analytical foresight, which is never really matched, blow for blow, by similar analytical nous on the Left of our national politics by self-declared radicals and so-called socialists?

Are the radicals and the so-called socialists incapable of studying the above advice of F.A. Hayek about how group interests in society organize themselves, including around the government and the state, for the sole purpose of capturing the state for the untrammeled hegemony of their ideas, perspectives and sectional power in society? Is this not what politics is really all about? Is this really not how lobby groups and organisations like Solidarity trade union, Afri-Forum, the Transvaal Agricultural Union, the FW de Klerk Foundation, the Helen Suzman Foundation, the R2K, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), etc, now operate under conditions of constitutional democracy in our country? Are they all ultimately not about political power and the hegemony of the state in our democratic society?

In a straight-talking manner, the question to ask is why do the interests of the black poor, the overwhelming majority of our society, which are allegedly represented and embodied by the Left forces, always getting trumped, rounds after rounds of contestations with white monopoly capital and the interests of the white minority and BEE haves in our free but unequal democracy? Is it only a function of the lack of analytical and strategic capacity on the part of South Africa’s forces of the Left? Or is it the playing field itself, thanks to genocidal white colonial regimes and the racialist Apartheid dictatorship of the bygone era in our country, which is apriori skewed against South Africa’s Left forces?

In this regard, and very instructively, Michael MacDonald stated that:

“The value of democratic government dawned gradually on business leaders from the mid-1980s onward, as they struggled to dissociate themselves from what had become the permanent crises in apartheid…Business, in other words, was coming to need democracy almost as much as democracy would come to need it. Faced with the prospect of ungovernability and compromised by past involvement with white supremacy, business needed to be cleansed of the original sin of racial capitalism and to be baptized as multiracial by a government with the democratic credentials to rein in and supersede popular movements. This is why the ANC government was especially attractive to business: having been legitimated by nationalism, the ANC could provide stable democratic government, and democratic government could legitimate capitalism”. (Ibid, page 169).

In this quoted paragraph Michael MacDonald provides a necessary, and almost sufficient, historical context for us to understand the rise of Cyril Ramaphsa into our presidency as a BEE mogul and a former trade unionist at some of our most powerful mining companies. It also explains why the authors of The Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century got their huge, long-term bet on Ramaphosa so correctly. After all, one of them, Michael Power, is today the storied investment analyst of Investec, one of South Africa’s banking behemoths.

MacDonald, I believe, also provides a useful premise from which to understand why the ANC has followed, doggedly, the pro-business and neoliberal GEAR under former president Thabo Mbeki, and why it is now fanatically committed to another pro-business and neoliberal long-term development plan, the National Development Plan (NDP) under president Jacob Zuma.

When business sneezes, the ANC catches cold. When our black townships and other black areas occasionally explode, as happened few weeks ago during the vile black township xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders, the top ANC leaders will insist to continue to remain at the pro-business World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, or similar global elite summits, and not to interrupt the Davos participation to come and pacify the black townships in violent turmoil.

This is also a clear demonstration and projection of business power over our ruling party, the ANC, in the current age of neoliberalism’s worldwide triumph.

The Left in the South African politics, on the other hand, has experienced only unending, debilitating ideological defeats and disasters, one after another, at the hands of neoliberalism in our country in the past two decades of our nascent but still vibrant democracy.

The Left’s staggering humiliation and scruffy diminution go on. This humiliation and diminution will of course continue in the next fifteen years of “the implementation period” of the NDP.

And there is effectively nothing – zilch, akuna, a’gukho, lefela, zero, nechevo, nada, ne pas est – the Left can do about it, except to endlessly mouth off anodyne rhetorical platitudes as an opium to the masses of South Africa’s poor and indigent.

Absolutely nothing!

Why is South Africa’s Left so pathetic, so demoralized, so disunited, so dispirited, so at war with itself and so intellectually unimaginative and barren, at the very time the white racist and conservative forces are so emboldened, so animated, so mobilized, so self-assured and feel so feisty and pesky that they shamelessly announce, defend and advocate in public their abominable revanchist pro-Apartheid sentiments, including the politically insulting to black majority, glorification of Jan van Riebeeck, two decades after the advent of all-inclusive democracy in South Africa? What really explains all this strange and baffling political phenomenon?

Is there perhaps an inverse relationship between these two mutually exclusive political phenomena in our current democratic space?

CHAPTER ONE.

In the run up to president Jacob Zuma’s 2015 State of the Nation Address (SONA) to our national parliament on 12 February, The Citizen carried a hilarious, for me, cartoon by Siwela, in which president Zuma, in a sky-blue suit, spotting a tie in ANC colors, wearing a white shirt and some shabby pension-house-issue shoes, checks out ‘the state of the nation suggestion box’, as the cartoon averred, and holds up in his left hand a piece of white paper which reads “RESIGN”. His right hand keeps the ‘suggestion box’s lid open. The suggestion that popped up to the top of the brown box reads “PAY BACK THE MONEY”. President Zuma, with his lips stretched by something that looks like an odd and bitter mixture of his legendary giggle and a growl, the latter so uncharacteristic of president Zuma, appears to be beleaguered, and not showing the sangfroid he boasted about in our national parliament yesterday.

Turning away from the ‘suggestion box’ in front of him, possibly as an excuse for not reading the “RESIGN” suggestion held by his left hand, president Zuma then fixes his reluctant, sheepish but steady gaze to his left and at the cartoonish walking green map of South Africa, its snow-white eyes, green nose and mouth contorted in a leery look of deep disapproval, whilst it is standing on a short, brown workman’s ladder. The cartoonish green map South Africa is emptying another full, brown ‘suggestion box’. On one of the sides of this second ‘suggestion box’ is written in bold ‘PLEASE STEP DOWN’. An avalanche of other tabula rasa small pieces of white papers are emptied from the second box by green map South Africa. President Zuma then asks green map South Africa, almost quizzically: “And what about those?”, in the hope that their message is more sanguine. His reading glasses precariously balanced by his big nose, away from his sheepish eyes, president Zuma breaks several ant-sized sweat balls around his wizened and as-hard-as-boiled-egg face when reading “PLEASE STEP DOWN”, written on a side of the ‘suggestion box’. (See The Citizen of 03 February 2015, page 12).

At that point, as implied by The Citizen’s cartoon, president Zuma must have felt like the most unloved adult in South Africa, and by far not “the people’s president” of our pre-Polokwane collective imagination.

For me this cartoon by Siwela of The Citizen best captures the gloom and doom sentiment in our society which preceded the 2015 SONA by president Zuma.

The City Press’ Mondli Makhanya, in an article headlined ‘Address the State of the Nation’, which appeared on 08 February 2015, just four days before 2015 SONA, hurriedly did away with the creative license and allegories of The Citizen’s cartoon by Siwela. Makhanya went straight for president Zuma’s jugular, writing about president Zuma that:

“He may still be a mind-numbingly boring orator, but he has grown in confidence since his catastrophic address in February 2010. In that speech he seemed to be thinking more about his new baby and the pleasant processes that led to its birth than the matters of state he had to deal with. He fumbled, made mistakes, giggled, stumbled, giggled, fumbled and bumbled his way through the speech. His elocution has improved vastly since. He now reads more like a grade 7 pupil than the Grade 4 performances he gave in the early phase of his presidency. Four more years in power and he might just have us eating out of his hands.” (Voices, page 3)

And so the general expectations about 2015 SONA seemed pretty low in certain sections of our society.

But incredibly, the ructions in our national parliament during 2015 SONA beat even these very low expectations about 2015 SONA and dragged the whole of South Africa, loudly hee-hawing and mightily kicking, to the lowest point it has been since April 1994, and possibly since the assassination of the ANC and SACP stalwart, Chris Hani in 1993. (See my recent Politicsweb article ‘President Jacob Zuma’s 2015 SONA, South Africa’s parliamentary imbecility and unpresidential giggles’).

The Jacob Zuma that delivered the 2015 SONA to a chaotic and messy national parliament definitely differed greatly from the Jacob Zuma projected by Sifiso Moshoetsi, the communication research chief director in the Presidency of Jacob Zuma. In his 22 March 2012 Sowetan article Sifiso Moshoetsi incredulously and hyperbolically described president Jacob Zuma as “a gift to mankind”. What? Really now?

