Submitted by Felix Ngasama
The year 2008 is so far proving to be South Africa’s annus horribilis since its rebirth as a new democratic state in 1994. Things haven’t been worse since 1994.
This year has brought with it the aftermath of the ruling party’s most divisive national elections where Jacob Zuma, a man acquitted of rape charges and still likely to stand trial for corruption in the third quarter of this year, trounced President Thabo Mbeki and emerged as the new leader of the ANC, thus making him the likely next president of the country.
Zuma is rumoured to be a traditional and clueless man without formal education who cannot even diarise his day or manage his basic personal finances. This is just part of the doubts and fears of most South Africans — mostly the middle class — at the prospect of Jacob Zuma becoming the president of the country. Most South Africans, although they may not admit it publicly, are waiting with bated breath in anticipation of the political buffoonery Zuma might bring with him on the presidential stage, as indicated by his poor showing in a recent BBC documentary titled No More Mandelas where he was interviewed by Fergal Keane but dismally failed to impress.
There was Zuma — the ANC president and likely to be the next president of South Africa — taking part in a television programme that was portraying his country as on a downward spiral and he unwittingly confirmed this by his own poor showing.
The incumbent but outgoing President Mbeki made it clear in his recent State of the Nation speech when he said: “I am aware of the fact that many people in our society are troubled by a deep sense of unease about where our country will be tomorrow.” Zuma has contributed to this sense of unease by cavorting before his supporters while performing karaoke with the popular but anachronistic ANC liberation song Umshini Wami.
The year 2008 has brought with it a ruling party split in the middle, albeit unofficially, thanks to its highly contested and acrimonious national leadership elections, fought between what the South African media labelled as Mbeki and Zuma camps. The two camps cynically fought for the leadership of the ANC in total disregard of the party’s interests.
Since the elections, there has been no sign of the two camps smoking a peace pipe together. Instead the new leadership is flushing out party officials holding key positions but perceived as belonging to the Mbeki camp, and replacing them with Zuma zealots.
This year has been the worst for Mbeki as South Africa’s president. He has been bruised in a lost bid to lead the ANC for another five years and reduced to a lame-duck president with no real power while his Cabinet ministers have become a bunch of limping flamingos. For the first time since 1994, some opposition parties were toying with the idea of garnering support to push for a parliamentary vote of no confidence in Mbeki and force him to step down as president.
The year has brought so much uncertainty in South Africa. People don’t know where the ANC is leading them any more, especially with rumours making newspaper headlines that the so-called Mbeki camp is hatching plans to undermine Zuma and take control of provincial leadership, having lost at national level. Newspapers have also reported violent clashes between supporters of Zuma and those of Mbeki that have allegedly claimed at least one life this year in the Eastern Cape, Mbeki’s home region.
Soon after taking power as ANC president, Zuma and his lieutenants made a beeline for an elite crime-fighting unit, the Directorate of Special Operations (DSO), popularly known as the Scorpions, to lay down plans to disband it.
The Scorpions, Mbeki’s brainchild to combat corruption and organised crime, have been highly successful and, to a certain extent, have become the pride of the nation. However, the unit touched a raw nerve within the ANC government and political alliance circles when it went beyond fear or favour to investigate and charge top and powerful ANC government and parliamentary officials for offences ranging from corruption to racketeering.
Prominent among those who have seen the wrath of the Scorpions are Zuma himself and a flamboyant dandy, former ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni, who spent four months in jail for corruption and is now out on parole — but was in December elected as a member of the ANC’s national executive committee, regardless.
The hasty and controversial move to disband the Scorpions this year is seen by many as a pre-emptive and vengeful tactic by Zuma and the new ANC national executive committee — whose members include convicted criminals and others who are awaiting trial or being investigated by the Scorpions.
