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)
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(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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THE TRAGEDY OF JACKIE SELEBI’S DEATH.

TOPIC: THE TRAGEDY OF JACKIE SELEBI’S DEATH.

At the height of Jackie Selebi’s unimaginable personal pain, political humiliation and judicial conviction, whilst he was behind bars – lonely, ill, abandoned by the world as he had come to know it, and almost despairing of life itself in a Pretoria jail – I wrote a tribute to him under the title “The tragedy of Jackie Selebi”, which appeared on Politicsweb of 07 February 2012.

In the article, after lauding Selebi’s great, undoubted personal qualities and immeasurable contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, I pointed to his glaring failings, flaws and his fall-from-grace tragic situation of being a jailed criminal in democratic South Africa he fought so hard and for so long to bring about.

Writing and saying something positive at the time about Selebi was frowned upon and seen as fraternizing with the criminal, Mafia world of alleged mobster Glenn Agliotti.

I ended the article by declaring that Selebi was “…like one of those deeply flawed but transformational heroes from Thomas Carlyle’s “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History”.

I further quoted Carlyle when he declared about his heroes that “…their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection”.

I was reminded of this quote from Thomas Carlyle today upon hearing the sad breaking-news announcement on radio of the passing on today of Ambassador Jackie Selebi, which news was broken by Lindiwe Zulu, the Minister of Small Business Development.

Today, in the wake of Selebi’s death, it has again become commonplace to sing praises to Jackie Selebi, although his bitter haters retain their loathing of him as before.

As in life, in death Selebi is becoming a divisive figure, with the divisions to continue in debates about the essence of his legacy.

Immediately following the news of Selebi’s death, Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with messages of heartfelt condolences and commiseration, on the one hand, but also with messages expressing hardnosed ambivalence about the legacy of Selebi, as well as with outright condemnation of his moral standing in our society, owing to his conviction by our courts for corruption, on the other hand.

The vehemence and tone of some of the condemnatory messages following the death of Selebi caught me by surprise, given that Selebi’s body was hardly cold. Some of the condemnatory messages sounded as if they had long been prepared, memorized, rehearsed and canned for this specific, sad occasion, like a dagger which is kept sharpened and at the ready for the right moment. They sounded like they were ready-made and were just re-heated in the micro-ovens of political hatred and racial bigotry for today’s instantaneous public propaganda consumption. There was surprising but unmistakable velvet elocution in some of the condemnatory message on radio broadcasts, and some boastful and self-indulgent cadence, in the mist of death.

If death is often a surprise and always comes unannounced, how come the Jackie Selebi haters’ condemnatory wailing appeared so effortless and flawless?

It is this harsh and unforgiving nature of some of the vindictive messages about the departed Selebi, which flooded radio stations, Twitter and Facebook, that reminded me of the memorable words of Ossie Davis, the African American who delivered an historic eulogy to one of America’s greatest all-time heroes, the venerable Malcolm X:

“There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain – and we will smile. Many will say turn away – away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man – and we will smile…And we will answer and say to them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we honor him”.

Of course like Jackie Selebi, Malcolm X had been involved in and caught doing crime. And like Selebi, Malcolm X had done jail term. And like Malcolm X, there are those who now do not want us to utter a single good word in the direction of the deceased Jackie Selebi; and, yes, there are those who want to convince South Africans that Selebi was nothing but a demon, a monster, a subverter of our criminal justice system, a mobster even, and an enemy of the black man and the founding, constitutional values of democratic South Africa – and nothing else. They want us to turn away – away even from the presence of Ambassador Jackie Selebi’s memory.

Many of the Jackie Selebi haters and defilers will ask as to what it is the ANC, ANC Youth League, the Tripartite Alliance and our country’s mass democratic movement find to honor in this stormy, controversial, bold but ultimately broken and tragic captain.

And we too should smile.

They want us to celebrate only Jackie Selebi’s fall from grace, his criminal conviction, the utter humiliation of serving jail time for corruption, his physical withering away, literally, as a result of a terminal disease.

In his tweet on the passing on of Selebi, one of South Africa’s favorite puppets, Chester Missing @chestermissing wrote:

“Jackie Selebi has passed away? RIP. Matter of hours before someone in the DA tells us it’s a ploy to keep out of jail.” (The Citizen, 24 January 2015, page 4).

But it is simply not true that Comrade Jackie Selebi’s long, heroic life was completely devoid of positive meaning, of any catchet.

This blue tissue of a lie is being spread around the world by the haters.

And there are those with hearts so full of fury, of savagery, of hatred, of vindictiveness, and of absolute lack of compassion, even in the event of death, who demand forgiveness for themselves but dare not forgive others like Selebi. They are the hard men and women of South Africa’s national, everyday life, lurking around every corner in our country, waiting to do character assassination on those they intensely loath, and capable of being moved only by their narrow ends of life, by their selfish interests.

But did many of these defilers of the memory of Jackie Selebi – these Jackie haters – get to meet him in person, to speak to him, to touch him, to see him smile, to listen to him and to greet him with a handshake, to see him in love with Ann Selebi, to see him doting on his children?

I also believe that if these haters and defilers had had such an opportunity, they would know why we too honoured Jackie Selebi during his life, and are honoring him upon his tragic death. In fact, some of us had the good sense and fortune to honour him during his darkest hour, when he laid prostrate and sick in his jail cell in democratic South Africa, two years before his death.

As our outstanding musician Sipho Gumede would sing, “when the hour is dark, friends are few”.

So precise. So true.

Deeply anguished to observe that it seemed that at that darkest hour of Jackie Selebi in a jail cell, even his long-standing ANC comrades of many decades seemed cowered by the shrill public opinion and calculated calmny around Selebi and seeming to have abandoned him for good, as if he were a skunk they did not want to touch in public, not even with a bargepole, I wrote in my ‘The tragedy of Jackie Selebi’ that:

“It is of no little political interest to note that to date, there is no major ANC and government leader who had publicly supported Minister Mangena’s mercy call.”

This was after the former president of AZAPO and former Minister of Science and Technology in the previous Thabo Mbeki government, Masibudi Mangena, went public with a Pretoria News article calling on South Africans to show mercy and have Selebi released from jail, on account of his terminal illness.

Ossie Davis and the progressive American community were able to soberly evaluate the enduring and ever-lasting positive contributions to America’s politics, racial tolerance and world peace of Malcolm X, despite the latter having dabbled in crime in Harlem and having spent several years in jail as a result.

Today we can all see that fifty years after the assassination of Malcolm X, history has largely vindicated Ossie Davis’s eulogy to Malcolm X and its correct historical portrayal of the eminent and enduring Malcolm X as “our Prince”, who has found a first-rate place of honor in the pantheon of America and the whole progressive world’s all-time heroes.

South Africans also should be able to do the same regarding Jackie Selebi and his huge, ever-lasting contribution to the emergence and consolidation of democratic South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and in line with all of the immortal Freedom Charter’s clauses, without a single exception.

In doing so, we shall not be denying that Selebi was like Thomas Carlyle’s “flawed heroes.” We shall be merely affirming, as Thomas Carlyle wrote, that we know that we and our own world are morally imperfect and thus incapable of producing morally perfect individuals, such as many Selebi haters and defilers seem to have unreasonably expected Jackie Selebi to have become.

This is not too big an ask. I truly believe that we should not be afraid to publicly declare, from rooftops and treetops, loud and clear and into the chambers of eternity, that Comrade Jackie Selebi was and remains one of our freedom and democracy struggle’s immortal, heroic “Princes and Princesses”.

I believe that history will be kinder to Selebi and will ultimately judge that 80% of his life was dedicated to right, ennobling causes for the benefit of freedom, democracy and the unity of South Africa, Africa and the world, and that only 20% of his life, which tragically got him imprisoned, was dedicated to unworthy ends which resulted from a lapse of his moral and ethical judgment, and from unpardonable fraternization with the base criminal underground.

Most importantly, all South Africans, even those who deeply despise Selebi, in death as in life, should be able to marshal at least a modicum of human decency – African Ubuntu – to commiserate with his grieving family, close relatives, as well as with members and leaders of his long-time political home, the African National Congress (ANC), and especially his grieving, doting and dutiful wife, Ann Selebi.

The remarkable strength, commitment, dignity and sheer human doggedness with which Ann stood by her ailing and frail husband, Jackie Selebi, to the every end, is truly moving and remarkable. She was like the Bible’s Hannah to Jackie Selebi, right to the last minute of the latter’s life. Theirs is an unheralded great love story born in the burning crucible of the ANC’s struggle for freedom and dignity in South Africa. It stood the bitter and back-breaking tests of time. Only death could conquer it. And maybe not even death should rejoin in its momentary triumph over their love life.

Watching Ann Selebi on TV as she stood or sat every day silently by or behind her husband as he attended his court case, reading about her as she visited him at the Pretoria prison, and lastly as she nursed her terminally ill husband after his parol and release from prison, I was often reminded of these touching words of Jennifer Homans, the loving and dutiful wife of Tony Judt, the great, towering American Jewish philosopher and historian, which appeared in The New York Review of Books of 12 March 2012, under the title ‘Tony Judt: A Final Victory’, and which are worth quoting at some length, as they assist us to articulate the tragedy and pain of Ann Selebi as she watched life flowing out of Selebi, her husband and the man she loved dearly.

Wrote Jennifer Homans about Tony Judt:

“I was married to Tony Judt. I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010…When Tony was diagnosed with ALS, he knew he would die, soon. He knew before any doctor told him; and he continued to know it even as we pursued every possible alternative explanation and cure. He knew it because it was happening to him every day: hands, arms, legs, breathing passed out of his control with terrifying speed. It was difficult to keep up a dizzying and exhausting time of doctors and tests and determination; of anger, grief, desperation, and love…As he grew sicker, he became understandably more fearful. There was too much he couldn’t control in the outside world; everything from electrical outlets for the breathing machine (batteries fail) to his wheelchair (power operated but he had no way to steer it) and – not least – the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand…He took grim refuge in his study, his sickroom, his closed, safe prison cocoon that would house his deteriorating and entrapped body”.

Jennifer Homans was, in a morbid sense, – sorry for the unintended pun -, somehow luckier to observe “…the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand.”

Unfortunately, Ann Selebi had and has to deal with the truly “unbearable”, horrifying, openly-expressed ill-will of Jackie Selebi haters and defilers, who are in a party mood over Selebi’s death, and who do not want to understand anything about the terminal illness which ravaged her husband, and who even this late afternoon are asking as to why Jackie Selebi didn’t die much earlier or few days after he was paroled, in a puzzling, macabre public display of hatred and bigotry.

Yet the suffering, pain and endurance test which married women like Jennifer Homans and Ann Selebi are made to go through when they are impelled by circumstances to become the only pillar of support in life on which their terminally ill, famous husbands depend, should move us all when they are visited on white, privileged American women like Jennifer Homans, as well as when they are visited on black African women like Ann Selebi.

Our humanity should demand nothing less from all of us.

Even in his death, the Selebi haters are demanding a pound of Jackie Selebi’s flesh, in a baffling necrophobic outburst against even the remaining mortals of Jackie Selebi, not bothering to wait for their burial.