During the chaos and mayhem at the start of 2015 SONA, it would have been difficult to find many South Africans who would have described president Zuma as “a gift to our national parliament and our democratic South African nation”, let alone, as Sifiso Moshoetsi once pompously, most improbably and self-promotionally put it, as “a gift to mankind”.

And so president Jacob Zuma must be highly complimented for the excellent stateman-like manner he handled and delivered his Response to 2015 SONA. I attended president Zuma’s first inauguration as president back in 2009. In my mind, his Response to 2015 SONA ranks arguably as his second best speech since his presidential inaugural address in 2009.

The Response to 2015 SONA was president Zuma’s masterpiece.

And given the very harsh words I wrote about the appalling behavior of all our elected parliamentarians during the start of 2015 SONA, it behoves me to also heartily compliment our democracy’s elected representatives in our parliament as well for the exemplary and highly dignified manner with which they comported themselves yesterday as president Zuma delivered his Response to 2015 SONA. (19 February 2015).

The massive contrast between the chaotic and scrubby start of 2015 SONA and the heart-warming scenes in our parliament yesterday cannot be overstated.

Still, how did it come about that president Zuma received such a colossal bad press immediately following his 2015 SONA, and such a marvelously good press and public opinion approval yesterday, contrary to what Mondli Makhaya predicted regarding Makhanya’s speculation that “four years more in power and he might just have us eating out of his hands”.

Yesterday the eNCA TV parliamentary reporter uncharacteristically gushed, almost completely lost for words of praise for Zuma, after the president’s Response to SONA, that “the Members of Parliament and the parliamentary gallery were eating out of the president’s hands”.

Mondli Makhanya, did you hear that one?

The more cynically-minded amongst us may want to suggest that eNCA TV’s latest sweet-heart-journalism-coverage of the Presidency and 2015 SONA has a lot to do with the outcome of the recent bitter and public boardroom battles amongst eNCA’s owners and shareholders.

My take would still be that president Jacob Zuma delivered a commanding and highly impressive performance on his Response to 2015 SONA.

He was like the national leader we have been waiting for in the last six years since presisent Zuma ascended to the Presidency.

It seems we did not have to wait for four years to eat out of president Jacob Zuma’s hamds, but a mere hundred and fifty hours, if the feel-good moment lasts for the next four years.

But can this be so? Or is this all smoke and mirrors of South Africa’s parliamentary democratic politics?

How can the president be projected as the main national villain last week, yet this week be held up as “a masterpiece”, as I put it above?

For me, this question goes to the very heart – the central core – of the essence, basics and irresoluble contradictions of president Zuma’s scandal-ridden and controversy-mired leadership in general.

Yesterday the president again revealed his astonishing tactical brilliance. At the start of 2015 SONA, president Zuma revealed his strategic ineptness in all its glory.

And it seems that his first leadership quality (his tactical brilliance) cannot be divorced from and cannot exist independent of the other, second of his leadership quality (strategic ineptness).

It appears like one quality shines only after the other dims and hides in his character’s penumbra.

In my Politicsweb article of 29 October 2012 entitled ‘Jacob Zuma: Brilliant tactically but strategically inept’, I wrote the following about president Jacob Zuma:

“It is this unmistakable penchant for tactical brilliance that has made Zuma one of the ANC’s leading political survivors and ‘bounce-back’ kids. It is also what has made him such a formidable, durable and fearsome ANC and SA’s political operators of his generation”.

And what an incredible bounce-back president Zuma has had from last week to this week around his appearance before our elected parliamentarians. Only a consummate political acrobat or contortionist could successfully effect such an improbable political bounce back, no doubt about that.

(My October 2012 two-part article on president Jacob Zuma elicited a very ill-tempered, sanctimonious and angry retort from the Presidency (apparently and outwardly penned and signed by Sifiso Moshoetsi) in Politicsweb of 01 November 2012, under the heading ‘Judge President Zuma on performance’. Moshoetsi was clearly livid and began his anger-fuelled attack on my article by writing that “the piece by Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is preposterous in the extreme and is clearly informed by a personal dislike rather than an objective assessment of the President’s record…Many critics of President Zuma unfortunately become so emotional that they fail to see his achievements and those of the country”. Where Moshoetsi thought I picked up my “personal dislike” for president Zuma, or that I was “emotional” in my Politicsweb piece about the president, he (Sifiso Moshoetsi) did not bother to elaborate. He just left the smear accusations hanging like grotty decorations on a Christmas tree, not organically embedded in the Christmas tree itself. Soon thereafter, the president for the first time publicly blasted “clever blacks” for always disparaging him, the ANC and the progress democratic South Africa is making since the end of Apartheid.
So I personally take the dubious, self-describing claim by president Jacob Zuma, whilst delivering his Response to 2015 SONA a few days ago, that he never gets “angry”, with a sizeable pinch of some Dead Sea salt. Unless of course being “angry” is solely a subjective, self-describing, rather than objective and peer-assessed, emotional character of an individual, such as president Zuma).

Yesterday president Jacob Zuma displayed his legendary tactical brilliance in all its glory, for South Africa and the world to behold. He tactically and brilliantly regained the public opinion ground he had strategically and disastrously lost at the start of 2015 SONA.

But I still think that I was right to point out to president Zuma’s abiding strategic ineptness in my October 2012 Politicseb article on him. And the events of the last two weeks also bear out my assessment of president Zuma in that regard as well.

President Zuma knew already back in November 2014 that the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) had vowed to disrupt his 2015 SONA. And the ensuing chaos and anarchy at the start of 2015 SONA were all that the president could have done and mastered to strategically prepare for and respond to the oft-repeated EFF threats to disrupt his 2015 SONA? Really? Pass me my cup of black coffee then.

This disjuncture between the chaos and mayhem at the start of 2015 SONA, on the one hand, and the impeccable rendition of parliamentary proceedings yesterday, including president Zuma’s excellent Response to SONA, on the other hand, speaks to a worrying but ever widening gap between president Zuma’s astounding tactical brilliance and his scrubby, scrappy and shabby strategic ineptitude.

And herein lies president Jacob Zuma’s greatest leadership dilemma – his penchant to respond tactically to the ever deteriorating strategic and political ecosystems within which he and the Zuma ANC (ZANC) he leads operate. Tactical brilliance alone is woefully inadequate to respond to and to match the fast-deteriorating strategic environment around president Zuma and the ruling ANC’s national leadership. It is in the nature of this type of leadership – where tactical brilliance co-exists with strategic ineptness – that only Zuma himself, and not his family, not his Cabinet, neither his advisors, nor the brainpower of the ANC’s National Executive Committee, can help him much to resolve this startling comtradiction and paradox at the heart of his leadership.

It is the type of inner demon we all have to confront in our lives at one point or another, although president Zuma has to do so in the public eye, and not in the privacy of his family home’s living room. That comes with territory as the country’s Numero Uno Citizen.

I personally think it will not be possible for president Zuma to resolve this acute personal tension between his tactical brilliance and his strategic ineptness which has hobbled and undermined his otherwise very promising leadership of the ANC and South Africa.

And so it is fair for one to expect that even before the remaining four years of his presidency expire, president Zuma will be caught up again in another maelstrom of a massive personal scandal or an acute leadership failing, through either of which he will now and again continue to dazzle us and to display his truly arresting-to-behold tactically brilliance on given occasions, until his political supernova self-destructs dramatically some time in the future.

We continue to undermine president Jacob Zuma’s brilliant, tactical leadership qualities, whilst, on the other hand, the president remains his own worst enemy by weakening himself through self-induced and self-imposed and self-inflicted and seemingly unending personal scandals and controversies.

CONCLUSION: THE EMERGENCE OF REVANCHIST PRO-APARTHEID NOSTALGIA IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA.

President Jacob Zuma’s finest moment during his Response to 2015 SONA came when he delivered an impromptu oral history lesson to the few of rightwing, conservative Freedom Front Plus’ MPs, who were taunting him, including through obscene figure-pointing gestures in our sacred national parliament, for allegedly wanting to chase away the white Afrikaaners from South Africa.