In a country where crime is one of the biggest and most challenging problems, the move to disband a highly successful crime-fighting unit defies all logic. Organised crime lords and other dirty rotten scoundrels will be watching the whole plan to disband the Scorpions with glee since it will significantly lower the risks involved in carrying out their shenanigans in future. For the scum of society, the year 2008 is not one of doom and gloom but rather of boom and glory, courtesy of the new ANC leadership under Zuma’s stewardship.
The Zuma spectre is just one of many ominous factors that the year has brought into a country touted as Africa’s only hope. As the year was hovering while waiting for 2007 to pack and go, it sent warning signals of power failures. Since 2008′s arrival there has been a “new dawn” in form of power cuts euphemistically described as “load-shedding” by Eskom, the country’s electricity supplier. Load-shedding has become the official term for power cuts in the country; it is now a South African household and boardroom term — a locally celebrated term that would turn any South African resident who may not know it into a laughing stock.
Such power failures would have major economic and social implications in any country, and it goes without saying that the power cuts in South Africa have negatively affected every economic and social activity here. For the first time South Africa stopped being a leading gold producer in the world, having being elbowed from the gold-production throne by China as power cuts took their toll and interrupted mining activities.
Gridlocked traffic due to out-of-order — load-shedded — traffic lights has become part of a contingency plan when driving in South Africa’s cities. One of the country’s major daily newspapers has revealed in its editorial that since the beginning of the year, more than 100 restaurants have lost business and closed in South Africa due to load-shedding. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of overall economic and social repercussions. The director general of the National Treasury was recently quoted by a major Sunday newspaper as saying that South Africa will no longer be able to reach its economic growth target of 4,5% until the year 2009, and 6% from 2010 to 2014, attributing this to global economic turmoil coupled with the country’s power woes.
As if the “dawn” of power failures was not enough to worry South Africans, the petrol price is another worrisome factor. Economists predict an already high petrol price to increase even more in the first quarter and probably again in the second or third quarter of this year. A chance conversation between South Africans nowadays is mostly about the gloomy state of affairs due to load-shedding, the increase in the petrol price and, generally, an uncertain political and economic future.
Interest rates, which are already high for South African consumers, may rise even higher this year. Considering that South Africans — especially the middle class — survive on credit, high interest rates will only tighten the financial noose and make it difficult for them to maintain their relatively good but credit-dependent living standards. There have been reports of an increase in bank repossession of mortgaged homes, hire-purchased cars and household goods in 2008. Although some people think that interest rates can only drop now after rising so high, respected authorities on economic matters are predicting that another interest-rate hike is not far off.
Then there is the issue of South Africa’s chief of police, Jackie Selebi, who is facing charges of corruption and racketeering. On his list of close friends was a shady underworld mogul who had been previously convicted of crime and surely listed as such in the police files. This is yet another sad and lousy episode in South Africa’s state of affairs in 2008. It is reprehensible to see a police chief who is supposed to be the country’s custodian of law enforcement dragged into court to face criminal charges of receiving bribes from a Mafioso friend of his in exchange for classified police information to put him a step ahead of law enforcement.
Hey, wait a minute … that is not all. Civil engineering and transport experts have just issued a warning that municipal and provincial roads are also in a crisis that could escalate to the same scale as the current electricity turmoil. Road networks in the country are teetering on the brink of collapse due to poor maintenance, bad planning and a brain drain of professional engineers. It is estimated that a maintenance programme to restore the roads to their former glory could cost up to R200-billion.
Racism has also refused to be left behind. It has reared its ugly head in a most hardcore fashion at one of the country’s universities as a video showing elderly black university workers being humiliated and forced to eat meat soup laced with urine by white students — just weeks after another white youth descended upon a sleepy black informal settlement, opened fire and shot dead four black people and wounded six.