Haters will always do the hating best.

In a nation which boasts about its world-acclaimed national capacity to forgive the horrendous crimes and sins committed during apartheid by racist regimes of the time, this hatred for and vindictiveness by some amongst us towards Jackie Selebi – this stoic unpreparedness to forgive Selebi’s lapse of moral and ethical judgment, even for a moment of silence, even if posthumously so – does take one’s breath away. Totally.

Many Britons openly celebrated the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It would seem some amongst us will be throwing braai pool parties this coming weekend to celebrate the news today of Jackie Selebi’s death.

This is really the tragedy of Jackie Selebi’s death.

It damns the cruelty and false pretense of our key national trait – the readiness to forgive past sins, only selectively so, apparently, and evidently only if you happen to belong to the race group with a particular dose of melanin.

This should not be so. This is the worst imaginable discrimination in a democracy.

Is this because Selebi was black, whilst the majority of the leaders who committed crimes against humanity under apartheid to uphold white racial superiority and were forgiven for their steering political roles in enforcing it were white, that our sense of forgiveness is so choosy, so discriminatory?

It makes you ponder.

Even those of us – many bitter Jackie Selebi haters – who do not have an idea of what Ann Selebi went through from the moment Selebi collapsed upon hearing the news that the Supreme Court of Appeal had upheld his conviction for corruption, right through to Selebi’s hospitalization and incarceration and release from jail by parole, right to her daily administering dialysis on him every day, several times a day, to the loneliness she felt as she and Selebi were trapped in the Waterkloof house and haunted by Selebi haters and the media, unable to do normal daily family walks befitting a paroled convict, we should at least soften our cruel hearts a bit by reading what similar terror Tony Judt’s wife went through during his last two years as he also battled a terminal disease.

We can let go our manufactured anger and self-righteousness against Jackie Selebi, now that he is no more.

How Tony Judt and Jackie Selebi died from a terminal illness is a fate none of us – including implacable Jackie Selebi haters – should wish on their worst enemies.

This is especially so because Jackie Selebi, like Malcolm X and Tony Judt, had contributed so much to the cause of human freedom and progressive political thought in his country, which for centuries suffered white racialist colonialism and Apartheid’s legislated race-based discrimination.

In my Politicsweb article mentioned above on Jackie Selebi, which even then attracted its own barbaric hoards of Jackie Selebi haters and unrestraint nasal scorn in the comment section, I wrote the following about arguably Selebi’s singular, greatest contribution to democratic South Africa and the precious freedom we all enjoy today:

“Alongside former Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, former Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo, and the ever intellectually irrepressible former Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad, Selebi was at the forefront of re-integration of South Africa into the fold of community of nations following the end of apartheid in 1994…He was also at the forefront of the international community’s sterling efforts to develop post-Cold War normative standards in such diverse diplomatic fields as human rights, nuclear disarmament, conventional chemical weapons, anti-landmines treaty, WTO negotiations, WEF annual Davos meetings, and the Geneva-based WIPO’s intellectual property protection efforts…Jackie Selebi was SA diplomatic pioneer of great note, and arguably post-apartheid South Africa’s most successful multilateral diplomat so far.”

There is nothing that has happened since I wrote the Politicsweb article ‘The tragedy of Jackie Selebi’, which would make me re-assess my opinion of Selebi’s great contribution to democratic South Africa’s globally-respected and admired diplomacy.

Today the huge diplomatic spear of an eminent global multilateralist has fallen.

But, hopeful, his tragic death will make the claque of his bitter haters and defilers to mellow a bit, so as to hopefully allow it the much-needed opportunity to slightly re-assess Jackie Selebi’s legacy in less judgmental and less damnatory, even if not wholly positive and constructive, terms.

This would be the final victory of Jackie Selebi, the South African freedom and democracy struggle’s Prince of Tides, to borrow from the title of Pat Conroy’s moving, eponymous novel.

And that would also be our nation’s best epitaph to the great and heroic contribution which former National Police Commissioner and former Interpol President Jackie Selebi made to our abiding and ongoing national Freedom Agenda and our National Democratic Revolution (NDR).

RIP our Prince of Tides.

——-END——–

15th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
25 January 2015

Written by:

Mr Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
And
SEDIA Research NOT FOR PROFIT (NPC)
Cedia blog : centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com
Email Address : cedia.mail@gmail.com
Cell number : +27 72 912 9311
Cedia Pay-Off-Line: Dynamic Thought, Positive Action

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

IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?

IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?.

IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?

IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?.

IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?

Topic: IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?

“But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me to make one respectable person!” Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland.

INTRODUCTION.

In her article of 23 January 2012 entitled ‘What is the most racist thing that has happened to you?’, the Star’s veteran journalist, Helen Grange, quotes me as saying:

“Also, I have never experienced anything like the racist rants from the bloggers to my Politicsweb articles on DA’s Lindiwe Mazibuko and Helen Zille.”

So it was with great interest that I read the SACP general secretary (GS) Blade Nzimande’s article “It’s time to confront  cyber-racism”, which appeared on Politicsweb on 13 January 2015.

Nzimande should be complimented for his courage and willingness to confront this difficult issue of the intersectionality of technology and social media, on the one hand, and socio-pathologies like racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, on the other, as well as the intentionality of cyber racists and bullies to abuse others and the cyber space afforded to them.

It is a matter that has exercised my mind, and troubled me deeply, from the day my first article appeared on Politicsweb in December 2011. Since then cyber racism and bullying against me as a Politicsweb’s occasional contributor has not just rained on me in the comment section of Politicsweb. It has poured cats and dogs.

I therefore cannot agree more with Blade Nzimande, my fellow dialectical materialist, when he states that “indeed cyber racism is rife today.”

This is so, so true.

One nevertheless hopes that Blade Nzimande would understand that many amongst South Africans would rather they did not confront the pressing challenge of cyber racism specifically, and indeed broader societal racism in general. Some amongst us seek to play ostrich when faced with this debate they find uncomfortable.

In this context, this is what The Citizen’s Martin Williams recently wrote on 10 December 2014 in that daily, under the title ‘There’s no “us” and “them”‘:

“Race, race, race – it’s being shoved down our throats. After a survey showing most South African whites don’t think apartheid was a crime against humanity, there has been an onslaught against white denialism. If you are white and you say you are not racist, you are in denial. If you are not overly racist, you are subliminally racist. If you challenge the survey, you are being defensive. No escape. The logic is circular and self-fulfilling. You can’t penetrate this shield by citing your own experience.”

It is not quite clear what Martin Williams means when he states that “…there has been an onslaught against white denialism.” What is undeniable is that there has indeed been racism denialism by some white South Africans, perhaps most infamously epitomized by Steve Hofmeyer’s offensive statement that blacks were the architects of apartheid.

Whilst Nzimande’s article correctly sets out the broad, general principles and parameters of the issue of abominable cyber bullying, racism, sexism and discrimination of all kinds, and invites us to debate the matter further, I shall confine myself to providing concrete, lived examples of how I have been subjected to unremitting cyber bullying and outright cyber racism on the comment section of Politicsweb, in reaction to many of my articles published by the esteemed online journal.

I hope that in doing so, I shall not only honor Nzimande’s timely invitation to us to engage in this important debate, but that I shall also enrich the debate further.

I do concede that I have myself in turn been called an online “racist”, in response to some of my articles and comments on Politicsweb. This for me is another, more complicated example of how cyber racists and bullies seek to cloth themselves in the hallowed gowns of cyber victimhood, whilst they are and remain cyber bullies and perpetrators of online racism, and certainly the initiators of these deplorable pathologies.

And what is more, unlike bloggers on Politicsweb’s comment section, I always posted my comments under my names, and not under the cover of nom de guerre, or some one or other anonymity.

And this is an important distinction to draw as well, in the context of discussing cyber racism and cyber bullying.

What has puzzled me no end, as my interview with the Star’s Helen Grange indicates, is why I have been subjected to cyber bullying and racism in particular by bloggers who pretend and assume that they are advancing the cause of Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance (DA).

This is not to accuse either Helen Zille or the DA of cyber bullying and racism. Not at all. Nor is it to accuse either of hiring a rented “cyber mob” to do their dirty work online against one of their constant critics. Far it be from me to level such an accusation.

This is however my attempt to show how some who fancy and project themselves as admirers and defenders of the DA or Helen Zille allow themselves to impermissibly lapse into undisguised and misguided cyber racism and or cyber bullying, without being called to order by leaders or representatives of the DA.

This should not stand. Because, as Blade Nzimande states, “indeed cyber racism is rife today.”

At no point during the many online racist or misanthropic attacks by these racist cyber trolls on my person and articles have I seen a single instance when the DA leadership or card-carrying members join the fray to distance the party and themselves from these online racist bullies, whom at one point I was impelled by the brutality of their offensive online attacks to characterize as “the vile racist scumbags” and “drunken racist howlers” and “racist online lynch mob.”

It is obviously impossible to write here about each and every instance when I felt a victim of cyber bullying and racism on Politicsweb’s comment section.

But I shall use the example of one, anonymous, and particularly vicious “Sad Days” Politicsweb blogger, who has been a real, consistent persecutor of my Politicsweb online persona. I easily view “Sad Days”, whoever he or she is in real life, as my chief online racist tormentor by a long shot.

I shall share some of “Sad Days” online racist provocations directed at me just to affirm and underline the veracity of the general point Blade Nzimande was making in his article about the need to confront cyber racism headon. But Politicsweb’s “Sad Days” stands out as arguably the chief admirer and praise-singer of DA’s Helen Zille, occasionally in such offensive panegyrics for Helen Zille, which bother either on Helen Zille’s alter-ego or doppelganger, possibly done so to confuse Politicsweb’s readers as to the true identity of “Sad Days”, whilst painting Helen Zille in bad light.

It is “Sad Days”‘ cyber infatuation with Helen Zille, as I shall demonstrate below, which riles, whilst he/she never hesitates to raise his/her left hand to plunge a racist cyber dagger against my online person.

And this is what makes “Sad Days”‘ cyber racism and bullying particularly so dangerous, offensive and intolerable – this insistence on his/her part that he/she is the great admirer and defender of Helen Zille and the DA, under the cover afforded by cyber anonymity.

Some of the DA leader Helen Zille’s utterances and attitudes on the cyber space have not been particularly helpful themselves either, and may have unwittingly given cover, if not succor, to the kind of cyber bullying and racism that emanate from the likes of Politicsweb’s “Sad Days”. I shall also demonstrate this below.

To the best of my knowledge, Helen Zille or the DA has not once called “Sad Days” to order on the comment section of Politicsweb for such an atrocious defence of the DA and its leader, on account of his/her cyber racism and bullying.

This is the tragedy of it all.

Unless Helen Zille or the DA was playing possum at some point in the recent life of Politicsweb, which thing I think is beyond either, quite frankly.