It is also clear that president Zuma’s passion, whilst delivering his impromptu oral history, was aroused in part because he had to keep quite and not respond to the vicious series of racist Twitter messages about him by Zelda la Grange, the personal assistant (PA) of former president Nelson Mandela. At one point in her delusional Twitter War with the phantom of president Jacob Zuma, Zelda la Grange picked up on the fact that president Zuma had made a statement in the Western Cape in which he declared that the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck, South Africa’s first archetypical, ruthless and butcher man Dutch colonizer, was the beginning of all our problems.

What is clear though is that president Zuma’s correct statement in the Western Cape about Jan van Riebeeck put him squarely in the crosshairs of the influential section of the revanchist pro-apartheid white nostalgics. Was he going to respond tactically, as he is wont to? Or was he going to respond strategically to the provocation?

This particular truthful statement of president Zuma seemed to have touched a raw nerve in Zelda la Grange.

[However, there is no denying that both of president Zuma’s pronouncements – on Jan van Riebeck’s arrival at the Cape being the beginning of all our problems, which he made in the Western Cape, as well as his impromptu, off-the-cuff oral rendition of a long history about the meaning and consequences of Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape during his Response to 2015 SONA, came across both as mere unscripted moments of a tactical move in a strategic political game; and not as long-thought-out and carefully-scripted presidential strategic interventions. President Zuma seemed genuinely caught by surprise in the wake of the furore his highly contested historical pronouncements caused in powerful white sectors in our society.]

Zelda la Grange went ballistic at these pronouncements of president Zuma about Jan van Riebeeck and even went as far as unfavorably comparing former president Nelson Mandela with president Jacob Zuma, to the latter’s clear reputational damage. She called on European investors not to invest in South Africa, called leaders of our sub-region, SADC, “anarchists”, and even expressed a desire to migrate to the white European and Christian country of France, with the help of the French president Francois Hollande, she adduced. (See my opinion on the French president Francois Hollande in my Politicsweb article ‘Open Letter to President Francois Hollande of France’).

As an adage would go, Hell knows no fury like a white spinster lass living alone with a cat and scorned by the post-Mandela Presidency!

As if all this kerfuffle by Zelda la Grange, a mere PA ranting against the President of the Republic of South Africa over Jan van Riebeeck were not enough, she stated in her tweet that she thought that the Afrikaaners had no safe future in South Africa under president Zuma.

She even gave herself a new Twitter handle “@Zelda van Riebeeck” as a befuddled tribute to and glorification of Jan van Riebeeck.

Jan van Riebeeck must have performed a ‘tikkie draai’ dance in his grave at the news that, more than 350 years after his Dromadaris landed at what became Cape Town, former president Nelson Mandela’s PA, Zelda la Grange, was self-declaring and self-electing to be Van Riebeeck’s own great-great–great-great daughter, which thing she did as an act of cocking a snook at South Africa’s third democratically elected back president, Jacob Zuma.

The truly astonishing thing is that the veracity of president Zuma’s parliamentary oral history on Jan van Riebeeck is born out not only by the entirety of all rational and progressive historiography on South Africa’s history, but also by many rightwing, racist and conservative historians, almost word for word, other than for their use of insulting and offensive terms such as the “K” word. (See the white German American Lewis H. Gann’s The White Experience in South Africa, published by the Wilson Quarterly Spring, 1977, pages 39-42). Lewis H. Gann demonstrates how Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at what is today Cape Town started the catastrophic process of genocide against the black inhabitants, land dispossession and deprivation, destruction of black African kingdoms and livelihoods, introduction of slavery, and subjugation and conquest of what was then referred to as South Africa’s interior, following the so-called Groot Trek by the so-called Voortrkkers, etc. Thus president Zuma’s oral history rendition on the year 1652, in which Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape, and its massive, subsequent catastrophic consequences for black South Africans, which we continue to feel to this day, including through @Zelda van Riebeeck’s strange Twitter rants, must be prescribed, standard reading for all of our senior primary school students from 2016, I would think.

That way, we can hope that no young South African – black or white – will in the future do a @Zelda van Riebeeck on future South African generations on future new social media platforms.

But the biggest error we commit is to think that the biggest casualty of Zelda la Grange’s Twitter rant was only president Zuma, the primary target of Zelda van Riebeeck’s Twitter venom.

In fact, the biggest blob from Zelda’s mindless Twitter outburst landed on the legacy of former president Nelson Mandela.

In his much-acclaimed autobiography ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, Nelson Mandela wrote the following about Jan van Riebeeck, evidently the latter-day hero of Zelda van Riebeeck:

“The council resolved that the ANC would hold demonstrations on April 6, 1952, as a prelude to the launching of the campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws. That same day white South Africans would be celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape in 1652. April 6 is the day white South Africans annually commemorate as the founding of their country – and Africans revile as the beginning of three hundred years of enslavement”. (1994, 108).

So former president Nelson Mandela was very clear that the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape on 06 April 1652 was the day “Africans revile as the beginning of the three hundred years of enslavement”. This statement of former president Nelson Mandela is most certainly much stronger than the muted statement of president Jacob Zuma that “the problems”, not what former president Nelson Mandela called “enslavement”, started exactly on 06 April 1652, the day the rapacious and land-acquisitive Jan van Riebeeck arrived on our sacred land.

Now that we all – black and white – insist to be called Africans, this is a little historical concession we should grant Nelson Mandela regarding the historical meaning of the day Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape.

This powerful statement of former president Nelson Mandela, who Zelda van Riebeeck likes to call “Madiba” and served for many years as a PA, is as unambiguous as it gets. It is not president Jacob Zuma who betrayed this statement of Mandela on Jan van Riebeeck.

It is in fact Zelda la Grange doing the betraying of Madiba (Nelson Mandela) regarding the historical meaning of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape on 06 April 1652.

Arguably the second most celebrated, respected, admired and honored South African in our entire history, i’Nkosi Albert Luthuli, our first Nobel Peace Prize winner and the former President-General of the ANC, in his autobiography ‘Let My People Go’, wrote the following about Jan van Riebeeck:

“Preparations for the Defiance Campaign went forward. June 26th was chosen for the launching of open disobedience, but the earlier date, 6th April, did not go unused. It turned into a warm up for the campaign proper. Large meetings were held in the main centres at the same time as whites were, in their way, observing the three hundredth anniversary of the landing of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape. Simply put, while they celebrated three hundred years of white domination, we looked back over three hundred years of black subjugation.. While the whites were jubilant over what they said God had given them, we contemplated what they had taken from us, and the land which they refuse to share with us though they cannot work it without us”. (2006, 108).

As if to re-emphasise the importance of the landing of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape on 06 April 1652, Nelson Mandela returned, in his autobiography, to the self-same theme of Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape, something he clearly felt very passionate about, for reasons very different to those making Zelda van Riebeeck passionate about the same, writing:

“On April 6, 1959, on the anniversary of Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape, a new organization was born that sought to rival the ANC as the country’s premier African political organization and repudiate the white domination that began three centuries before. With a few hundred delegates from around the country at the Orlando Communal Hall, the Pan Africanist Congress launched itself as an Africanist organization that expressly rejected the multiracialism of the ANC”. (Ibid, page 197).

So, Ms. Zelda van Riebeeck, you have every right under the sun to peddle the nonsensical white racist, rightwing and conservative and distortionist ahistoricism about South Africa’s history and past, and about the significance and consequences of Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape on 06 April 1652.

Our democratic Constitution enshrines your right of expression and speech and association to do so, which right black South Africans were not allowed to freely enjoy during the previous genocidal white colonial and white racialist Apartheid dictatorial regimes.

But what history will not permit you to do is to seek to wrap yourself in the warm glow of Nelson Mandela’s halo, whilst you in fact bastardise and sabotage Nelson Mandela’s very teachings and writings about Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape on 06 April 1652, and whilst you plunge your historical sabotage dagger in the back of president Jacob Zuma.

And I have no doubt in my mind that Nelson Mandela would have considered your Twitter handle @Zelda van Riebeeck as an historical and political sacrilege.

Not even your illustrious, much-admired and admittedly distinguished great public service to our constitutional democracy and our first, founding former president Nelson Mandela, whom you served so oustandingly as his PA and young white Afrikaaner, confers on you the right to selfishly rewrite South Africa’s turbulent history, just to appease the racist, rightwing and conservative fringe elements amongst us and your evidently troubled conscience.

