South Africa

[noddy]

i get more than enough merkin politics here, i dont think i hate myself enough for even higher levels!

I will say tho, any other country on the planet, "trespassing" parliament house as gun toting millitia would have left you shot.

normally its all about americans being shot for littering, so i spose its a pleasant change.

still, this is a saffer thread and in many ways, its future of america it seems.

[Typhoon]

The Spectator | The real reasons for South Africa’s riots

The nominal cause of the riots was the arrest and imprisonment of Jacob Zuma, our president from 2009 to 2018, a charming man with powerful supporters and the most corrupt leader in South Africa history. We were told the riots were in his name, but I saw very few pro-Zuma placards. In fact, there were almost no placards at all. Instead, there seem to have been more immediate causes: desperate need and greedy opportunism; political and racial rivalry. Murderous faction-fighting within the ANC was doubtless a factor, especially in KZN, where assassination of political rivals has become an administrative procedure. One KZN journalist wrote: ‘Politicians in Durban walk around with hit lists in their back pockets … a hitman can be hired as easily as we hail e-rides. A simple trip to the taxi rank gets you an inkabi — or hitman — as long as you have R5,000 to pay.’ But if there are many immediate causes of the rioting, there is only one profound cause, which is the failure of the ANC to improve the lives of ordinary black people.

[noddy]

it appears you need quite rare local characteristics to make the switch from angry peasants to middle class.

the process requires an educated populace but that in itself doesnt help much, all that happens in many places is you have wasted 10 years in school - their are no jobs or industries to use that education in.

you have also ruined your ability to be a peasant and just get more angry at a system that isnt going to help you and lied to you.

Russia has the same problem in many ways - you cant tell the difference between good and bad leadership because the process between poor peasant and comfy middle class isnt going to happen in your lifetime.


East asia is the only place it has happened that I can think of and their are perhaps a myriad of reasons behind it, reasons that dont exist in South Africa.

[Typhoon]

FT | Brutal murder highlights rise of South Africa’s xenophobic vigilantes

Organised groups fill gap with violence as authority of ruling African National Congress wanes

Joseph Cotterill in Johannesburg 3 HOURS AGO

South African vigilantes banged on Mbhodazwe “Elvis” Nyathi’s door late one night last week demanding he show them his passport then beating him and setting him alight.

The 43-year-old Zimbabwean, a father of four, was left to burn to death in the street in Diepsloot, a crime-plagued township north of Johannesburg.

Nyathi was “the tragic victim of the indiscriminate door-to-door raids by a vigilante group that targets African foreign nationals outside the confines of the law and without due process”, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party Citizens Coalition for Change said in a statement after his death.

His brutal murder has highlighted the rise of xenophobic vigilantes as an organised political force in South Africa, as President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress struggles to turn around a flagging economy and its authority wanes.

This week, without referring to any particular group, Ramaphosa tweeted that “attacking those we suspect of wrongdoing merely because they are a foreign national is not an act of patriotism. It is immoral, racist and criminal. In the end, it will lead to xenophobia, whose consequences we have lived through in previous years”.

The most prominent of these groups is Operation Dudula, which since its launch last year has attracted hundreds to its anti-migrant marches, enjoyed support from smaller political parties and expanded across South Africa. It has called for an end to illegal immigration and the prioritisation of South Africans for jobs. It has accused the police of corruption and negligence — claims denied by the police — and has raided the homes and properties of migrants it accuses of being involved in crime. The group denies fanning xenophobia, breaking the law or any involvement in violence. Police are investigating Nyathi’s death and there are no suspects yet.

South African analysts and politicians agree that the emergence of Dudula, whose name means “pushback” in Zulu, represents a step change in the country’s politics.

Operation Dudula is “not a political party, it doesn’t play by the rules, it does not have a formal leadership structure” but it is an “alternative way to contest power” as the ANC declines, said Ralph Mathekga, an independent political analyst. The movement is rooted in a “scores of young people who are economically and socially frustrated,” Mathekga said. “People turn to them because they are desperate” and as formal authority such as ANC local leadership has collapsed, he added.

These groups have emerged against a backdrop of stable, or even falling, migration. Nearly 900,000 African nationals migrated to the country on a net basis between 2016 and 2021, according to Statistics South Africa, down on the previous five-year period and a fraction of the country’s overall population of about 60mn.

But with post-pandemic joblessness at a record 35 per cent, immigration resonates with voters. Last year smaller opposition parties, such as ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance, campaigned against illegal immigration in local elections that saw the ANC’s vote fall below 50 per cent for the first time.

Analysts and activists say that ANC rule has incubated vigilante governance through their local co-operation with mafia-style protection rackets operating as township associations, truck and taxi federations, and business forums.

“These groups have been allowed to operate with a great deal of impunity but at a very local level,” Loren Landau, co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, said. “What’s happening now is that the political landscape has become more complicated with the ruling party losing its hegemony,” Landau said.

The lack of accountability for widespread civil unrest last year, in which ANC infighting sparked mass looting that killed hundreds, has also fed a sense of impunity for political violence, analysts said. “What we’re seeing is the normalisation of violence as a form of political negotiation,” said Landau.

The main opposition Democratic Alliance said that if Operation Dudula was “allowed to continue unabated, it will very soon lead to exactly the kind of violence and unrest” that was seen last year.