PART ONE

Politicsweb blogger “Sad Days”, like many online and anonymous bloggers, who abuse cyber space for some nebulous and perfidious ends, would do well to recall these words of one of Germany’s foremost authors of the 20th century, Gunter Grass:

“Even if an author eventually becomes dependent upon the characters he creates, he must answer for their deeds and misdeeds.” (Quoted by John Irving, International Herald Tribune, ‘Grass’s (sic) shocking revelation? Not really’, 7-8 July 2007, page 8).

Ideally, this pearl of wisdom of Gunter Grass should become cyber space’s guiding motto.

But alas!

Here are some of the examples of the cyber racism and bullying I am talking about from the side of “Sad Days”:

Reacting to my Politicsweb three-part article “The Sorry State of South Africa’s Opposition Parties”, “Sad Days” posted this comment to my article on 05 March 2014 at 20:02:

“Isaac talks cr@p and loves to have a dig at the DA at every opportunity – what’s more, he can’t write – I am sure Sepedi and Seswana (sic) also uses (sic) full stops. This is basic stuff for anyone wanting to write. If he writes better in his home language, then he can do that on a forum that is read by people who read those languages. I suspect however, that he writes just as badly in his own language as he does in English.”

What is interesting about this statement is that it is itself written in very bad English grammar, as indicated by the bracketed “sic”. If we therefore studiously followed “Sad Days”‘ own recommendation, “Sad Days” himself/herself should not post comments on Politicsweb, because of his/her poor English grammatical form. But do we want to be that pedantic? Really? Secondly, my alleged “non-fluent English”, as “Sad Days” called it, arrogates to him/her the right to decide that my first language cannot be English, as if a black African and Ghana-originated British Ambassador to South Africa with the surname Boateng cannot claim English as his “home language.” It is deliberate racist profiling, which must be rejected with the stale-dog-vomit-covered contempt it deserves. And “Sad Days” decides that because he/she reckons I am “anti-DA’, he/she should shaft me aside to some corner where writing happens only in the black African languages of Sepedi and what he/she calls “Seswana”, another bad spelling by someone claiming supremacist knowledge of sorts. Evidently, if you follow the logic of “Sad Days”, Politicsweb must be the platform used only by those who can command the British Queen’s lingua franca flawlessly. And it is not difficult to suspect what “Sad Days” thinks will be the skin colour and race of such a group of people.

No wonder this long-running attitude of “Sad Days” regarding my “home language” had earlier led to another Politcsweb blogger, Kevin Vollenhoven, to post this thoughtful comment to my Politicsweb article ‘Helen Zille and the “professional blacks” slur’ on 05 January 2012 at 08:26, in reaction to the sustained cyber bullying and racism that was perpetrated by the likes of “Sad Days” at the time:

“Only one commentator responded to the substance. This maybe makes the point about how people still look at your name, your colour and then decided whether they will listen to you. Tongue in cheek, I still think there are rather still many of our citizens who cannot take smart darkies who can string more than two words together. To them, we should be groveling like the ‘Uncle Thom’ slaves…”

In the same comment above on 05 March 2014, “Sad Days” permitted himself/herself to release this pathetic panegyric directed at the DA leader Helen Zille, in reaction to my constructive criticism of Helen Zille’s leadership of the DA as the country’s official opposition:

“Zille is probably the most visionary leader SA has had in decades, so to go on about the DA needing visionary leadership is just total nonsense. To say the DA is in crisis when it has never been so powerful, is again the words of someone who is pretty clueless.”

On 05 January 2012, in reaction to my Politicsweb article ‘Helen Zille and the “professional blacks” slur’, “Sad Days” posted this praise-singing about Helen Zille:

“It takes a politician of Zille’s magnitude to have the courage to confront such important issues in South Africa.”

Earlier in the same comment, “Sad Days” had written the following about me:

“For someone who is desperately trying to be politically authoritative about Helen Zille, I do wish he would at least learn to spell her name correctly”. This whilst “Sad Days” had misspelt the black African name of another DA-supporting and Helen Zille-admiring blogger on the same thread, who sought to tie my arguments in cross-hairs, a matter I pointed out to.

Very interestingly, here is how Helen Zille, in her 02 March 2014 Daily Maverick article, complains about misspelling of her name by a tweep on Twitter:

“Then there is the ubiquitous ‘F’ word. “Zile (sic) fuck you” is one of the milder tweets I received on this subject – I was tempted to reply “Not until you learn how to spell my name” – but I resisted.

Any similarities between “Sad Days” and Helen Zille’s complaints about how Zille’s surname is misspelt by me and by a tweep haranguing her on Twitter? Is rocket science required to hazard an answer to this question? Duh.

But the point is about “Sad Days”‘ unrelenting panegyrics for Helen Zille. Totally in bad taste.

Look at this one in the same comment, where alter ego-tripping and doppleganger-ing between Helen Zille and “Sad Days” are dangerously blurred and made interchangeable by “Sad Days”:

“Incidentally, follow Zille on Twitter – she is very impressive”. (05 January 2012, 08:33)

As if not convinced that his/her Twitter advice was clearly understood and taken seriously, “Sad Days” returned on the same day at 11:33 with this pathetically groveling pro-Helen Zille online comment, written in response to a comment by another blogger calling ‘herself’ “Jane”:

“How old are you that you don’t understand the power of Twitter…it is political gold for a capable politician to be able to interact with her supporters. 100 000 SA citizens want to interact with the hardest working, most caring, most available politician in South Africa. In the old days a politician gave speeches to a few supporters in dusty halls – nowadays, at your fingertips, you can communicate with hundred voters. Maybe you should follow her and you too will start to understand what is going on here http://twitter.com/HelenZille”.

Huh? Is there a scintilla of something of a give-away in this online post by “Sad Days” regarding his/her true identity? An unintended alter-ego revelation? Failed and collapsed Janus-faces?

I wonder.

In reaction to my Politicsweb article “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment’, “Sad Days” dismissively wrote this about me and the Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA) I founded:

“So I guess we have to assume you invented the name of an organization that sounds important and promptly made yourself its ‘executive director'”

Again very interestingly, this is how Helen Zille dismissively wrote about another tweep in her 02 March 2014 Daily Maverick article:

“Take @dayjoyskillz, whose twitter bio describes him as a journalist, or, more pretentiously, a “Creative Partner @E- touch News”.

In the world of “Sad Days” and Helen Zille, ostensibly standing and writing worlds apart in place and time, both @dayjoyskillz and myself share this common trait to want to “pretentiously” hoist upon ourselves bombastic titles that in fact hide some empty-shell organisational existence

But what is striking, and almost unmistakable is the near-similarity in the phraseologies of “Sad Days” and Helen Zille.

Is this all per chance? Or is it some unacknowledged, unrecognised telepathy between “Sad Days” and Helen Zille? Voice-over acting?

But what is wrong, one must ask, under our country’s Companies Act, in setting up a company and making yourself its executive director, if you happened to be the sole member of such a company? Did I have to make “Sad Days”, or his/her publicly declared political hero, CEDIA’s executive director?

It truly boggles the mind, this chicanery of “Sad Days” in cyber space.

But here is what DA’s Helen Zille wrote in her Daily Maverick article of 02 March 2014, under the title ‘If you can’t take heat…”, which article contained nuggets that bear striking similarities to the cyber bullying writing of “Sad Days”.

She (Helen Zille) wrote that “…today I can reach in a single tweet more than double the weekly circulation of her newspaper” (“her” being Carien du Plessis of City Press).

“Sad Days” puts it this way: “…100 000 SA citizens want to interact with the hardest working, most caring, most available politician in South Africa”.

If you take it that City Press’s weekly circulation is between 40 000-50 000, and Helen Zille boasts that she “…can reach in a single tweet more than double the weekly circulation of her paper” (meaning City Press), whilst “Sad Days” counsels that “100 000 SA citizens want to interact with the hardest working, most caring, most available politician in South Africa”, you can see how the lines between the online “Sad Days” and the real Helen Zille get burred and confusing.

Half a dozen of one thing and six of the other?

Earlier on 31 December 2011 at 08:21, “Sad Days” posted this comment to another blogger, in response to my article on Lindiwe Mazibuko:

“Even though I am a man, I have to agree with you about the impressive DA women. In politics, it appears to me that political men nowadays are often disappointments…It is women who simply get on and get the job done. Especially in the DA.”

This is either an acute case of a self-hating man, or one of the worst examples of craven sexism, or just a self-promotional ego-trip across cyber space by a narcissistic self-admirer or self-promoter.

And this desire to declare one’s sex before making a point on Politicsweb’s comment section, so utterly irrelevant to any argument, because it is so deeply sexist, is almost unheard of. It might just as well have been a red herring, quite plausibly.

Whatever the case may be, it is clear Politicsweb’s “Sad Days” blogger is in love with DA’s Helen Zille, and unashamedly so; in the process completely oblivious to Alice in Wonderland’s dictum that “it’s no use…to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

And being respectable and respectful in cyber space is the first bold act towards renouncing cyber racism, bullying and discrimination of any form.

Or “Sad Days” is oblivious to the words of the old song that kept ringing through Alice’s head like the ticking of a clock, and that she could hardly help saying them out loud, to quote Carroll Lewis:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle”.

When will Helen Zille do battle with “Sad Days” in cyber space? Can’t she see “Sad Days” is spoiling her “new rattle” by constantly presenting himself/herself as her alter ego? And here, I am not at all advising that Helen Zille should do nothing else but go ratty and throw herself in a hissy-fit every time “Sad Days” goes racially hocus-pocus online.

In her angry Daily Maverick article of 02 March 2014, Helen Zille makes the hugely startling accusation against journalists that it is “…difficult to distinguish the parasite from the host.”

Unfortunately, it gets similarly difficult to also distinguish “Sad Days” – the online parasite – from some of Helen Zille’s host-tweets, in the same way Zille wrote about the difficulty of distinguishing “the parasite” from “the host”, when she referred to some journalists she apparently intensely detests and spectacularly dislikes. This ‘umbilical relationship’ – the relationship of a parasite to a host – that “Sad Days” seeks to insinuate and impugn online between himself/herself and Helen Zille and the DA, is given a morbid colour by this statement of Zille in Daily Maverick:

“The DA, like all political parties, has its ‘dial-a-quote’ brigade who love seeing their ‘anonymous’ spin described as information emanating from ‘senior insiders'”.

Greatly provoked by Helen Zille’s twitter war against her, City Press’ Carien du Plessis, in a tweet of 24 February 2014, posted at 07:04, wrote that @helenzille’s tweets were “…bordering on defamation.”

City Press’ editor, Ferial Haffajee, in turn called @helenzille tweets “…a bad bout of cyber bullying.”

And I level against online “Sad Days”, word for word, the same weathering accusations which Carien du Plessis and Ferial Haffajee, respectively, threw at Helen Zille, for “Sad Days” blogger’s online Politicsweb comments about me and my articles, which “…border on defamation” and are “a bout of cyber bullying.”

Exactament!

So, I say “Sad Days” is a cyber bully. Ferial Haffajee says Helen Zille suffered ” a bad bout of cyber bullying.” So I say “Sad Days” defames me. And Carien du Plessis alleges that Helen Zille tweeted things that “…border on defamation.”

Similarities there too, no doubt, in my humble but subjective opinion. Yes, striking similarities.