Desist from ever doing that again, even under the cover of cyber nicknames and revolting Twitter handles.

You own your opinions about our history. That is fair. That is your right. But you do not own the facts about our history.

Always remember that, please Ms. Zelda van Riebeeck.

——-END…….

18th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
20 February 2015

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
And
SEDIA Research NOT FOR PROFIT COMPANY (NPC)
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President Jacob Zuma’s 2015 SONA, South Africa’s parliamentary imbecility and unpresidential giggles: Is South Africa becoming “a renegade democracy”?

TOPIC: PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA’S 2015 SONA, SOUTH AFRICA’S PARLIAMENTARY IMBECILITY AND UNPRESIDENTIAL PARLIAMENTARY GIGGLES: IS SOUTH AFRICA BECOMING “A RENEGADE DEMOCRACY”?

“…a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischief of a faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and conceit result from the form of government itself ; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” James Madison, USA Founding Father and Co-Author of The Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 10.

South Africa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) of 12 February 2015, delivered by president Jacob Zuma, and which was widely televised to the nation and to the rest of the African continent, became, to paraphrase James Madison, “…a spectacle of turbulence and contention.” During 2015 SONA, there was also “nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual”.

The Africa National Congress (ANC) acted in the belief that the EFF is “a weaker party” in parliament, with only 6% of parliament’s members, whilst the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is convinced that president Jacob Zuma is “an obnoxious individual” who sallies the reputation and standing of our parliament by refusing to account for the unauthorised state expenditure on his i’Nkandla home. In addition, the EFF is convinced that the personal security of its members of parliament (MPs) is no more guaranteed by the sanctity of the parliamentary chambers, as their MPs were frog-marched from parliament and some of them physically assaulted by security personnel. On the other hand, the Democratic Alliance (DA) MPs are of the view that the sanctity of the South African Constitution has been endangered by the violation of the “inviolable” principle of the separation of power in a democracy, when security personnel marched into the parliamentary chambers during the 2015 SONA to evict the EFF MPs. The DA MPs, to their eternal credit, also protested vigorously against the securocratic signal jamming that was experienced immediately before and at the start of 2015 SONA.

But it is also clear that the pandemonium and anarchy that reigned at the start of 2015 SONA were largely driven by “conceit” on the part of all the parliamentary party factions involved. It is the type of mayhem which, with a mature political leadership, could have been averted. Unless our fifth national parliament believes in China leader Mao Zedong’s infamous maxim that “great chaos brings stability”.

The questions uppermost in the minds of South Africans, who have been deeply saddened, shocked and outraged by the parliamentary shenanigans during 2015 SONA, are: What does the chaos at 2015 SONA say about the health of South Africa’s young democracy? What do these scandalous parliamentary events say about “the mischief” of the various party-based parliamentary factions involved in the unbecoming melee? And most importantly, what do the anarchic events say about the role of our representative parliament as one of the three key pillars of the tripod of our constitutional democracy, alongside the executive and the judiciary? Will our democracy be short in its life? Or will it meet a violent death? Or can it survive the crisis it is today facing, better rejuvenated for the crises of the future? Can our parliamentary democracy be saved? Can the overwhelming majority of the South African public be freed from the boiling passions, narrow partisan political interests, parliamentary party factional intrigues and infantile mischief of our parliamentary representatives which have declared open warfare on one another during the start of 2015 SONA? Can our elected South African national parliament be rescued in time from what Karl Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, characterised as “demagogic intrigues” and as “…passion without truth and truth without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, and history without events; evolution whose only motive force appears to be the calendar…”, which are clearly holding sway in our fifth South African parliament?

I want to submit that 2015 SONA represents the first time in our 20-year old democracy when the South African general public, voters, TV viewers and radio listeners came face to face with the reality of our parliamentary imbecility.

In the recent past Zwelinzima Vavi, the beleaguered Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)’s general secretary, used to admonish us that when a dictatorship arrives in South Africa one day, it will not announce its advent through drum majorettes marching down our streets. But how precisely will a dictatorship announce its arrival in South Africa, following the violent death of our democracy, if ever it will come to that? Will it announce itself through giggles? Or will it announce itself through securocratic signal jamming of our parliamentary chambers during the SONAS, as we witnessed at the opening of 2015 SONA? Have we embarked down a slippery, dangerous road towards a brutal authoritarian rule in our country under the Zuma ANC (ZANC) government?

In his seminal work, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx famously also stated that:

“For my part, I prove that the class war in France created circumstances and relationships that enabled a grotesque mediocrity to strut about in a hero’s garb”.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the acute and deepening racism, class, tribalism, xenophobic, ideological and factional contradictions in democratic South Africa today are creating circumstances and relationships which are “enabling” our elected but deeply fractious fifth national parliament to present itself as “a grotesque mediocrity strutting about in a hero’s garb”. The chaos, anarchy, violence, shouting matches, signal jamming, the shoving and pushing, wolf whistling and crude passions at the start of 2015 SONA are proof-positive of the grotesqueness and imbecility into which our elected national parliament has descended.

We have unfortunately reached a sad stage in our democratic parliamentary evolution when we are embarrassed to catch our kids watching parliamentary debates on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) TV’s Parliament Channel on their own, for the legitimate fear on our part that our kids will be exposed, without prior warning, to the crude group violence, obscene language and gestures, feral passions and crude violation of our nation’s collective annual Pledge on 16 Days of No Violence Against Women and Children, all played out on the parliamentary floor. Our national parliament has become the nation’s prime scene for the violation of this sacred Pledge of No Violence Against Women and Children, given how female EFF MPs were brutally abused by the security personnel who intruded into the parliamentary chambers. How can we ever take seriously the national Executive and our national parliament’s commitment to, declarations and speeches on, as well as expensive public relation efforts around the next observance of 16 Days of No Violence later this year, or any year hereafter, given how female MPs are hit, knocked down, bruised and (wo)manhandled in our sacred parliament, as if they are at some shabby taxi rank or shebeen, and not in our national parliament? Nowadays the scenes transmitted by the SABC’s Parliament Channel TV from our national parliament differ very little from the bloody and gory scenes beamed each weekend from World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) championship contests. There is hardly any difference between the two, frankly speaking. And at least the WWE, unlike our national parliament, holds separate bouts for males and females respectively, and not “the war of all against all” we witnessed on the floor of our national parliament at the start of 2015 SONA. Truth be told, the WWE displays more chivalry and noblesse oblige than the dour and stony-faced male suits in our elected national parliament. And this male patriarchial perfidy in our parliament was committed two days before the whole world celebrated 2015 Valentine’s Day?

And in the mist of all this, the President of the Republic, our Number One, Mr. Jacob G Zuma, as if to emphasise to us the TV viewers and radio listeners his sangfroid, managed to giggle, once he resumed reading his interrupted 2015 SONA. He giggled not once. Not twice. Not thrice. But several times more. Loud, booming, contented giggles. Very, very unpresidential giggles, it must be said.

It was such a jarring giggling by the President of the Republic that it bordered on irreverent conceit and presidential self-absorbtion. So totally out of place in the circumstances.

Honestly, I do not quite know why, but President Jacob Zuma’s jarring, unpresidenial giggles during his 2015 SONA gave me the same goose pimples I had when I first watched and heard Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the film The Silence of the Lambs. Just as fear struck my heart when watching The Silence of the Lambs for the first time, but yet I could not bring myself to stop watching it, I was very fearful during the anarchic scramble on the floor of our national parliament at the start of 2015 SONA that something very tragic may just happen before our very own eyes, and yet again I could not bring myself to stop watching the near-tragedy unfold.

And during the chaos of the 2015 SONA, it seemed as if the majority of ANC MPs were themselves gripped by fear, immobilized in their parliamentary seats as they watched the shameful scenes which scandalized South Africa, and as if they were capable of only excreting the silence of terrified lambs.

Men and women who once courageously confronted the mighty instruments of repressive Apartheid power and were once prepared to lay down their lives for the freedom of their people, seemed incapable of lifting their eyebrows or their fingers in protest at the ugly scenes at 2015 SONA.