What a hopeless future of racial reconciliation we face, considering that both these gross acts of racism were perpetrated by young whites who were barely five years old in 1994 when South Africa was reborn as a new democratic and non-racial country. How have they become so racist when they were growing up in a supposedly non-racial new South Africa? Institutionalised racism might have been abolished, but its root, which anchored it during the apartheid era, is still very much alive and kicking. That root is the heart and soul of the perpetrators, and this year has shown that racism is still radiating from the old to the new generation of South Africa.
Mbeki seems to have taken the harbinger of doom and gloom that is the year 2008 very seriously. He frankly issued a warning in the form of advice in his State of the Nation speech, saying: “Our nation should unite as never before and strain every sinew of its collective body to address our common challenges and keep alive the dream that has sustained us all.”
While Mbeki’s call for a united and organised effort to turn around the ominous state of affairs is noble, it is equally ineffective coming from a president sitting in a limbo and bereft of any real clout in his twilight days as leader. He has had no real influence since being ousted as the ruling party’s leader in December.
In all likelihood, the dream that has sustained all South Africans as indicated by Mbeki may just be a pipe dream if the signals of the year 2008 are anything to go by. The same old and well-known infectious causes that have brought suffering and total collapse to almost all African countries are now zeroing in on Africa’s last and only hope with a typical modus operandi of primarily targeting the leadership.
A careful look at the current South African situation will show that the usual suspects that have pillaged, plundered and destroyed other African countries are currently devouring South Africa, and may also cause its eventual collapse if not checked.
Take a deep breath in South Africa in 2008 and you are likely to smell the demons of disunity; corruption; choosing leaders based on ethnicity, culture, creed or ideology instead of integrity or ability; obsessive pursuit of power at all costs; putting one’s interests above the nation’s interests; and abuse of power and self-aggrandisement. Typical!
Felix Ngasama lives in Johannesburg. He is both employed and self-employed, having just started a quality-assurance consultancy in the tourism industry. He am a keen follower of current affairs both locally and internationally, and a contributing author to Africa Global Village, which has rated him as its top author so far this year. Some of his articles have been linked to Global Voices, a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, and to Technorati. Writing comes naturally to him and he has a passion for political commentary.
In a democracy you’ll always get the government you deserve.
All rather depressing and unfortunately pretty much fact. Have you got any positives to throw our way by any chance? I suspect we will need them to cling to in the coming storm.
With all possible respect, mate, none of these problems are insurmountable. We have a disunited ruling party, but that will change after the next election. We have an electricity problem, but that will change once the power stations which have been a-building for years are completed.
Before 1994 we would have killed to have problems as small as these to solve. In fact, we did.
Ja, well. Onwards to the revolution! Haha, we thought we were safe…
Well that just about sums it all up. Botswana is still an option though!
What a pessimistic article. It is increasingly sarcastic and paints bloody gloom and leaves the reader almost jittery- as if threatened by a dangerous and ruthless force or creation- about the future of anything in this country. I am deeply concerned of the unbalanced manner in which this article has been macadamized. I say this because the author has not included government intervention programmes as part of his article. I am referring to the R60 billion budgeted for by the State in order to finance expansion programmes by Eskom. Bearing in mind that government has warned that this is an Investment in Eskom and nothing else source: http://www.sars.gov.za/budget2008/9
Moreover, the author makes allegations of death owing to political reasons within the ANC yet he provides no source or any kind of substantiation for this. I am referring to the Eastern Cape “Mbeki’s region” death.
Finally, the conclusion of the text I find to be inappropriate. What does the author mean by stating- “typical” in exclamation? I find the conclusion to be inappropriate because it lacks information as to why the author says typical. Is he/she suggesting that this was bound to happen in SA? Will he/she please supply reasons for such a colonial and distasteful conclusion.
@MFB
Respectfully, ever heard of “no-turning point” ???