Is “Sad Days” one of the DA’s embedded and implanted ‘dial-a-quote’ cyber brigade trolls, about which Helen Zille boasted in her 02 March 2014 Daily Maverick article?

It sure does look, walk, waddle, swim, quack and claque that way, if you ask me, given “Sad Days”‘ endless and relentless panegyrics for Helen Zille and the DA, at the slightest urge, whilst unfailingly taking disgusting and uncalled for digs at any online critic of the DA and Helen Zille, including myself, on Politicsweb comment section, at the slightest fall of his/her hat.

Paradoxes abound.

Why is this online monkey “Sad Days” clinging so tenaciously on Helen Zille’s back, to paraphrase a famous saying? And when will this online monkey be rudely and unceremoniously shaken off and brutally thrown away by Helen Zille? This is not like a matter of a shadow and a tree?

Or is it?

“Sad Days” is undoubtedly a cyber bully, racist and tormentor of great, infamous note. He/she embodies and epitomizes all the worst socio-pathologies of cyber space about which Blade Nzimande wrote. “Sad Days” oozes and breathes subliminal racism.

Sometimes the similarity in the phraseology of “Sad Days” and the real Helen Zille is truly unfortunate, startling and uncanny. In fact it borders perilously on the act of a ventriloquist.

In response to my Politicsweb article ‘Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment’, “Sad Days” bitterly commented, as he/she damned me, in the following terms:

“We all know that when the ANC runs out of ideas, they pull out the race card.” (27 December 2011, 06:58).

This sounds very much like one of Helen Zille’s infamous, tired and befuddled political mantras against the ruling ANC.

On 06 January 2012, at 01:15, “Sad Days” wrote the following about me:

“…people are reacting to you because you speak such cr@p. You are just a bad ANC propagandist.”

In her 02 March 2014 Daily Maverick article, Helen Zille states that “analysis and opinion have been liberated from the self-appointed, self-referential journalistic elite, called ‘political commentators'”.

“Sad Days” speaks of “a bad ANC propagandist”, whilst Helen Zille writes that “political commentators” are “…still stuck in the anti-DA rhetoric of the late 1990s”.

ANC propagandist and anti-DA rhetoric. Two sides of the same coin.

The thought process similarities are persuasive, if not overwhelming.

Needless to say, I have never worked as, or considered myself “a bad ANC propagandist”, whatever that means. In conferring on me this tittle, “Sad Days” merely revealed his/her God-complex syndrome on cyber space.

In her article ‘Zille goes to Twitter War’ of 25 February 2014, the Mail & Guardian’s Verashni Pillay wrote that “things started getting personal when Zille, the leader of the party that preaches non-racialism, surprised everyone by bringing Du Plessis’s (sic) race into the discussion.”

A leader of the party that preaches non-racism surprised “everyone” by bringing someone’s race into discussion? Was she “re-racialising” our national politics?

This is huge. This is momentous. This is phenomenological.

Is it enough of a smoking gun regarding crass cyber racism and bullying? You be the judge.

I was similarly surprised when few years back “Sad Days” brought up my race into the discussion by suggesting that I should rather post my articles not on Politicsweb, because of my alleged “non-fluent English”, and that I should rather post them on fora where people can read Sepedi and “Seswana” (sic).

Again the thought process similarities are persuasive, if not overwhelming.

Alter ego-tripping? Or doppelganger-ing? In the circumstances, these are indeed unavoidable questions that cry out loud for good answers.

The patience of every person is not limitless.

Neither is mine.

Subjected to these unrelenting cyber bullying and racist torments on the comment section of Politicsweb by the likes of “Sad Days”, on 05 January 2012 at 23:03, I snapped and posted this energetic retort:

“My advice to the DA: watch out against these white racist scum that uses the anonymity afforded by online communication to push white supremacist and racially bigoted obscenities and profanities against black people they differ with. And DA, remember, the same racist scum today denies, to one man, that it ever votted (sic) Apartheid parties into power. Tomorrow they will again deny they voted DA into power in Cape Town and the Western Cape. Because they are contemptible cowards, otherwise they would not hide behind the pseudonyms online. They got the trailer-trash and low-life morality of a vile white racist scum we defeated under apartheid.”

Already then, I was underlining what I saw as an emerging and highly disturbing connection being established by trolls like “Sad Days” between their bullying and racism in cyber space, and their ostensible political support for Helen Zille and the DA. And I was calling the DA leadership’s attention to this deplorable cyber space development in the name of the DA and Helen Zille, but to no avail.

In fact, in the morning of 06 January 2012, at 08:56, I posted the following angry riposte to my online racist bullies and tormentors, like “Sad Days”:

“The more foolish among the drunken racist and heckling mob above idiotically but mistakenly believe that they can be white supremacist racists by night (online) and DA and Helen Zille “black-boetie-boetie” pseudo-democrats by day. Thinking that the cover of online pseudonyms is impregnable and unbridgeable they engage in the most shameful and unrestraint intellectual intimidation and online racist bully (sic), hunting online like a pack of unprovoked and hungry wild dogs, for any online critic of Helen Zille, DA, Cape Town and the Western Cape government under the DA. In light of WikiLeaks techno advances, it will soon be possible to expose the true identities of these vile and insufferable online, racist scumbags above.”

For every action, a reaction. Indeed, so eternally true.

On the same morning, on the same day, at 09:56 I posted this deeply critical but cautionary comment on Politicsweb’s comment section:

“The real political scandal in the country will then be that behind this or that pseudonym, it was this Western Cape politician, or that Editor, or this national CEO, or that TV (sic), this Rector etc.”

From these examples I have provided of cyber racism and bullying, as rightly raised by Blade Nzimande in his recent article, it is indisputable that this issue is urgent and vital.

It indeed needs to be tackled post-haste. It certainly cannot be treated as if it is an article of poste restante, for some future collection and resolution, because it can be quietly parked somewhere in an air-conditioned office.

Hell, no. No, no, no!

CONCLUSION

In an outstanding chapter 5, entitled ‘Chrysalis – The Life and Death Of The African Renaissance In A Zambian Internet’, which is an integral part of his must-read book ‘Global Shadows – Africa In The Neoliberal World Order’, James Ferguson makes this vital point about the elite contributors and bloggers of, as well as online discussions on Chrysalis, a short-lived Zambian online African Renaissance publication, which was similar to Politicsweb in several material aspects:

“It is obvious that the discussions of such a narrow and atypical group tell us very little about how Zambians in general have thought about the recent crisis. But they may tell us a great deal about the efforts of some of Zambia’s new elites to remake a national identity that would conform to the economic and political conditions of the new times. They may also perhaps help us to understand why it has been so difficult – and not only in Zambia – to develop viable national identities and ideologies under conditions of actually existing neoliberalism.”

This is a very cogent point James Ferguson makes.

So it is important to remember that the challenges of cyber racism, sexism and other forms of cyber discrimination are not unique only to South Africa. They are as universally prevalent as the internet is globally omnipresent.

It is also worth bearing in mind that these challenges in South Africa obtain in conditions of broad societal transformation and transition under the economically-dominant neoliberal order in our post-apartheid country.

These challenges are also a reflection of national contestations about, and constraints on, the acquisition and exercise of hegemony over society, as well as about the all-encompassing patterns regarding society’s either inclusionary or exclusionary postures – ideologies, identities, freedoms, elite rituals, power manifestations, influence projection and the battles over the broad future trajectory of the country.

They are often nothing more than furious shadow-boxing and positioning in the dark between various elite and class interests dominant in our country’s politics and economics.

Most importantly, these challenges attest to the fact that post-apartheid South Africa too has what James Ferguson calls the ‘Question Mark Generation’ and the ‘Chrysalis Generation’, and that the two generations are in close-combat duel about the correct political and developmental perspective for South Africa’s development going forward.

What is also clear though is that Politicsweb blogger “Sad Days” and his cyber ilk belong to the Question Mark Generation, and not the Chrysalis Generation, of Africa. For them, South Africa “…is a question mark.”

Their despicable cyber behavior is a testimony to this.

And in their varied reactions to Blade Nzimande’s on-spot article ‘It’s time to confront cyber racism’, the cyber racists and bullies need to remember these eternal words of Morocco in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice:

“Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,
To whom I am neighbor , and next bred.”

——-END——-

14th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
17th January 2015

Written by:

Mr Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)
And
SEDIA Research NOT FOR PROFIT (NPC)
http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com
Email address: cedia.mail@gmail.com
Cell number : +27 72 912 9311
Pay-Off-Line : Dynamic Thought, Positive Action

NB: ‘SEDIA’ stands for ‘School of Economic Diplomacy and International Affairs’.

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

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM..

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

“Al Qaeda’s trainers are proving the truth of bin Laden’s late mentor Shaykh Abdullah Azzam’s assertion that the Koran and the AK-47, together, yield the levels of lethality needed for Islam to triumph.”
Michael Scheuer “ANONYMOUS”, Imperial Hubris – Why the West Is Losing The War on Terror, 2005, page 76.

INTRODUCTION.

I use three prisms through which I see the precipitious tumble of the Middle East’s Levant region into Dante’s Inferno of bloody and murderous terrorism.

The first one is a personal prism.

The first diplomatic tour of duty of the western Middle East (or otherwise known as Levant), including Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which I undertook in September 2000, happened not long after I was promoted to the position of Director for the Levant in the then South African Department of Foreign Affairs, now the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO).

Then I was able to hold discussions with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv and west Jerusalem, was transferred by car to Ramallah, the capital of Palestinian West Bank. After discussions there with Palestinian officials, we drove by car from Ramallah, where South Africa maintains a diplomatic office, to Gaza on land across much of southern Israel, now the target of most of Hamas’s rockets. Following the Gaza visit, it was time to travel to Amman by car, across the river Jordan for further consultations with my Jordanian counterparts. From Jordan I took a road trip to Damascus, the capital of Syria, through much of the eastern province of Syria, for consultations with my Syrian counterparts. We then returned by car to Amman, where we prepared for our very long trip to Baghdad, Iraq’s capital at the time  under the chocking and severe western sanctions. It was a road trip of about twelve hours through much of south-western Iraq, or about the distance by car between Johannesburg and Cape Town. After our stay in Baghdad, we returned by car to Amman, a trip through much of Iraq’s desert Sunni heartland and the Anbar province.

In subsequent, many visits to the Levant between 2001-March 2003, I would often travel from Israel, to Ramallah, to Jordan, to Syria and ultimately to Lebanon, via Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and high mountains hugging Beirut, Lebanon’s beautiful capital, all done by car.

My road travels across the Levant at the time were some of the most beautiful, peaceful, emotional and informative travels I ever did anywhere in the world.

If at any time during these many travels on the road through the Levant I had been threatened with being hit on my face with a stray tennis ball anywhere in the Levant, I would have considered such a hit the most dangerous thing to have ever happened during my three years’ journeys through this ancient, biblical, important and historic region of the world.

As it turned out, I was never threatened by as much as a wayward tennis ball.

So generally peaceful and stable was the Levant at the time.

Remember, this was also a short while before the eruption of the Second Intifida in occupied Palestine.