And for me, that was the most heart-wrenching and wretched moment of 2015 SONA – this silence of the terrified lambs.

This is so terribly sad. Sad, sad, sad beyond words. That our national parliament has come to this – engendering the same primordial gut fear in the viewers of its proceedings as one usually gets when watching a horror movie in the league of The Silence of the Lambs.

This represents a profound crisis of our elected national parliament’s legitimacy and credibility in the public eye. It represents the descend of our democratic, national politics into the pit of the unacceptable and barbarous.

We now daily pray that our elected adult parliamentarians can take time-off and visit kindergarten classes across the length and breadth of our country to learn from our pre-school kids some civic manners, to learn how to comport themselves in public, and to also learn important lessons from these kindergarten kids about mature resolution of differences and pacific settlement of disputes.

This is as good a measure as any of how far our national parliament has tumbled from the high esteem we used to hold it in and the high pedestal we placed it on following our first, historic and all-inclusive democratic election of 1994.

The disruption of 2015 SONA is without doubt the lowest mark of our post-apartheid democratic evolution, on par only with the day Dmitri Tsafendas assassinated the Apartheid architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, in the racist white parliament in 1966.

So low a water mark in the evolution of our democracy was the chaos at the start of 2015 SONA that it should make us remember USA president Ronald Reagan’s wise words that “one of the great things about America is how smoothly we transfer presidential power…” (Ronald Reagan, An American Life, 1990, page 226).

What do the parliamentary fracas at the start of 2015 SONA say about the possibility of a peaceful transfer of presidential power between say the ruling ANC and the DA, or between the ruling ANC and the EFF, if it ever electorally came to that in the future?

And as we continue to ponder on the possible long term implications and effect of the chaos and anarchy at the start of 2015 SONA, we need to keep in mind another pearl of wisdom from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

“Since 1848 there has been endemic all over the Continent a malady which may be termed ‘parliamentary imbecility’. Those attacked by this disease live in an imaginary world of their own construction, and have no eyes and ears for, no memory or understanding of, the outer world of crude reality. It was characteristic of persons suffering from parliamentary imbecility that the members of the Party of Order…should continue to regard their victories as true victories, and should believe themselves to be hitting the President when they attack his ministers. Actually, they only succeeded to giving him a fresh opportunity for discrediting the Assembly in the eyes of the world”.

I am absolutely convinced that both the arch-capitalist, the American James Madison and the European Jewish and arch-Communist, Karl Marx, in their writings, which they have left for posterity, can help us arm ourselves theoretically to make sense of the chaos and anarchy that have descended upon our elected, fifth national parliament.

They can also help us to maybe understand why our elected parliamentary representatives are choosing to turn themselves into such parliamentary imbeciles before the whole world, as they did at the start of 2015 SONA.

Let us also hope that the chaos at the start of 2015 SONA can become an opportunity for us to reflect deeper on the form, content, direction and future of our elected parliament in terms of the robust health of our constitutional democracy.

And the less we all, without a single exception, giggle at the unfortunate turn of events in our fifth national parliament, the better for our common democratic future.

——-END———

17th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
13 February 2015.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre of Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
And
SEDIA Research NOT FOR PROFIT COMPANY (NPC)
Cedia blog : http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com
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Cedia Pay-Off-Line: Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.

(Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi’s Profile can be found at https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com and by clicking on the icons),

Is the shine of Nelson Mandela’s all-inclusive vision for post-apartheid South Africa dimming?: Xenophobia – the black South African township “bitch is in heat”, again.

TOPIC: IS THE SHINE OF NELSON MANDELA’S ALL-INCLUSIVE VISION FOR POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA DIMMING?: XENOPHOBIA – THE BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN TOWNSHIP “BITCH IS IN HEAT”, AGAIN.

“(Democrats who do not see the difference between a friendly and a hostile criticism of democracy are themselves imbued with the totalitarian spirit)”. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato, 1995, page 202.

INTRODUCTION.

There was once a time, during the USA administration of George W Bush, when the powerful American neocons who ran it were given to succumbing to fits of frustration and anger at South Africa’s votes at the United Nations (UN) in support of such countries as Syria, Iran, Cuba, Burma, Russia, Zimbabwe, Libya, Venezuela, Vietnam, North Korea and China, and would characterize our democracy as “a renegade democracy”.

It was all of course a false and deliberate misrepresentation. It was also a diplomatic ploy intended to embarrass South Africa into abject submission to USA foreign policy diktat.

But the rising tide of xenophobic attacks across our country in recent time may just achieve what the USA neocons failed to achieve, which is to give our democracy a bad name, and thus to damn it. Some of the most appalling acts and utterances of xenophobia of the last few months may just succeed to make the ugly term “renegade democracy” to stick on the name of our country as a permanent suffix.

We should all be shamed and propelled into action by these ugly, totally unacceptable and inhumane manifestations of xenophobia against foreign small traders in our black human settlements, especially in our black townships.

Xenophobia is as unacceptable as racism is and as sexism continues to be.

Are we, by choice and self-consciously, through these ugly manifestations of xenophobia turning ourselves into “a renegade democracy” in the eyes of the rest of Africa and the rest of the international community of nations, and thus unwittingly turning ourselves away from being the post-1994 beacon of hope for the whole world?

There is no doubt that our country is going through one of its most difficult patches at the moment owing to the outbreak of xenophobic attacks in our black areas.

Our principal challenge as a country currently is to gain a correct reading and understanding of the deeply shameful moment we are passing through, the forces at play, both internally and externally, as well as the right responses that befit the enormous challenges facing us. And above all, we should learn to keep a steady and beardy eye on even some of our very ugly and harsh truths about our post-apartheid society, including in black areas such as black townships, ugly truths we should not seek to sweep under the carpet, away from public view.

We should rather subject this ugliness in our black areas and black townships regarding xenophobia and black racism to the detergent power of light and transparency.

In a very thoughtful The Independent (UK) article of 1999 entitled “Why do we run away from the harsh truth about South Africa?’, Anne McElvoy wrote, rather perspicaciously, about how:

“…we bypass the troubles and challenges of today’s South Africa. The happy ending provided by the onset of democracy and the passing of Apartheid is so comfortable, the delight in the triumph of the wind of change so great that it has seemed impolite or ungrateful to raise the gravity of future threats to the country’s democracy and prosperity. If you think this sounds sour or harsh, look to the carefully sanitized popular imagery of post-Apartheid South Africa, which relies on an idealized evocations of the townships.”

There really is no reason now, in 2015 and twenty years since our first, founding all-inclusive democratic election, for us to continue to “…bypass the troubles and challenges” of our South Africa of today, nor to keep on cultivating unrealistic and untruthful “idealized evocations of the townships”.

The ugly, unpalatable truth is that too many of our black townships and other black human settlements have become unacceptable hotbeds of xenophobia, black racism and intolerance. The even more puzzling truth is that our collective national politics seems manacled from confronting and defeating these ugly human pathology of xenophobia, for some inexplicable reason.

Yet we need to defeat rising xenophobia in our black areas as we defeated colonialism, apartheid and the divide-and-rule Bantustan policy in the past.

Of course some of the townships Anne McElvoy wrote about as embodying “carefully sanitized popular imagery of post-Apartheid South Africa, which relies on an idealized evocations” are now theaters of ugly, horrendous scenes of xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders that are being beamed around the world by cable networks and written about by practically every newsman and newswoman around the world.

For some in the rest of Africa, in Asia, in Europe and in the America, our black townships now embody, by their xenophobic attacks, the very Heart of Darkness of Joseph Conrad infamy. So unimaginably horrendous are these xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in black areas that they defy any human comprehension. They need to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

The sanitised popular imagery of our black townships has been replaced by unimaginable, horrible, inhumane imagery of xenophobic violence in some of South Africa’s black areas, especially some of our townships, at the current moment.

It is time we engage in “friendly criticism” of our democracy, to paraphrase Karl Poppper, especially as it relates to our treatment of foreigners in our black areas, specifically in the black townships. It is time to stop being unnecessarily polite and rather to speak out truths about “the gravity of …threats to the country’s democracy and prosperity”. The rising tide of the toxic cocktail of xenophobia and black racism in post-apartheid South Africa at this current juncture represents precisely such a dire threat to our slowly maturing democracy and prosperity.