Your are experiencing the birth pangs of what is coming your way in South Africa; in Zim, we have been there, done that and are now steeled and hopefully if the “unwashed masses – alleged Mbeki lingo” help us dislodge the current leadership on March 29, we will be on the path to recovery. Its a revolution and do not let it cascade out of hand through populism and mismanagement because unfortunately for you, you cannot run anywhere in the SADC economies that surround you.They are weak or have been weakened by years of mismanagement. Botswana is too small to handle economic refugees from Mzansi and the rest of the region is in ruins. Once we hopefully fix our mess, then we can also hibernate with our own brand of “Quite Diplomacy” and turn away “Makwerekweres” from the south of the Limpopo.
What I am saying is do something before its too late. You almost had a good thing going but signs of disintegration are visible in the “rainbow nation.”
Felix,
BOTH the Zuma AND the Mbeki camps want the Scorpions out – there are no clean sides here. The resolutions at Polokwane were not prepared by the Zuma camp, but by Mbeki’s think tank and pushed through on the last day,without any known amendment, after all the rest of the time had been spent on voting.Here there is unity!
As for racism. Mbeki deliberately has blamed the whites for everything – which not only covers up government non delivery but also unifies Xhosa and Zulu against a common enemy, and keeps Inkatha out in KwaZulu-Natal. Obviously this will cause resentment. They grew up under Mbeki, not under apartheid. What, however, do you think is causing the sexism in the taxi drivers?
As for Eskom – why should we pay more? What have they done with the profits of the last 15 years? They built no power stations, reduced staff, and obviously did not look after infrastructure.
Never mind the bonuses – the salaries the top guys are getting is obscene. They are not CEO’s, only managers – but getting top CEO salaries. Do you know what the main job of a CEO is? Getting clients and contracts. Eskom can’t even service the clients it has, and has a monopoly!
Xolani
The R60 billion loan youre referring to is financed
by the Government from taxes etc paid by Tax
payers.
Now the end users of electricity are going to pay
the loan plus interest back to the Government
by means of increased electricity tariffs.
So the end users are bailing Escom out.The Government is just a conduit through which their
hard earned money,in the form of taxes, is channeled to Escom, who say thank you very much,we will have a R10M bonus first after which we will hit you with another 60% increase to rectify the mess we have created.
Now the economy has deal with a massive increase
and unable to absorb same brace yourself for
more lay-offs in the mining industry and more
enraged labour Unions and higher inflation.
@MFB – what power stations are being built – one and it has some real design problems – like a lack of water for the cooling towers.
@Xolani – the government has been unable to spend its existing money properly (see municipal budgets) what on earth makes you think the R60b will be spent properly and as the rand goes so that figure goes up as most of it is imported. Do you really think that us tax payers are bottomless pits of money when the economy is declining?
All this bad stuff…and yet I remain hopeful
This “report” is almost like a summary of last three months European weather report at the end of winter. If I summarise all murders and robberies reported over the last three months in my local newspaper, one would also feel depressed. No real news, no forward looking, no positive suggestions. Glad I am not married to this person.
To quote Obama:
Wright’s language, he said, “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America”.
Have we not done the same here?
To those who think this articles views are skewed -
Wake up and smell the coffee, it is only time before your rose coloured specs will be whipped off by the blizzard of despair… The other issue that is causing major problems in SA is AA/EE. Why do you think all the capable, efficient, high flying graduates have gone! Just walk into any corporate today where you will find gross window dressing leading to frustration of co-workers and the slow but ultimate degeneration of the corporate world.
Yes Xolani, we will just wait until 2015 for an end to on-going (daily) load shedding. How encouraging. We will just pay an extra 53% to fund Eskom salary costs. We will wait forever to have a Minister of Safety and Security who actually WANTS to commit to dealing with crime. We will wait forever for the Education department to install disciplinary processes in schools. Difficult to hide the facts. In all of this, the international community are beginning to get the real picture. But let’s be positive.
Hi Chief,
I am not impressed with your piece. Your failure to attribute the current problems to the current cabinet and the current President( which he apologised for) throws you in the “Polokwane wounded” who want to show everything wrong with Zuma even before he beconmes a President of the country.