 During that whole period, I also travelled between Amman, Jordan and Baghdad in Iraq on road no less than six times on various diplomatic assignments. I undertook the long trips by monster American GM 4 by 4 driven by highly experienced and dutiful Jordanian long-haul road drivers.

Not once did we ever become the target of any threat from any quarter during these Amman-Baghdad trips, a very long stretch often taken at night to avoid the searing desert heat of southern and western Iraq in summer.

And whilst visiting Syria several times, I would be driven by car to be shown the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the UN forces helping to keep peace there. It always struck me as the most peaceful line of divide between two antagonistic countries I ever visited anywhere in the world. And it certainly was in contrast to the tense  De-Militarised Zone between North and South Koreas, which I had visited in June 1989 during the world youth and student festival in North Korea in the same year.

Additionally, I once travelled by car from Damascus to visit the Syrian city of Palmyra, about 150 kilometers north of Damascus, which is an ancient and historical world heritage with Greek and Crusaders monuments. And in Iraq, I would travel by car to Babylon, the city of the biblical Nebuchardnezzar, and Karballah, the holy Shia city in the south, or up to Samara in the north of Baghdad, on my failed trip to Saddam Hussen’s birthplace, Tikrit.

All the trips in Iraq were done on road.

In Lebanon, I often visited the ancient city of Byblos, with its very impressive Crusader castles, stunning beaches and tourist attractions. Again these trips were undertaken on road.

The biggest danger that would face my delegation during the many trips by cars across the Levant would be dare-devil road drivers swaying recklessly to overtake.

Well, all this Middle Eastern idyll changed forever with the March/April illegal USA 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the very violent, chaotic and anarchic environment of the Levant today, only a very brave man can retrace my car travels throughout the region at the turn of the 21st century..

Dangers abound.

Death stalks the Levant everywhere.

Destruction and wars are the norm.

Civil strife and ancients hatreds are on the loose across the region.

Hundreds of thousands of people have perished.

Entire cities and villages lie in total ruin, the victims of vicious fighting amongst warring combatants of every imaginable stripe.

Iraq has effectively ceased to exist as a unitary state.

Syria can no more hold together as one country.

Lebanon is maintaining its unity through the skin of its tooth.

Palestine’s West Bank is vanishing under the weight of relentless Israeli illegal settlement expansion.

Gaza is being obliterated from the face of the earth through unremitting Israeli land, aerial and naval bombardment.

Egypt’s Sinai peninsula has become the Levant’s terrifying badland.

All this utter destruction of the Levant, following the USA’s invasion of Iraq, has happened in just less than fifteen years since my first visit to the Levant  region in September 2000.

Much of that which took the region’s various and much-admired civilizations thousands of years to build has been wiped off from the face of the earth in less than two decades. It is not even clear if any of the lost civilizational treasures of the region will ever be rebuilt or regained.

Syria lies in complete ruin. Gaza is in hot war with Israel. Lebanon now and again explodes in destructive, civil wars. The West Bank continues to be held in the stranglehold of Israel through its Apartheid Wall and humiliating check-points. Egypt, which used to be a reliable and steady anchor of the whole Middle East, is itself engulfed by unimaginable post-Morsi turmoil. Israel in turn lives in mortal fear of Hamas rockets and wages relentless,  cruel wars against Palestinians of Gaza, in a doomed and futile effort to ensure its own unilateral and one-sided national security and tribal-religious purity.

Above all else, Iraq and Syria lie in complete ruin, with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threatening to overrun and obliterate much of the two countries as modern nation-states.

 The lights are being switched off across much of the Middle East.

 A night without dawn is descending upon the region.

A starker contrast between the Levant of 2000-March 2003 and now is hard to imagine.

 It is almost like paradise lost.

The second prism through which I view the current bloody state of the Levant is offered by the false, infantile pseudo- optimism about the Levant and the broader Middle East which was once articulated by USA president George W Bush.

In his seminal book, Resurrecting Empire – Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path In The Middle East, Rashid Khalidi, one of the USA’s foremost experts on the Middle East, shares the following quotation from a speech president George W Bush delivered at the American Enterprise Institute on 26 February 2003, just about a month before the illegal and under false pretext American invasion of Iraq under his leadership:

“The nation of Iraq…is fully capable of moving towards democracy and living in freedom…A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region…Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards  a truly democratic Palestinian state.”

Seen against the background of the complete meltdown and mayhem of the Levant today, especially in light of the implosion of Iraq and the very brutal war waged there by ISIS, in effect “a war of all against all”, George W Bush’s congenital optimism of February 2003 borders on extreme superpower folly. But it was this type of misguided and ill-informed optimism about the Levant which was the crucible within which the George W Bush administration approached its “regime change” illegal invasion against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The third instructive and frightful prism through which to view the unfolding biblical-scale tragedy and savagery of the Levant today is provided by the 2006 issue of the USA magazine Newsweek.

In its 19 June 2006 Special Report issue, under the cover of the topic “Fighting Zarqawi’s Legacy”, Rod Nordland and Michael Hirsh wrote the following about the killing by USA forces of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)’s founder and leader, the fearsome Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi:

“But Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador in Iraq, can’t help it: he sees a ‘big opportunity’ in the death of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Why? Because Khalilzad knows that jihadists around the world may not encounter Zarqawi’s like again soon, no matter who replaces him. So monstrous a man was Zarqawi – so singularly savage in his methods – that he inspired  almost as much fear among his Sunni confederates as he did in his victims. A terrorist among terrorists, he was always the scariest guy in the room, frightening his Sunni hosts into silence or cooperation  with his unique combination of cruelty and competence: cross Zarqawi and you would die, along with your family , perhaps horribly.”

If in 2006 it was not clear to the USA ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the George W Bush administration he represented that “jihadists around the world may not encounter Zarqawi’s like again soon”, well, we today know that the leader of the modern-day Islamic caliphate, or the Islamic State straddling Syria and Iraq, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi makes Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi to look like Mother Teresa, by comparison, in unfathomable terms of “…his unique combination of cruelty and competence.”

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is not just “a terrorist among terrorists”, not just “the scariest guy in the room”. He is the Caliph of global terrorism now, and the scariest guy in a mosque in northern Iraq’s large city of Mosul, arguably the jewel in ISIS’s predatory and land-grab crown across Iraq and Syria.

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his ISIS have taken the practical definition of medieval and murderous barbarism for theocratic and political ends to a completely new, horrifying levels.

In a moment of great analytical stupidity, Donald Rumsfeld, the former USA Secretary of Defence during America’s invasion of Iraq, once spoke gibberishly and pompously about “a tipping point in Iraq.”

Well, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State (caliphate) across Iraq and Syria, and his ISIS, are the real deal in terms of “a tipping point” in Iraq.

 Surely, Zalmay Khalilzad and the George W Bush administration he represented could not have been more wrong in their faulty prophecies about what awaited Iraq in the future, following the USA invasion of 2003. In fact, in the words of the current USA Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, the Islamic State (caliphate) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS )  are “…beyond anything we have seen so far.” Meaning they are way, by far, beyond “the unique combination of cruelty and competence” which Newsweek’s Special Report on Abu Mussab Al-Zaeqawi, entitled “Fighting Zarqawi’s Legacy”, detected at the time.

Hard to believe, but following the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003, the hooves of hell have descended upon the Levant region.

Unfortunately the truth is that it is not all that clear that the Obama administration’s handling of the bloody turmoil in Iraq and Syria is any improvement on the poverty of policy and geostrategic thinking which afflicted the George W Bush administration.

Unbelievable though it may seem now, but if the Obama administration in turn mishandles its approach towards dealing with the very dire threat presented to the Middle East and global security by the Islamic State and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, one day, not in too distant a future, even Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi may appear like Mother Teresa in comparison, when he wil be succeeded by an even more odious terrorist monster.

USA Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel is right that ISIS is “beyond anything we have ever seen”. But that does not mean ISIS is the last word on murderous and insane human brutality and criminal depravity to be evinced by men who purport to uphold some deep religious values and virtues..

Only a selfless and altruistic, and not an egotistic and self-centered, USA leadership of the world, as the sole (for now, and not for long) global superpower, can ensure that the Middle East does not descend even  deeper, further and lower into the pits of Dante’s Inferno.

At the moment, the odds of the USA doing right by the whole world on the Middle East and rising to the occasion in a way that unites and mobilizes  the whole world against the mortal danger of Abu Bakr Al-Baghadadi and his criminal and murderous enterprise, ISIS, do not look promising at all.

 The current USA Obama leadership remains deeply self-absorbed in its own global power fantasies, and is committed enough to collecting the sinful wages of its highly ill-advised incumbent unilateralism.

For now, the USA’s approach to the Middle East remains in equal measure a part of the problem as it is undoubtedly also potentially a part of a long-lasting solution to the challenges of terrorism in the Middle East. The history of George W Bush administration’s entanglements with the Middle East, especially its disastrous Iraq invasion, is a clear demonstration of how a sole (for now, and not for long) global superpower can get things so horribly wrong in the Middle East, with no demonstrable culpability, punishment befitting the crime, or remorse whatsoever, whilst it brushes aside considered but contrarian opinion from elsewhere in the world.

And the large part of the problem regarding the current Obama administration’s involvement in the turmoil of the Middle East is that it continues to use its policies towards the region as a means to try to entrench and strengthen its post-Cold War “unilateral moment” as the only and undisputed superpower which should never brook any challenge by any other emerging power in the future..

This is a very tragic position of the USA.

This is dangerous, pure folly.

CHAPTER ONE.

In his brilliant article “Don’t BS the American people about Iraq, Syria and ISIS”, which appeared on War on the Rock on 20 August 2014, Brian Fishman, the researcher for the New American Century, makes a very valid point that “one cannot credibly argue  that the U.S withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 contributed to the rise of ISIL without also acknowledging that the U.S invasion in 2003 did the same. The former without the latter is a political argument, not a policy position”.

Yet as valid as Brian Fishman’s point about the compelling nexus between the 2003 USA invasion of and the 2010 USA withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 is, in terms of the rise of ISIS and the Islamic State, it still offers an incomplete formulation and at best represents a glass half full. It itself  may in turn be as misleading and dangerous a diagnosis, prescription and prognosis as the argument of those Fishman remorselessly takes his impressive, sharp analytical scalpel to.

The analysis provided by Brian Fishman can only be fully appreciated and be complete when juxtaposed with the other, equally compelling, sharp analysis proffered by Amr Hamzawy and Dina Bishara in one of  the Carnegie Papers (of the Carnegie Endowment) of November 2006, under the title “Islamist Movements In The Arab World and The 2006 Lebanon War”.

In the introduction to their well-grounded, incisive, impassioned Carnegie paper on the Islamists movements of the Middle East, the two analysts wrote:

“The war in Lebanon, mounted by Israel in July 2006 after the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah and halted by a cease-fire in August, made it necessary for Islamists movements to act in accordance with their ideological reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an existential struggle between Muslims and Jews. It also required them to be responsive to anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment widespread among their broad popular bases. The disproportionate Israeli response to Hizbullah’s initial provocation, especially the high toll of Lebanese civilian casualties, and the American refusal to push for immediate cessation of hostilities outraged Arabs and returned to the forefront the narrative of a grand American-Israeli conspiracy to dominate the Middle East.”