We should also at all times remember that South Africa is a country, to again quote Anne McElvoy, which is only just emerging from “a racialist dictatorship and a brutalized past.”

In fact, in its very essence, Apartheid, which was “a racialist dictatorship”, embodied extreme forms of racism, Afrophobia and xenophobia against migrants from the non-European world, such as from the rest of Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East. Even the Japanese, who were derogatively denoted as “honorary whites”, were barely tolerated but for their economic heavy heft.

If Karl Marx was correct in stating that capitalism creates society in its own image, there is no doubt that some of the inchoate and nascent petty bourgeois capitalism in South Africa’s black areas, such as in our black townships, also carries the ugly birthmarks of Apartheid white capitalism, namely its xenophobia, racism, tribalism, inhumanity, extreme violence and intolerance.

The fruit has fallen close to the tree.

In fact, the very creation of South Africa’s black townships, as they exist today, was a deliberate policy of racial urban separate development on the part of the past Apartheid regimes.

We cannot understand the outbreak of xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in some of our black townships and rural areas outside this crucial historical context.

In his seminal book ‘When Victims Become Killers’, Mahmood Mamdani, in Chapter Three entitled ‘The Racialisation of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism’ wrote thus:

“Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India; the former was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened…Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist…” (2001, page 76).

Undoubtedly, the ongoing xenophobic attacks by fellow black township dwellers against foreign small traders too represent “…an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist”, in relation to these foreign small traders.

The most frightful reality is that only a small, baby step divides the current xenophobic attacks in our black areas, as well as the 2008 xenophobic attacks, from genocide.

In this quoted paragraph of Mamdani two things become clear, namely, that South Africa has historically been the laboratory of racism in the whole world, and secondly, that if the difference between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda could be “racialised”, so can the difference between black South Africans and other black Africans from the rest of the continent, such as the Somali, Ethiopian, Tutsi and Sudanese small traders in our black townships. So there may as well be undertones of racism in the xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in our black areas by our fellow black South Africans, contrary to those who seek to define such attacks as only a reflection of “Afrophobia”. And such a claim of black racism holds more water when viewed against xenophobic attacks directed against foreign small traders from Pakistan and Bangladesh in our black areas

The Apartheid regimes actively encouraged our black population to view its miserable economic condition under Apartheid as representing a vast improvement on what Apartheid rulers claimed obtained in the rest of decolonized and free Africa. Thus the seeds of perplexing Afrophobia and black racism amongst many of our black people were planted.

That there is abominable recurrence of these xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in our black areas, following the truly horrendous 2008 xenophobic attacks, speaks to our collective failure as a democratic nation to address this shameful phenomenon in our body politic. One is thus reminded of the famous and haunting words of the great German revolutionary poet, Bertold Brecht, when he wrote, in ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’:

“If only we could learn to look
Instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up
on our arse
This was the thing that
nearly has us mastered
Don’t rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up
and stopped the bastard.
The bitch that bore him
Is in heat again”.

We South Africans are collectively failing to stop the “bastard” of xenophobia in some of our black areas and black townships, which rose its ugly face, collectively, for the first time in 2008. And now, in 2015, the black South African township “bitch” that bore the xenophobic attacks of 2008 “is in heat”, again. And like Bertold Brecht’s Arturo Ui, the rise of this black “bitch” that bore these appalling xenophobic attacks in our black townships and other black areas in 2008 and now, is very much “resistible” by us all!

And so the question is: What the hell are we waiting for? Why don’t we resist our own Arturo Ui with all the collective might we can muster under the sun? Does a genocide have to occur in our black townships first for us to neuter the township “bitch” and “bastard” on the loose in the black township xenophobic attacks?

In an important sense, the current xenophobic attacks against small foreign traders in our black areas are but the bitter harvest of the dangerous Apartheid policy of pitting our black people against blacks and Africans from the rest of the continent.

In fact, only a ruthless and sustained “racialist dictatorship” (Anne McElvoy, The Independent, UK) of Apartheid could, through its biblical-scale violence, succeed in recreating black areas and black townships in the manner they are today – desolate reservoirs of black labour with very few meaningful economic resources and opportunities. The large-scale white colonial settlement in South Africa ensured this violent outcome.

Mahmood Mamdani also stated:

“It is more or less a rule of thumb that the more Western settlement a colony experienced, the greater was the violence unleashed against the native population. The reason was simple: settler colonization led to land deprivation.” (Ibid, Settlers’ Genocide, page 10).

That tens of millions of black South Africans have been forced to live in the small urban and rural areas across our country, such as Soweto in Johannesburg, squeezed in like canned pilchards, is exactly the brutal outcome of the great white European settler violence during genocidal colonialism and later white racist Apartheid, which was unleashed against our colonised black South African population.

This brutal outcome is despite the fact that Robert Guest, in his acclaimed book ‘The Shackled Continent – Power, Corruption, and African Lives’, wrote:

“South Africa is huge and sparsely populated, so space is cheap.” (2004, page 219).

The failure to nurture small business development in our townships and other black areas, which could have fairly taken on and overcome stiff competition from the foreign small traders in our black areas, is made more poignant when viewed against this other statement of Robert Guest:

“South Africa has a better shot at creating a genuinely entrepreneurial black business class than most other African countries. The roads in South Africa are better, the airlines run on time, and all the support services that businesses need are in place, more or less. What is missing is a wider understanding that wealth is something you have to create”. (Page 238).

Earlier on page 236, Robert Guest had written:

“The drive for black economic empowerment has produced some perverse role models for young black entrepreneurs. The richest black businessmen have largely got that way by parlaying political influence into a share of someone else’s business. Few new factories are built this way, and few new jobs are created. A few well-connected blacks have become honkingly rich overnight, but there is obviously a limit to how many people can be empowered this way.”

The glaring absence of mature black businesses in our townships, the absence of access to capital for expansion for small black township traders, and the inability of black township traders to sustain any winning competition formula in the face of superior business acumen, organization and networking amongst foreign small traders in the black areas, all owe their origin largely to this failed and skewed and highly selfish form of black economic empowerment (BEE) since 1994, which Robert Guest eloquently, rightly and justly condemns. And it beggars the question: If there is clamour about the financial fire-power foreign small traders bring into the competition in their businesses in black areas, why are the few “honkingly rich” BEE multi-millionares not helping their fellow black small traders in our black areas and townships with capital, business knowhow and “business secrets”-sharing? Why are these empowered “a few well-connected blacks” not coming to the aid of their fellow black small businesses in black areas and black townships? In what sense are these BEE moguls the new “patriotic national bourgeoisie”, if not to assist their junior counterparts across the road or mountain from their new mansions in formerly white areas of Sandhurst, Sandton, Clifton and other such affluent areas?

Clearly space in sparsely populated South Africa is not “cheap” for black township dwellers, who feel even threatened by the tiny spaza shops in garages owned by fellow black South Africans falling under the sway of foreign small traders from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The cardinal failure of our democracy is the inability to change the essentialised Apartheid nature and features of black areas and black townships in South Africa, which remain as junior, subordinated appendages to the “metropolis economy” of white, developed, First World South Africa.

This striking failure of our political economy actually constitutes our democracy’s undeniable, ongoing historical injustice against black South Africans, who almost single-handedly ushered in our democracy through their centuries-old struggles against genocidal white colonialism, white domination and the racism of Apartheid.

The periodic outburst of xenophobic attacks in our black areas is quintessentially also a reflection of this startling failure of our post-1994 democracy.

We are now paying a steep political and diplomatic price for such a monumental democratic failure.

CHAPTER ONE – ON TOWNSHIP XENOPHOBIA AND UNDERSTANDING TOWNSHIP LIFE: THE DEBATES GO ON WHILST BLACK TOWNSHIPS ARE BURNING.

If the great French philosopher Voltaire was correct in stating that “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names”, our national wisdom on xenophobia should begin by calling the attacks on small foreign traders in our black areas and black townships for what they truly are – xenophobic attacks, or violent manifestations of xenophobia.

Unfortunately we have created a suffocating verbal obtuseness about the perils faced by small foreign traders in our black areas, owing to xenophobia in these black areas.