A careful analysis of our economy will reveal a sad fact about our “so called economic growth”, how do you explain the deficit of more R160 billion in the economy. How do you explain the “Jobless Growth”, how do you explain a target of 6 percent growth by ASGISA and refusal to fund better power generation by the same cabinet that was pushing for a six percent growth. This is just a few or real things, why concentrate on the perception about what will happen in 2009. Wake up bra, the media has fooled us enough with this unfounded fears.
Cedric sabelo Gina
even if the country is a mess at least you summed it up well!
It is commenable for Mbeki to call for all South Africans to pull together to tackle our shared problems and I support that sentiment completely.
Our major shared problem however is the practice of racial discrimination which exists at every level in society from the legislative to the individual. Sorting out matters at an individual level is a difficult and complex task which is not made any easier if racism is still legislatively implemented as is the case with AA and BEE which are the products of the Mbeki government.
Perhaps Mbeki does not perceive the the contradiction inherent in his own statement when he calls for all South Africans to stand together but the contradiction is nevertheless real and is fundamentally hampering our capacity to deal with our problems effectively.
SA has problems. Agreed.So does America and Germany and England and Israel and ——-!
But many here spout details and point fingers with salacious delight.
Since you are all so wise, Fix It!
This All ‘You are a miserable bunch who by and large eat well and are secure have education and influence and can make choices. It is your inadequacies that are on display here. Your selfishness is thoroughly exposed here. It is you, the middle class, that cannot deliver in SA.’
This All , I think you are a problem and wherever you go you will be the problem and so you are the problem.
I do not identify with Zuma. Others do. I will do the best I can to associate with and relate to them. I will ridicule those all who are above such.
Farts!
SM and Rory
There is nothing wrong with AA policy except that it was NEVER IMPLEMENTED AND NEVER USED. It was replaced by BEE, which squeezed the white capitalists to fork out shares of their businesses to the new black elite in return for government business.
AA was supposed to be a policy whereby the previously disadvantaged applicant for a job would be priotitised above other applicants. It would not have lost us skills – but increased them, as whites would just have been motivated to get more skills. BEE, however, means you must employ a majority of people of a certain skill colour – whether qualified or not.
The issue at hand is the fact that we have a governmental and general government breakdown. All the more laws are passed requiring normal citizens and private business to opperate in a legal and considderate fashion. All the while the government and its machinery, is becoming more corrupt and do not even remotely comply with their own laws and standards set. For example pass laws to control private healthcare, but state hospitals are in a state of chaos. Force private/public companies to comply with GAAP,FICA,NCA etc etc.but more and more government deparments get qualified audit reports. If companies would function like government departments/organizations, they would all go belly-up. But noooooo, lets just pass the buck to private sector!
Excellent article.
@ Rory Short
Good summation my friend. People focus on crime being out of control but crime is really just the symptom. One has to address the causes and one of the causes is the 60 odd anti-white racist acts and amendment acts which punishes today’s white minority for the perceived sins rendered on a massive majority, by a handful of people 50 to 350 years ago. Amongst other things it makes criminals believe that whites are fair game and that they will get away with murdering, raping them and stealing from them because the government is targeting them. Unfortunately the worst is still to come as the Land Restitution Act is currently evolving to Zim-style Land Grabbing under our intellectually challenged, complete with mad cow disease, minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs.
@ MidaFo
What is the problem? Do you see your share of the plunder slipping away with more and more people realizing that white guilt, “injustices of the past”, “we have been disadvantaged by apartheid” etc. etc. and the 1 million other propaganda allegations, are just convenient political lies?
Let me put your mind at rest. With the “redistribution of wealth” which people like you are so eagerly awaiting, nothing would have come to you anyway. It will all go to a handful of politicians and their cronies. You think with the likes of JZ, Winnie Mandela and Robert McBride, not to mention Tony Yengeni, at the top of the NEC food chain, that any of you will get anything? Dream on pal.