So, the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq must, undeniably, be understood within the context of the terrible and terrifying consequences of the USA’s illegal and deceitful invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the various destabilizing Israeli policies of occupation, settlement expansion and annexation, and punitive Israeli  wars directed against occupied Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, as well as other Arabs, like Iraqis and Sudanese, especially Israel’s 2006 war against Hizbullah.

Any global strategy to confront and defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq will have to first contend with this terrible legacy of crimes of the USA and Israeli policies and actions in the Middle East, especially the continuing occupation by Israel of Palestine and in particular the ongoing, horrendous consequences of the unilateral, illegal and under false pretext USA invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Short of this acknowledgement on the part of the USA and Israel, and their assorted and uncritical backers in the European Union (EU), no lasting good will come out of Obama administration’s unilateral military campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

 If ISIS is a global terrorist threat, it must by necessity be confronted with a united global action, and not unilateralist impulses of a sole superpower masquerading as global effort in the name of the Right to Protect (R2P).

It is interesting that even a close Arab ally of the USA and Israel in the Middle East, such as Egypt is, nurses bitter grievance against both countries. No wonder Egypt hectored and pilloried the Obama administration a few days ago over its abominable handling of the race protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the senseless killing by  a white American cop of the black, African American teenager, Michael Brown.

Matters are not helped by the occasional arrogance of the American administrations towards Egypt, arguably the most important Arab, Sunni and Middle Eastern country. It is sometimes unbelievable how Americans go out of their way to humiliate Egypt in public and for the whole world to see.

A prime example of this American arrogant attitude towards Egypt is provided by president Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright in her autobiography, Madam Secretary – A Memoir. In it Albright proudly ventilates about the USA’s sole global superpower arrogance at the expense of Egypt’s national and pre-eminent diplomat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who, as the then United Nations’ secretary general, had sought a second term:

 Albright can hardly camouflage her elbow-in-the-rib-cage glee at the sad fate that befell the veteran Egyptian international statesman, as a result of her direct diplomatic backstabbing and shinnanigans:

“When the Secretary General had been elected in 1991, he pledged to serve a single term…I concluded that if UN-U.S. relations were going to improve, the Secretary General would have to go. That meant a fight. We began with one big advantage. If we didn’t vote for him, he could not win. A secretary general had to receive the votes of each of the five permanent members of the Security Council…The fall of 1996 was consumed by our campaigns to reelect Bill Clinton and to unelect Boutros-Ghali…On November 19, I vetoed a resolution that would have given the the Secretary General a second term. The vote was 14-1 against us…If Boutros-Ghali thought we would flinch at the last minute, he was wrong.”

 With American friends like Madeleine Albright, does Egypt really need Islamic extremists like ISIS as her enemies?

 This shabby treatment the USA administration of Bill Clinton meted out to its most important Arab, Sunni and Middle Easterrn ally recalls the categoric statement by Karel van Wolferen, the renoun Dutch journalist and author of The Enigma Of Japanese Power, that the USA’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “…complete military disasters.” (Karel van Wolferen’s blog, The Ukraine, Corrupted Journalism and the Atlanticist Faith, 09 August 2014).

 And that is the truth, and nothing but the truth.

 Often it appears as if the USA is hell-bent on destroying secularist and republican governments of the Middle East  in such varying countries as Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine, Eritrea, Tunisia and Iraq, all now suffering from contrasting forms of severe domestic and international terrorism as well as civil strife -, whilst it protects oil-rich tyrannical and undemocratic monarchies of the Gulf states, which, like Israel, have been “miraculously” spared the bane of terrorist attacks and ISIS’s murderous rampage.

The USA invasion of Iraq in 2003, the subsequent destruction of the Iraqi state and society, and now the emergence of the Islamic State which encompasses huge parts of Iraq and Syria, under the leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), must be, historically, understood against this background. 

Not unsurprisingly, the current bloody chaos and nihilistic anarchy which have engulfed the Middle East at the current moment bears a close resemblance to the futuristic strategic scenario laid out in rare detail in the Yinon Plan – Israel’s Strategy for the Middle East, which was written  by the Israeli government’s Foreign Ministry official, Oded Yinon, as an article for  Kivunim (Directions), the Journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organisation in February 1982, and which was subsequently leaked to the broader media.

Just last week, Algeria’s president Abdulazziz Bouteflika was quoted by the Middle Eastern Monitor (MEMO) as having, in his address on Algeria’s national day for the Armed Forces,  “…accused western intelligence services of attempting to dismantle Arab countries.” (MEMO took the quote from Al-Ardy Al Jadeed news of 21 August 2014).

Given that Algeria under Bouteflika is such a very close ally of western countries in its fight against its domestic and regional terrorism, the coincidence of his accusation and the ongoing, violent meltdown of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sinai peninsula and Gaza is too rich to go unnoticed.

CONCLUSION.

Al Qaeda in Iraq and its various manifestations have shown themselves to be incredibly adept at adapting to the ever changing geo-strategic environments in which they are often forced to operate by their powerful opponents, primarily the USA’s overwhelming conventional military power.

From Abu Mussab Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda franchise during the Iraqi Sunnis’ violent resistance to the USA invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to the time of the triumph of the Arab Awakening around 2007, through the bloody battles over Fallujah and other cities of Iraq’s Sunni Anbar province, to the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) as an Al Qaeda franchise, to Abu Muhammed Al-Jalani’s Al-Nusra Front fighting against the Syrian regime of president Bashar Al Assad, right through to the unity between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Jablat Al-Nusra front to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and its current incarnation in the Islamic State (caliphate), and inclusive of Al Qaeda serving divorce papers on ISIS – these terrorist organisations have displayed amazing adaptability, resilience and an almost unmatched capacity for survivalist metamorphosis within very hostile environs.

The remarkable extent of ISIS’s triumph and ideological metempsychosis in adversity in Iraq and Syria was brought home in highly vivid terms by the recent Business Insider article of Michael B. Kelley and Mike Nudelman entitled “Everyone Who Wants to Destroy ISIS Needs To Know One Hard Truth”. The two authors revealed, amongst other things, that destroying ISIS will require a full-scale war, and not just surgical airstrikes that president Obama has just authorized to protect the Kurdish city of Irbil and to provide humanitarian protection (R2P?) to Iraqi minority communities like the Azidis; that ISIS has gone through many iterations since the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003; that the Islamic State (Caliphate) is basically a “criminal petrostate”, which gets about $12 million a month from extortion and other shady practices and about $1-2 million from selling oil from oil fields it has captured in Iraq and Syria.

It is this access by ISIS to this tremendous source of wherewithal and organizational-military capabilities, matched by “an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world vision” which has impelled the USA’s Chief of the Joint Staff, General Martin Dempsey, to recently characterise ISIS as a formidable and present danger to the USA’s national security. President Barack Obama has in turn described ISIS as “…a cancer whose spread must be contained” and that the group “has no place in the 21st century.”

And it is also this which makes ISIS and its caliphate such formidable direct and immanent threats to global peace and security.

But the surest way to rally international opinion and support for the requesite collective effort to confront and defeat ISIS and its caliphate in Iraq and Syria is certainly not more, but less, USA unilateral impulses and extraterritorial over-reach in international affairs, especially in the Middle East.

On 01 February 1994, two months before South Africa attained its freedom and democracy, Robert Kaplan, one of the foremost American conservatives, Neocon rightwing commentators and “regime change” advocates penned a fascinating article for the Atlantic magazine under the title “The Coming Anarchy.”

 Amongst other things, Kaplan wrote, rather disparagingly, the following about one part of our ancient and beautiful African continent:

“There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive – where, in fact, they tell lies – as in West Africa…West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization.”

Well, very wrong, Robert Kaplan.

 Your bad.

 There is in fact such a place on the planet, outside Africa, where political maps are deceptive too – where, in fact, they tell lies. Such a place, far away from West Africa, too provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that are already confronting our entire planetary civilization.

Robert Kaplan, welcome to the 21st century’s first (and possibly not last) Islamic Caliphate, otherwise also known as the Islamic State led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi..

Welcome to the murderous badland of Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in the Levant.

Welcome to the vilest, most horrendous, bloodiest and blood-thirsty form of theocratic nihilism and tribalistic, existential apocalypse.

Welcome to the 21st century’s Hell on Earth.

13th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
24 August 2014

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address: Isaac@cedia.co.za
Cedia Website : http://www.cedia.co.za
Cedia Blog : http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com and clicking on the Home icon
Cedia Pay-Off Line : Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.

BRING BACK OUR AFRICAN LEADERS…FROM WASHINGTON!: THE USA-AFRICA LEADERS’ SUMMIT.

“Ships that pass in the night
And speak each other in passing
Only a signal shown
And a distant voice in the darkness
So, on the ocean of life
We pass and speak one another
Only a look and a voice
The darkness again and silence.”
Longfellow, Tales of Wayside Inn.

INTRODUCTION

At the moment of Barack Hussein Obama’s great promise, whilst standing on the cusp of presidential power after vanquishing Hillary Rodham Clinton to clinch the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, something happened, which, in hindsight, is of great relevance to the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, which Obama has just hosted in Washington, the USA’s capital, allegedly successfully.

On that occasion Newsweek magazine led with a cover story on candidate Barack Obama’s future foreign policy as would-be president. The two-part story was entitled “Obama Abroad”, by Fareed Zakaria, now host of CNN’s Global Public Square (GPS) discussion show, and “Advice for Obama”, by Timothy Garton Ash. Conspicuous by its glaring ommission in the veteran opinion formers’ analyses of candidate Obama’s foreign policy agenda was Africa, the continent from which Obama’s father hailed.

Africa was clearly a huge diplomatic lacuna in the foreign policy thinking and planning of Obama and the American foreign policy honks around him who claimed to understand Obama’s thinking on foreign policy at the time.

It was an astonishing and intriguing omission. But the omission proved prophetic as well, in the manner of speech.

The omission was to be made into policy negligence by president Barack Obama himself, after winning the White House, by paying only perfunctory attention to Africa and her many challenges. Obama made only three trips to Africa during all the six years he has been America’s first African American president. And on each occasion, he seemed decidedly uncomfortable in his own presidential skin during these Africa visits, most clearly shown by his memorable, unpardonable and unforgettable “selfie” taken, in boredom, to the bemusement of the whole African continent and the consternation of his beautiful and classy wife, Michelle, with Denmark’s bombshell, leggy female prime minister and the UK’s slightly eccentric, if not dotty, prime minister at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in Johannesburg in December last year.

Some of us were compelled to publicly comment on this lackadaisical presidential attitude of Barack Obama towards his paternal ancestral continent of Africa during the first term of his presidency.