To call these xenophobic attacks only as “criminal acts”, as the ruling ANC and government officialdom are inclined to do, is as disingenuous as calling the Marikana massacre of August 2012 only as “a tragedy.” It is a linguistic cop-out intended to absolve the utterer(s) of any moral agency and responsibility for these most shameful chapters in our new democracy’s history.

But there has been deliberate obfuscation of terminology in the opposite direction amongst civil society as well, which has proven no less misleading and misguided.

In his article ‘Xenophobia is ancient and horrible’, which appeared in The Citizen of 02 February 2015, Andrew Kenny writes:

“In my private conversations with black foreigners living in local townships, they accuse locals of being lazy, resentful and filled with a feeling of entitlement”.

This trope uncannily regurgitates the racist rubbish beloved of arch-racists under Apartheid – that South African blacks are indolent, are ingrates and that they are pathetically envious of others’ success. And how foreign small traders can rent garages from bonded township houses of black South Africans who work hard to pay off their bonds, and still be called lazy, resentful and filled with feelings of entitlement of course only Andrew Kenny can explain.

However, the great wonder is that the twat of Andrew Kenny was given a dubious imprimatur of some respectability by a statement of Rose Nkosi, the president of the South African Spaza and Tuckshop Association. When interviewed by Chris Barron of the Sunday Times (SA) on 01 February 2015, she stated, amongst other things, the following regarding foreign small traders in our black townships:

“Of course that is true, they work harder. I mustn’t tell lies. As a grown up and as a leader. They work harder.”

In his article of 29 January 2015 in The Independent (SA) under the title ‘What kept Soweto apart in 2008′, Michael Schmidt refers to the 2008 xenophobic attacks as “pogroms”, a misleading term that surreptitiously suggests some elements of South African State abetment, if not active encouragement, of the 2008 xenophobic attacks, which delegitimising claim is patently false and cruel. On available evidence in the open source public platforms, to my mind, if anything, it does seem that it is a few foreign small traders who have been the ones who seem trigger-happy and shooting to death a few black South African youngsters caught up in the activities of township looting mobs. Of course, it is possible that contrary information may emerge as this crisis evolves or subsides.

In his article in The Citizen of 28 January 2015, The Citizen’s Martin Williams wrote about “spaza xenophobes”, a term so inelastic and inelegant that it hardly carries any scientific and analytical utility. One can only wonder as to what Martin Williams calls the 2008 xenophobic attackers on foreigners in South Africa’s black areas.

For its part, the Sunday Times (SA) of 01 February 2015 wrote about “spaza shop looters” (page 5), apparently eschewing The Citizen’s term of “spaza xenophobes”. And commendably, the Sunday Times (SA) provided a space under the same headline to one of the boastful “spaza xenophobes” to air his view, albeit quite atrocious views about foreign small traders.

In his Sunday Independent (SA) article of 01 February 2015, professor Tinyiko Maluleke self-indulged in a wordplay about “xenophobic denial of xenophobia”, most probably a wordplay intended to convey his strong, unmistakable and commendable abhorrence for some of the government officials’ denial of the attacks on small foreign traders as “xenophobic”. Unfortunately it is the kind of wordplay which also contributes to the building of the Tower of Babel of alphabetic soup of acronyms around the debate on xenophobia in our country, and very pregnant with inexactitudes and unnecessary theoretic latitude. Otherwise Maluleke’s article was a positive and helpful contribution to the national debate about xenophobia in our country and the real dangers of officialdom’s sustained “xenophobia denialism”, which, as has been correctly pointed out already, sadly echoes the “Aids denialism” of a different, sad, previous era.

Two of the more thoughtful and trenchant commentaries on the subject were the article by Jeremy Cronin, the SACP’s deputy general secretary and the deputy Minister of Publics Works, which appeared in Pretoria News Weekend of 31 January 2015 under the title ‘Agenda motive in story on attacks’, as well as Inkatha Freeedom Party leader i’Nkosi Magosuthu Buthelezi’s piece ‘Xenophobia: the makings of disaster’, which appeared in The New Age of 02 Febryary 2015. Also well written and well-argued was Phumulani Khumela’s ‘From spaza to squalor’, which appeared in Sowetan of 28 January 2015 and “An open letter to President Zuma’ by Marc Gbaffou, chairperson of the African Diaspora Forum (ADF) in South Africa. The programmatic recommendations contained towards the end of Gbaffou’s open letter to president Jacob Zuma are worth paying special attention to by us all. The City Press also excellently editorialized on ‘Foreigners should not live in fear in our land’, on its 25 January 2015 issue.

On the other hand, The New Age issue which carried i’Nkosi Buthelezi’s piece, also carried a quote of Lindiwe Zulu, the Small Business Development Minister, under the rubric ‘The Horse’s Mouth’, when she stated:

“Foreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is first and foremost for the people of the country.”

It is clear that The New Age had either missed or ignored Minister Lindiwe Zulu’s self-explanatory piece on her unfortunate “Freudian slip”, which appeared a day earlier in the City Press of 01 February 2015, in which she stated, amongst other things, that:

“Let me register my unconditional condemnation of the violence and acts of criminality directed at foreign national-owned businesses. This was inconsistent with our Ubuntu ethos and Constitution.”

But even Lindiwe Zulu could not bring herself to characterize the attacks on what she referred to as “foreign national-owned businesses” as “xenophobic attacks”.

Which is a great pity, really.

The DA’s shadow Minister for Small Business Development, Toby Chance, has penned several Politicsweb articles whose key intent seems less to shed light on ongoing xenophobic attacks in our townships, and more to trip Lindiwe Zulu, his government counterpart, owing to her above-quoted unfortunate and unguarded comment. Even when Toby Chance boasted about his visits to “my constituencies” in Soweto, it comes across, as one Politicsweb blogger incisively put on Politicsweb comment section to his artilce, more like “township poverty tourism” by someone on “a short-left domestic tourism” visit to Soweto, after which he retires back to formerly white, leafy and affluent Johannesburg suburbs, timeously abandoning Soweto to continue to stew in its own juices.

The City Press cartoon of Dr. Jack and Curtis had two adult black male and female looting xenophobes – not sneak thieves, for sure – running away from a looted foreign small trader-owned spaza shop, their hands overflowing with their ill-gotten loot, the female’s bountiful physical frame almost succumbing to the ground from the weight of her ill-gotten lucre, and the male partner, with a distorted, sneering snarl and dirty-looking hat worn at a rakish angle, declaring:

‘You know what I hate most about those foreigners? The way they bring out the worst in us!’

No doubt the xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders in our black areas represent the very worst in all of us black South Africans, collectively speaking.

Sowetan of 29 January 2015 led with a headline about ‘Minister blasts Somali takeover – Mokonyane criticizes foreign shop owners on Facebook for invading her township.’ Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane’s Facebook message, dated 02 January 2015, was reproduced on page 4 of the same issue of Sowetan, in its entirety. It made for grim reading, in the circumstances. She wrote that she believed that “…the ‘takeover’ by foreigners in townships is ‘a recipe for disaster'”, reported Sowetan.

The greater disaster, the Minister failed to concede, is the xenophobia itself.

The EFF released a surprising statement on Politicsweb condemning the xenophobic attacks, but blaming the government for the difficult human condition in the black areas, which, according to the EFF, drives the black township residents to these inhumane acts of desperation embodied by these xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders. For a welcome change, the EFF resisted the urge to join the populist bandwagon and to support the xenophobic township uprisings.

On the other hand, the SABC3 TV prime evening news bulletin of 28 January 2015 led with a report about Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general (SG)’s statement controverting the idea that the start of township violence directed at foreign small traders in 2015 was “xenophobia”. He stated that it was a “burglary” gone wrong, which was meant to allow for looting of a Somali shop, but resulted in a 14 year old getting shot dead, which sparked subsequent violence. He further stated that the 2015 anti-foreign small traders violence in black areas was very different from the 2008 attacks on foreigners, which 2008 attacks Mantashe correctly characterized as “xenophobic”.