@ Tyson
Another good posting. If you do an analysis of the taxation paid by owners of SMEs incorporating all forms of taxation plus the cost of compliance to the barrage of new legislation you will find that it exceeds 120%. That is right. If you are an honest taxpayer you cannot survive.
as my nick implies, i’m foreign. [mundundu is the kikongo word for mzungu.] i’m black and i grew up elsewhere in africa.
anyway, i’m choosing to stay in south africa because due to the failure of eskom and the anc to properly plan, the rand is falling faster than the dollar. [i'm paid in US$ -- messrs zuma, gcabashe and maroga have been instrumental in my re-emerging solvency after my acrimonious divorce. thanks guys!]
let’s see, the presumptive next president is a barely literate buffoon with no impulse control when it comes to his personal finances, and his judgment is so bad that he has unprotected sex with a woman he knows to be hiv+ — and did i fail to mention he has five wives?
the world economy is rapidly coming to the [correct] conclusion that south africa is on its way to being just another banana republic. this could have been avoided, but wasn’t.
even zanu-pf did right by most zimbabweans for a few years. the anc can’t even claim to have done that.
ugh.
Hoorah ! I am on my way . Leaving Africa for the Africans . Africa does not tolerate whites and so me must go . Back to where we came from ? Possible. All the black Africans (overseas) must come back to Africa . Their continent , just theirs to do with as they like. Leave the rest of the world, to the world.
There are still racists in our midst and by that I mean any and eveybody who identifies the sources of the negativities in their lives as being members of a race group, other than their own, because of the mere fact that they are members of another race group.
As Martin Luther King so rightly said, ‘The consequences of discrimination are used to justify it’. He was talking I am sure about the situation in the USA in the 60′s but the same holds true with respect to the racial legislation brought into force and justified by our present government. Racism in any form whatsoever and no matter how applied is wrong. It is as simple as that. The consequences of past racism can be addressed in non-racist ways if the government of the day sets its mind to it. Our government has however taken the politically expedient route and sadly continued with racism. Racism continues to rob our country and its people of their true potential.
Tyson & Eagle
I forgot about taxation. If we give a general amnesty for the arms deal – does Zuma get off the tax evasion charges as well?
@ Lyndall Beddy,
Good point, Lyndall. He will probably get off. Add to this his R 15 million legal fees already paid by the taxpayer, as well as his other R 10 million legal fees, still to be paid, than most of us have been working for most of our lives to finance Zuma’s irresponsible, selfish and self-indulgent behaviour.
However, I suspect that this will be small change compared to the financial implications when he sells our country out to the communists.
It is only in Africa that this could happen.
Eagle
African followers of the ANC don’t know what communist actually means. Neither do the new young communists – they think it means socialist.
Spot-on Lyndall,
As you obviously know, nothing in Africa has the same meaning as elsewhere.
The “democracy” much lauded by the interfering West, has now become ‘African democracy’ in virtually every African country, where it means; one man, one vote, one time. Alternatively; one one-party state, one dictator, for life.
Consider what happened after majority rule and democracy was forced upon Rwanda. Almost 900 000 citizens, mostly the minority Tutsis, were massacred in the street. Where were those then that forced Western democracy upon Rwanda?
It is the interfering West, and the UN that was present in Rwanda during the genocide, but stood by and did nothing, that should be taken to an international court for “crimes against humanity”.
In South Africa, ‘African Communism’ will simply mean; “I’m now free to plunder what I want, for myself – for life”.
Eagle
You are only half right:
See my comment on Khadija’s article:Darfur not Genocide(re Rwanda) and on Michael Trapido’s article: Zimbabwe: a Bonfire ( re Africa rising)
Hi Lyndall
I saw your comments but I don’t quite get it. You will have to clarify it for me.
Great summary.
Can we vote for more?