In the 37th volume of The Thinker magazine (edited by Dr. Essop Pahad) in 2012, this is what I wrote about what appeared to be Obama’s insouciant and indolent attitude towards Africa and African issues:

“What then has been Obama’s track record on Africa since he assumed the Presidency? Pretty dismal and very disappointing, I would say. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of them all has been the cold, dispassionate disposition Obama has adopted towards Africa. In a few and far-in-between occasions when President Obama devotes his time, effort and energy to African issues, he comes across as just a tough businessman who must make tough decisions, without allowing his passions and emotions to be on display or to cloud his judgment. The strange feature about the Barack Obama Presidency is that when he comes to Africa, Obama seems to retire his formidable reflective and analytical prowess, and at the same time seems determined not to allow his emotional persona to hold sway. No intellectual prowess and no jivey emotions. So on Africa Obama comes across as truly vacuous and disinterested. As a result, the Obama Presidency shows all the characteristics of a vacuous presidential Africa policy.”

I wrote this two years before the USA-Africa Summit.

Has the summit changed my assessment of Obama’s presidential attitude to our African continent? Has the summit imbued the Obama presidency, in the last two years remaining of his second term, with credible and considerable diplomatic elan about Africa?

Before attempting to answer that question with some degree of definitiveness, it is important to recall the prescient advice of America’s other black icon and civil rights advocate, Malcolm X about how African American leaders should relate to Africa and African leaders.

In his autobiography (written with the assistance of Alex Haley), Malcolm X wrote:

“..I formed a conviction which I have had ever since – that a topmost requisite for any Negro leader in America ought to be extensive traveling in the non-white lands on this earth, and the travel should include many conferences with the ranking men of those lands…Again, it was mainly Africans who variously expressed to me that no one would wish to be embarrassed trying to help a brother who shows no evidence that he wants that help – and who seems to refuse to cooperate in his own interests.”

In contrast, president Obama chose not to attend any summit of the African Union (AU) during his first term in office and half-way through his second term. Yet he felt no qualms calling for a summit of African leaders in Washington. Were he to rise from the dead, I am sure that Malcolm X would be surprised by this turn of events, which runs counter to his advice that “any Negro leader in America ought to be extensively travelling in the non-white lands on this earth, and the travel should include many conferences with the ranking men of these lands…”

Obama’s score-card on holding many conferences with the ranking men of Africa in the last six years of his presidency must be judged to be not just below par, to borrow from the terminology of golf, a game beloved to him. It has also decidedly looked like a diplomatic double bogey.

Has the outcome of the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit been of such a nature that ordinary Africans, above the heads of their leaders-participants, who all endorsed the summit, can feel that president Obama is now ready to “cooperate” with Africa “in his own interests” and in the interests of ordinary Africans themselves?

Clearly, the recently concluded USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, which took place on 05-07 August in Washington DC, USA, represents, in the words of Longfellow, “only a signal shown; and a distant voice in the darkness.”

In the more than 200 years of USA’s independence, and in all the post-colonial history of Africa, no white American-led administration saw it fit to host such a glittering gathering with African leaders.

Until now, under president Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president of America.

But not all that glitters is gold, of course.

The summit was certainly long overdue, given the massive dues America owes to Africa, arising especially from its plunder and theft of tens of millions of able-bodied slaves from Africa to build the USA into the impressive industrial and global power it is today.

Will future American presidents after Obama, likely most of them to be white or Latino for a long stretch, revert to form and “pass and speak” with their African counterparts, only to allow the usual “darkness again and silence” in the USA-Africa leaders’ summitry?

Was the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit hosted by Obama a once off diplomatic serendipity to the mutual benefit of America and Africa? Or was it a case of smoke and mirrors to make up for Obama’s six years of presidential neglect on his Africa policy?

Was the summit the festival for bloated, extra large African and American diplomatic egos on a global stage?

What actually is the the geo-strategic significance of this important, historic diplomatic event? Did it really have to take a first black American president for such a summit to happen? What does this fact say about white America’s view of Africa, in light of America’s enduring white racism against black folks?

Are the tales now issuing from all the participants of the recently concluded USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, told with such gusto, relish and conviction, nothing more than the tales from Longfellow’s wayside inn? Or is the self-promotional cacophony about the summit the sound and thunder of fools, signifying nothing in particular?

CHAPTER ONE.

During the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad in April 2009, a completely unusual diplomatic thing happened. As told by Andrew Clark of the UK’s Guardian, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, in the most unscriptd manner, rose up from his chair and approached a sitting USA president Barack Obama in order to present the latter with a gift in the form of a book entitled The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano. Clark, in his article, described Galeano’s 1973 book as “a 36-year-old tract attacking the imperialist exploitation of Latin America.”

It is really unfortunate that during all the time he played host to the just concluded USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, president Barack Obama did not once see it fit to quote from the book gifted to him by president Hugo Chavez. Has president Obama drawn any positive and relevant lessons from Galeano’s opus about America and western Europe’s exploitative and neo-colonial policy towards Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and south Asia? If so, where is the evidence? It is possible that president Obama did not even bother to read the Galeano’s book, given America’s intense animus towards the person of the late Hugo Chavez, and that he saw the book as an ideological poisoned chalice from an implacable opponent.

I believe that had Obama took the trouble and read Galeano’s well-researched, much-acclaimed and highly inspiring book, both the format and outcome of the recent first USA-Africa Leaders’ Forum in Washington would have been completely different, if only more progressive. For, having read Galeano’s book, Obama would have had a better perspective on and understanding of the true state of modern, postcolonial Africa as well, whose leaders, so full of unremitting puffery about the “successful” outcome of the summit he was hosting, even if only through the prism of the harrowing tales of Latin America’s exploitation at the hands of western powers, including the USA.

But more regrettable than Obama’s failure to reference Galeano’s book in any of his speeches to the Afro-American summit, is the fact that of all African leaders who were serenaded by Obama during the summit, none dared to emulate the bravery and sagacity of Hugo Chavez and present Obama with at least Kwame Nkrumah’s classic, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.

Clearly the African guests, apparently ever eager to be well-mannered and well-groomed guests of Washington, and maybe over-reacting to Eddie Murphy’s character, the African crown prince Akeem Joffer from the fictional African nation of Zamunda, in the 1988 film “Coming to America’, did not want to rain on the highly choreographed and rehearsed presidential parade of Barack Obama in Washington DC.

If Andrew Clark described Galeano’s book as “a tract attacking imperialist exploitation”, Nkrumah’s 1965 tract is a passionate ode against American and (western) European day-light imperialist exploitation and robbery of Africa and her resources over much of the last century.

With the books of Galeano and Nkrumah on his desk as bed-time reading, Obama would no more have had reason to behave in the American presidency, (as the first black president of America), in the manner so similar to that which Karl Marx, in his Das Kapital, observed in Edmund Burke, the two-faced, fork-tongued, mercurial and shifty Irish philosopher. Marx wrote that Burke sought to serve, at once, both the French and American revolutions, whilst he was also a paid agent of continental Europe’s tyrannical monarchies of the time.

And it is why Obama feels no internal conflict or contradiction in being a close friend of the King of Saudi Arabia, a tyrannical monarchy in the Middle East, whilst he used his peroration at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service to project himself to the world as the rightful heir of Nelson Mandela’s great democratic and freedom-loving mantle, whilst at the same time hectoring, by unsubtle innuendos, at some African leaders like Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe.

But the truth, so unpalatable to Obama, is that compared to Obama’s Saudi royal bosom friend, Mugabe smells, walks, quacks and paddles like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln combined. Mugabe holds regular elections, is a major African liberation struggle hero, a committed anti-colonialist and promotes women’s rights, with his deputy being a woman, to boot.

Can Obama dare to propose such an “audacious dream” for democracy to the King of Saudi Arabia in one of their future and regular tete-a-tete?

Hell will freeze over were that to happen.

The abiding political feature of Barack Obama is that as the head of the American imperialist exploitation of Africans and African resources, and a sponsor of the spread of American military bases across the African continent, he happily serves American imperialism in Africa, whilst at the same time he falsely seeks to adorn the freedom and liberation mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Pat Robertson, Mohammed Ali, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela, all who would have fiercely opposed Obama’s ongoing murderous Drone Wars across the world, for starters.

In this sense, no daylight separates Barack Obama from Edmund Burke, in essence. There really is no difference in the distinction between the two, other than that one, white, aspired to pervasive if also dubious intellectual and philosophical influence over Europe and America of his time, whilst the other, black,  now embodies some of the rank excesses of the American executive power at its highest, especially across Africa.

The first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit must also be understood against this background.

It is why the summit has been such a huge fudge, beyond the concerted, conceited and self-serving crude propaganda of its participants, defined primarily by its “vulgar economism”, to borrow a Marxist terminology. This “vulgar economism” has afforded Obama and his African counterparts at the summit the framework within which to overtly denude the summit of any global geo-strategic content completely.

Which is a pity.

Because the lack or absence of a serious exchange between the Obama administration and the African leaders during the summit on the global geo-strategic situation prevailing today deprived Africa of the opportunity to argue collectively with the world’s sole (for now, and not for long) superpower, the USA, for Africa’s place in global geo-strategic decision-making.

CHAPTER TWO.

There are notable ironies and surprises about the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit.

Firstly, the first, big gathering of black leaders of America and Africa in the new 21st century failed to issue a global call against racism and xenophobia in the world, especially against the backdrop of growing incidents of racial discrimination directed at Africans and blacks around the world, including at FIFA football matches in Europe. In the words of USA’s Dr. Cornel West, this would make the participants of the summit “…too hungry for status to be angry, too eager for acceptance to be bold, too self-invested in advancement to be defiant.’ (Race Matters). They border on what West describes as “race-effacing managerial leaders” who are distinguished by the fact that they survive “…on sheer political savvy and…personal diplomacy.”

Secondly, the first USA-Africa summit studiously avoided to pronounce itself in support of the campaign of fellow Caribbean nations to be paid reparations by former slave-trading nations of western Europe. Given that Africa was plundered by western Europe of tens of millions of slaves and that Obama’s most loyal constituency is African Americans, who are descendents of American slaves, this lack of support for the Caribbean cause for reparations is utterly surprising.

Thirdly, the African leaders went along meekly with the Obama administration’s decision to exclude Eritrea, Zimbabwe and the Sudan from the summit. One can have some sympathy as to why the Central African Republic should have been excluded, although even that should have been a call only the AU should have made. And why exclude the Central African Republic on accord of the civil war taking place there but invite to the summit Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Libya and Kenya, which are similarly torn apart by civil strife of huge proportions?

Fourthly, there seems to be an unusual turn out by many African leaders at a summit called by Americans in Washington, as compared to the usual poor turn out by African leaders at their own AU summits in Africa, where the common practice is of the African leaders delegating such attendance downward.

Fifth, the summit took place at the time of Obama’s acute political vulnerability domestically, thus making him not such a sure-footed host, despite external appearances to the contrary he sought to confidently project during the summit. The summit took place when Obama was enjoying his lowest approval ratings since he became president, according to USA polls. He had just been slapped with the uncomfortable vote in the USA Senate for him to be impeached over his signature health policy. And more devastating for Obama’s hosting of the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, the polls showed that, by a huge margin, the American public was of the view that Obama was a major failure in critical areas of his foreign policy agenda.