Mantashe basically reinforced the canard popular in officialdom and the ruling ANC that the 2015 attacks in our black areas against foreign small traders were not driven by xenophobia, but by criminality. That no foreign small trader has been killed (to date) during the 2015 violence does not make violent attacks on their properties, or on them, non-xenophobic. It merely attests to the prolific and gruesome success of the 2008 xenophobic attacks in cleansing many of our townships and black areas of great, definable and demonstrable concentrations of foreigners. The targets of xenophobic attacks in 2015 have apparently become fewer, if also becoming juicier and wealthier, as represented in the main by foreign small trader-owned spaza shops.

It is also interesting to note that Mantashe’s muted condemnation of the latest xenophobic attacks, which he characterized as “criminality”, stands in direct contrast to the clear condemnation of the same offered by Jeremy Cronin and i’Nkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the articles by the two quoted above.

And lastly, Sowetan deputy editor, George Matlala had this to say in his piece ‘Hopeless youth pose a danger to society’, which appeared in Sowetan of 27 January 2015:

“The reality is that 20 years into a democratic dispensation, the poor are rising to express their discontent about the status quo. They feel they should be getting more from the country’s riches than is the case now. They are bearing the brunt of an untransformed economy that continues to benefit a minority white population. And they can see that there has been an emergence of a black middle class indifferent to their struggles and a corrupt political class that has drifted into a posh life with white capital. The anger of the poor youth is slowly becoming unmanageable…Before we know it, these youths will form an army that can be used to go beyond foreign-owned shops to cause instability in the country. And next time they will be coming to cities, suburbs and places of power to violently demand jobs and their share in the country’s wealth.”

This is a dire warning worth paying special attention to too.

In his blistering characterization of “…an emergence of a black middle class indifferent to their struggles and a corrupt political class that has drifted into a posh life with white capital”, Sowetan’s George Matlala differs little from Robert Guest’s charactierisation quoted above of “…a few well-connected blacks have become hongkingly rich overnight”, and that “the richest black businessmen have largely got that way by parlaying political influence into a share of someone else’s business”. Neither does George Matlala’s harrowing characterization differ markedly from what John Pilger wrote about in his definitive book ‘Freedom Next Time’, when he stated:

“From banking to mining, manufacturing to media, white-owned companies, since democracy, have taken on black ‘partners’, the most prominent of whom are former liberation heroes, known as ‘the struggle aristocracy’. Thus the same black faces pop up in boardroom photographs. This co-option has allowed white and foreign capital to fulfill its legal obligations under new corporate charters and, more importantly, to gain access to the ANC establishment”. (2006, page 204).

The net effect of what John Pilger calls “co-option” of a few politically well-connected blacks through distorted BEE and their drift “into posh life with white capital” (George Matlala) has been particularly onerous on small business development in the black areas and black townships, from which “the struggle aristocracy” hails, to begin with.

No wonder that the current xenophobic woes in our black townships are as much a function of the white colonial and Apartheid legacy, as they are the outcome of a failed BEE policy since 1994.

All the above provides a representative and generally broad take on the national debate on ongoing and recent xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders in black areas of South Africa, especially the townships, although it is by no means an exhaustive list of all commentaries and articles on the subject matter. For an example, I have left out the very helpful and cogent interventions on the debate by such varied organisations as the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), the SA Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the African Migrant Project (AMP).

CONCLUSION: TOWNSHIP XENOPHOBIA – BEYOND THE DEBATES, TOWARDS CONCRETE ACTION.

One of the unfortunate aspects about the debate on xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders in South Africa has been our regrettable collective tendency to imbue township spaza shops only with what Marxists call “vulgar economism.” Yet, in truth, spaza shops are much more than just milch cows for their owners, be they locals or foreigners. Or they certainly should be much more than just rent-accumulating small-scale economic cocks in the big wheel of the dominant, neoliberal and white-dominated formal economy of South Africa. If we miss this important aspect as well, we shall not be in a position to fully address the challenges of small business development in South Africa’s black areas.

I remember vividly that as I grew up in Alexandra Township near Sandton in Johannesburg and in my village of Rabokala near Brits, in the North West province, the corner shop was a very important cultural, spiritual, intellectual and community center as well.

I saw the first TV broadcast in my life in the late 1970s at the small shop owned by a small black South African trader. I fell in love for the first time with a girl I met at the small corner shop. I made my first lasting friendship outside my schools and family at the corner shop. We young black men used to loiter for hours at the corner shop during weekends, exchanging foolish gossip and all manner of small talk. The corner shop was also where we looked at the new fashion introduced by “the clever blacks” coming to buy a pack of cigarettes or cool drinks or to snatch our love conquests from under our noses. Our fervent support for either Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates or Moroka Swallows or Pretoia Callies was born and nurtured in huge football Monday quarter-back arguments at these corner shops. I first heard about the ANC and PAC and Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko at the these small shops.

I will be surprised if the role of township and village spaza shops has changed much from this paradigm of my generation. But it is also possible that the “take-over” (I use the ill-advised term courtesy of Minister Nomvula Mokonyane) of spaza shops in our black townships and villages by foreign small traders has also negatively impacted on the sense of these small trading points as cultural, spiritual, fashion, bonding and even intellectual centers of black life. In rebuilding the spaza shops destroyed in the ongoing xenophobic attacks, we need to restore this important aspect of the life of a spaza shop as the center of township and village life, alongside the church or mosque and the school and the football club.

Interestingly, and by way of a demonstration of my point about small businesses in townships being the center of vibrant and pulsating township life, here is how Hugh Masekela, in his fascinating autobiography ‘Still grazing’, describes the socio-economic life of Alexandra Township of his generation:

“Alexandra Township streets were buzzing with tens of thousands of workers returning from their menial jobs in downtown Johannesburg or the suburbs, where they were employed in every occupation that was considered too lowly for white folks. Among them were shoplifters, pickpockets, burglars, prostitutes, pimps, small-time gangsters, and hustlers of every kind. The streets also teemed with hawkers of fruits and vegetable, fatcakes and mielies (corn), and roadside ethnic fastfood and washerwomen carrying large bundles of white people’s laundry balanced on their heads for the weekend’s ironing, with little babies tied to their backs with moth-eaten blankets”. (Hugh Masekela and D. Michael Cheers, 2004, page 27).

How did it come about that we allowed our post-apartheid democracy to stifle this amazing entrepreneurial spirit of our hardworking and imaginative and resourceful and creative black township folks, so vividly described by Bra Hugh Masekela, the legendary and globally-acclaimed product of the self-same black townships we so much rubbish today, to the extend that we can today bear to listen to the insulting notion that these of our black people are now “lazy, envious of foreign small traders and so filled with feelings of entitlement”, and are unable to hold their own candle against foreign competition from foreign small spaza shop traders in our black townships?

We should all, as one man, demand that our democratic State should henceforth embark, without delay, on a long-term and sustainable black South African Township Renaissance across South Africa, especially in terms of their massive economic rejuvenation, for the sake of our collective future and prosperity as a democratic nation.

After all, this should be the river-bedrock on which former president Thabo Mbeki’s lofty ideal about the African Renaissance should be anchored.

We, as the South African society, should remember and follow up on our own, voluntary commitments to the whole world we entered into regarding the urgency on our part of combating xenophobia as part of the Final Resolutions of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which South Africa, at great expense to our national budget, hosted in Durban on 31 August-08 September 2001. As a host and chairman of that world conference, we cannot appear, nor afford, to be muddled and quibbling, as we presently seem to be, as to what we see, regard and understand to be clearly violent acts of xenophobia being committed by some of our fellow black countrymen and countrywomen against foreign small traders in our black areas and black townships in 2015.

To so quibble and equivocate on our part is to openly and unashamedly betray the outstanding legacy of our hosting, so admirably and successfully, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001.

And lastly, the most practical thing we can all do in the sad times of 2015 xenophobic attacks in some of our black townships on foreign small traders is to do ourselves a big favor and read Nicos Poulantzas’ phenomenal, compelling book ‘Fascism and Dictatorship’, especially its Part Five on ‘Fascism and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, so that tomorrow we do not say: ‘We failed to read the clear writings on the wall’.

The warning signs are flicking incessantly all around us. As the Bible puts it, none is as blind as one who refuses to see.

Our own black township Arturo Ui, in the form of sporadic and periodic xenophobic attacks on foreigners and foreign small traders in our black areas, is very much resistible too.

———–END———

16th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
08 February 2015

Written by:

Mr Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
And
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