It was during that unrest that Nhlanhla Lux, Operation Dudula’s military-garbed 33-year-old leader, first became a national figure for defending Soweto. Last month, he turned his arrest for an alleged raid on a house into a rallying cry for the movement. “The revolution is not about Nhlanhla Lux. With or without him, the revolution will go on,” he said. He denies wrongdoing.

Many of South Africa’s most desperate still abhor Operation Dudula. Thabo Maleke, 32, who lost his job as a waiter in Nando’s during South Africa’s pandemic lockdown and is still unemployed, is bitter that restaurants often hire undocumented foreign nationals for lower pay.

Yet Maleke does not support forcing them to leave South Africa, nor condone Operation Dudula. “It’s not good,” the Soweto resident said. “The police must be the ones doing that work [investigating migrants’ involvement in crime]”.

While Ramaphosa has acknowledged that “many communities are frustrated by the apparent inability of the police to deal with criminals”, these words mean little to the victims.

“I’m very heartbroken about our country and I am disappointed about the ANC,” said a female business owner in Soweto, who is working into her sixties to support children who cannot find jobs. As a supporter of vigilantes, she did not want to give her real name. “They [the ANC] don’t look after us. Everything is dirty, there is no service delivery, but the worst of the worst is crime.”

“Operation Dudula is trying to reduce people who are coming here without papers. I’m disappointed that the parties will fight them,” she said. The mall where she works was looted in last year’s unrest, and Dudula helped defend the township, she added. “Now, they are trying to do another nice thing, they are attacked.”

All black lives matter, but some black lives matter more than others.

[Typhoon]

FT | Scandal at South Africa’s Eskom: the CEO and the cyanide-laced coffee

The attempted poisoning of André de Ruyter is a dramatic example of how criminality has seeped into the country’s state

Interesting, but sad, how the country that inherited the best infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa is devolving into a failed state.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

Interesting is .. every time when a country does not bend to Western "Rules", it becomes a "failed state"


https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/so ... -1.6752297


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-64380572

[noddy]

why is it some people blame every damn thing on the planet on the west.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/so ... 023-02-09/

CAPE TOWN, Feb 9 (Reuters) - South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday declared a national "state of disaster"over his country's crippling power shortages, saying they posed an existential threat to the economy and social fabric.

The electricity crunch has been years in the making, a product of delays in building new coal-fired power stations, corruption in coal-supply contracts, criminal sabotage and failures to ease up regulation to enable private providers to swiftly bring renewable energy on tap.

"We are in the grip of a profound energy crisis," Ramaphosa said in his annual State of the Nation Address to parliament.

China can have Russia and South Africa, I wish them the best of luck.

[Apollonius]

Look back in anger - Helen Andrews, Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2022/23
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/look-back-in-anger/

The lights are going off in South Africa.

Review of: The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning by Eve Fairbanks (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

...Fairbanks believes that South Africa is “a story that illuminates what lies ahead of us.” The 1994 handover compressed into the blink of an eye a transition that the United States is undergoing more slowly: the regime’s old heroes “became losers who had labored for a collapsed and discredited cause,” and “people of color took their places in the president’s office, in Parliament, on the committees that write the school history books.” The defining characteristic of white South Africans today is their lack of moral standing. They have been so discredited over apartheid that they have no basis for making claims in the public sphere. This lack of moral authority is more important than their being demographically outnumbered, a fate that is still a long way off for whites in the U.S. (but not unthinkable, as they’ve gone from 89% of the country to 58% in two generations). It should be obvious to everyone by now that this lack of moral standing is what Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project have in mind for white Americans. They want to take the same moral certainty with which we condemn Jim Crow and extend it to everything white Americans have ever done until, like white South Africans, we feel grateful just to have our continuing presence tolerated. ...

... The argument that borders are the moral equivalent of apartheid is not just theoretical; it is being made today. The quality of life we enjoy in America is the result of exclusion. Otherwise, entire favelas would pack up and move here. On what moral basis do we keep them out? Do the people of Latin America not deserve nice things? One might ask why they can’t have nice things in their own country, but the answer would probably be that it is somehow our fault. Certainly it is not anything the Latin Americans are doing. That would imply that they are incapable of sustaining nice things, and that would be racist. Eventually the only reply to these liberal gotchas is to say that foreigners can’t have our country because it’s ours. That is precisely the kind of basic moral claim that the current Left would like to deprive Americans of the authority to make.

[...]

White South Africans cannot look forward to a day when they are no longer blamed for everything that goes wrong in their country. As apartheid recedes into the past, its role as a political explanation grows. A 2018 national survey found that 77% of black South Africans said they had “never personally experienced racism directed against them.” Still, every ANC politician blames lingering racial disparities on the legacy of racism. The white population of South Africa could shrink to five Afrikaners in a remote corner of Gauteng, and no doubt Malaika would still be harping on about “the boiling fire of white supremacy.”

So white South Africans will never achieve any political power no matter how hard they try, and they will never cease to be blamed for the country’s misfortunes. That is the very definition of a dead end. When people say America is becoming more like South Africa, they usually mean that California can’t keep the lights on and private security is a booming business for middle-class neighborhoods in Baltimore and Portland. That is all part of it, but the most South African thing about our politics is the current effort to push white Americans into that same position as permanently powerless scapegoats.