Sixth, the summit took place at the time when the world seems to be imploding all around president Obama in places like Israel/Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, the naval rivalries in South East China sea in Asia heating up, the Japan/China tensions, Kenya, Somalia, the Central African Republic, northern Nigeria, Mali, Libya, South Sudan’s civil war, the turmoil in the Sinai peninsula of Egypt, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia in west Africa, terrorism in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mexican/USA border troubles, and Latin America’s open political and intellectual revolt against the diktat of the Washington Consensus, as if on cue to Galeano’s classic on Latin America, to name just a few of the pressing crises confronting the world’s sole (for now, and not for long) superpower and its leader. And not to mention the coup in Thailand, about which the Obama administration has remained uncharacteristically muted, and the territorial gains in Syria and Iraq of ISIS.

The first USA-Africa leaders’ Summit chose not to release a final communique guiding the world on USA-Africa thinking on any of these pivotal moments of our contemporary world.

So why are the African leaders, who took part in the summit, so determined to pass and sell it to us ordinary and toiling masses of Africa as an unprecedented, unblemished diplomatic masterpiece?

Help in gaining insight into the mindset of our African leaders, so full of praise of the summit, is provided by the famed and respected author Daniel Kahneman in his fascinating book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. In this book, Kahnemen writes about “the illusions of truth”, a psychological device in fact very popular amongst many African leaders of today, if “truth” be told. It is a concept that also helps to understand the African leaders’ perception and appreciation of the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit. For many a politician, including our African leaders, “the illusion of truth” is more palatable and re-assuring than truth itself, because actual truth, and not the illusion of it, can turn out to be very destabilizing and insurrectionary commodity to the prevailing status quo and hegemonic mindsets of ruling elites. Interestingly, Kahneman further states that “…the dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.” In one of the USA’s media reportage analyzing the summit, it was stated that the summit offered Obama the first opportunity, since becoming president, to relax and kind of be “homey” and warm amongst his fellow African counterparts, a privilege that apparently eluded him in the last six years of his presidency, because it could have proved too costly to him electorally. It is clear from this postulation that the fact that it was envisaged that “emotions”, if not a sense of black racial kinship between Obama and African leaders, would dominate the summit’s mood and proceedings, points to the summit’s capacity to have apriori conclusions steamrolling arguments about the USA-Africa relationship during the summit. Obama and the African leaders at the summit were seemingly also under the hypnotic spell of what the psychologist Paul Slovic (as quoted by Daniel Kahneman) calls “affect heuristic”, which denotes a state “…in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling.”

Many African leaders long determined that no argument will sway their “likes” for Obama, the first black president of the USA, with whom they naturally feel a close racial kinship. And they carried that long-held conclusion into the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit and its accompanied arguments and deliberations over three days. They thus rendered themselves pitiful victims of classical “affect heuristic” during deliberations of the just concluded USA-Africa summit.

But to be fair to our African leaders who participated in the summit, they might also have been strongly reacting to what James Poulos, in the Daily Beast of 08 August 2014, describes as “…Obama Derangement Syndrome – an instinctual hostility to anything and everything the president said and did.”

There is no doubt that our African leaders are aware of the prevalence of the Obama Derangement Syndrome across the white, rightwing circles of America, including within the Tea Party, and might have felt the need to come to the aid of their beleaguered black brother in the White House in the hour of his greatest political need, through “the illusion of truth” of a successful first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit.

And that would be a completely understandable human, if not political, instinct.

Whether it is a right political, diplomatic and external trade strategy for Africa’s dealings with the USA’s Obama administration is a different matter altogether.

CHAPTER THREE.

In 2005 the Economist of Britain carried an interesting cover story under the title “Helping Africa to help itself.”

The picture accompanying the Economist’s cover story was of two extended black hands reaching to each other mid-air; one hand unadorned and apparently giving or donating something to the other lower black hand, which seemd to be of a man wearing a suit, with a golden cufflink, and some things around his wrist which look like ivory bangles. It is not clear if the intended message of the Economist was of two blacks cooperating to mutual benefit, or whether the message was of a poor black being robbed by a rich black and meant to capture the tensions between western aid to Africa and the requirement for extended western trade with Africa.

Be that as it may, the latter meaning of the picture accompanying the Economist’s cover story would of course best capture the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit’s Zeitgeist, nine years after the Gleneagles G8 Summit which discussed the trade versus aid conundrum around Africa at the time.

Did the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit successfully incorporate some of the lessons, achievements and failures of the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit in relation to Africa?

The “vulgar economism” of the recent summit in Washington is proof-positive that not much progress in how the developed world relates to, and not just treats, Africa has been registered, regrettably.

To illustrate this point, here are some of the more unappealing characteristics of the “vulgar economism” of the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit:

Firstly, in pure statistical terms, the $33 billion in new trade and investments to Africa which president Obama pledged at the summit divides into less than $1 billion for each of the 50 African countries who participated in the summit. In the case of a tiny African country like the Kingdom of Swaziland, with a population of about 1,2 million people, the less than $1 billion from Obama’s $33 billion pledged at the summit would translate into about less than $10 000 for each Swazi citizen. In the case of Nigeria, the average per Nigerian for sharing the Obama trade and investment largesse would be laughable. To say the amount president Obama pledged is peanuts would be the biggest understatement of July 2014.

It is no co-incidence also that the $33 billion in trade and investments which president Obama pledged during the summit is about the same amount the USA administrations have pledged and delivered to Egypt and Israel, two countries in the Middle East, in the form of military aid and in every decade since the signing of the Camp David Accords.

Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that whilst the USA’s trade with Africa amounted to about $85 billion in 2013, from the high of $125 billion in 2011, the same USA’s trade competitors like China and the EU have much bigger trade volumes with Africa of about $210 billion and $200 billion respectively in 2013. In the first five months of 2014, the USA traded only $31 billion in goods with the African continent. On this trajectory alone, it is hard to see how the USA-Africa trade volume would equal the one of 2013. This speaks to the sustained decline, since 2011, in USA trade with Africa, the highfalutin rhetoric of the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit not withstanding. And as president Obama correctly pointed out during the summit, much of USA’s trade with Africa is dominated by only three African countries, namely South Africa, Angola and Nigeria, and is heavily weighted in favor of the oil imports to the USA from Angola and Nigeria. President Obama was also correct to point out to the startling trade fact that the USA trades about as many goods with Brazil, a single country in Latin America, as it does with the whole of the African continent.

In 2009, China surpassed the USA under president Barack Obama as Africa’s biggest trading partner.

What is even more interesting is that whilst the USA-Africa trade volumes are registering disappointing and consistent decline since 2011, following the great recession in the USA, the point of fact is that the USA and India, another single country in south Asia, will be increased from the current levels of over $100 billion to close to $500 billion in the next ten years, if the intentions of the USA and Indian trade negotiators are to be taken seriously. And against this background of the growing India-USA bilateral relationship, the USA’s trade relationship with China continues to exponentially explode, whilst it is in reverse gear with regard to the African continent.

Thirdly, whilst it is true that president Obama’s great legacy for Africa will likely be his work on, support for and success in convincing the USA Congress to extend the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a truly transformative gesture he can make in the direction of Africa’s growth and opportunity would be for him to work to couple the benefits arising from AGOA in the next fifteen years with (in tandem) some of the trade and investment drives of other world powers active in Africa, such as those of Brazil, Russia India, China, South Africa (BRICS), the EU, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Malaysia. The Chinese government has recently indicated its preparedness to coordinate its trade and investment policy in Africa with the Obama administration.

Fourth, it is worth noting that whilst the USA and the EU clearly surpass China as bigger investors in Africa, at around $61 billion each to China’s about $18 billion, the Chinese investments are state-driven and infrastructure projects-bound. Much of the USA and EU’s investments in Africa are private corporations-driven, non-infrastructure-bound and are often out of sync with African states’ own developmental agendae. This is definitely not helpful. In effect, the Chinese investments have the direct positive effect of empowering Africa’s developmental states. It is no wonder that after all the many decades of USA and EU’s investments in Africa, the investments remain concentrated largely in extractive sectors like oil and mineral resources, whilst the dictates of the Washington Consensus, promoted by the USA administrations, the EU, IMF and the World Bank, ensure that the capacity of Africans states are considerably weakened and undermined, if not completely negated.

An undeniable historical truth is that the rise and rise of western Europe and north America in the last five hundred years has been directly linked to the fall and fall of the African continent during the same period. It can be shown convincingly, as Walter Rodney did in his 1972 classic, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, that western Europe and north America’s development, on the one hand, and Africa’s acute underdevelopment, on the other hand, have an “a-symbiotic” relationship between them.

Lastly, whilst president Obama’s Power Africa initiative, for which he pledged $300 million of initial American investment, is to be welcome, its positive effects can happen and be sustainable in the long run only if the initiative is anchored within a broader USA pivot towards Africa, and distinctly so, regarding trade and investment matters. However, the USA’s trade and invest flows to Africa, compared to the USA’s trade and investment flows into other developed and emerging regions of the world, do indicate that Africa remains the lowest trade and investment priority for USA administrations, including the current Obama administration, and that any hope for a decisive trade and investment pivot by the USA towards the African continent remains just a pipe-dream.

And this is the fact and truth the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit sought to deliberately down-play.

And so, in a strange sort of way, the over-emphasis on “vulgar economism” by the recent African-American summit in Washington further exposed the extent of continuing neglect by the USA of its bilateral relationship with the African continent, which remains the world’s poorest continent.

CONCLUSION.

The first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit is but a first step in a journey of more than a thousand miles. There is no doubt that in the next two years remaining of his presidency, president Obama will want to be part of another such mega-event summit.

This is understandable.

The challenge of course is to make sure that such future summits do not degenerate into the usual calcified circuit of unending but useless global conferencing and self-congratulatory back-patting on economic diplomacy between the leaders of Africa and the USA. For that to happen, the Obama administration still needs to stretch its mind a bit further and define, in more precise and specific terms, what is the nature and content of the new, equitable bilateral relationship the USA should develop and maintain, in the long term with the African continent, even in the future event of an absent president Barack Obama.

Otherwise the USA-Africa bilateral relationship will continue to be best described by Henry Longfellow’s Tales Of The Wayside Inn:

“So, on the ocean of life
We pass and speak one another
Only a look and a voice
The darkness again and silence”.

It does not have to be so. Especially in the coming USA’s post-Obama future.

12th Cedia blog
11 August 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address: isaac@cedia.co.za
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IT’S RUSSIA, NOT AFRICA, BLOODY STUPID: THE UKRAINIAN FASCIST PUTSCH, WESTERN DIPLOMATIC HYPOCRISY AND SOUTH AFRICA’S EFFEMINATE CRIMEA POLICY.

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

INTRODUCTION.

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

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

Or something to that effect.

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

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

His Power FM one is no exception.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shubin also wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or words to that effect.

Say what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bravo.

And they indeed are breathtaking.

But the editorial ‘s most powerful paragraph read:

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

Hear! Hear1 Hear!…Encore!

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

Why not?

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER ONE.

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

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

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

And,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two important starting points to this end.

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

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

It is Russia, not Africa, bloody stupid.

CONCLUSION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by:

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