WHO WILL SAVE US FROM THIS RUBBISH?
So declared Business Day editor Peter Bruce in his editorial on how the ANC doesn’t know what it’s talking about, specifically with regard to mining, taxes and how a modern economy works. (Business Day 2.9.13). He was referring to a speech by Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu during a mining conference in Australia last week. “She wants investors in mining companies to live with lower returns so they can spend more on social upliftment. It is hard to believe that stuff like this can still be uttered by a cabinet minister in a modern economy”.
It’s actually not hard to believe when you consider who these people really are, and who purport to govern South Africa. It is difficult not to once again say “we told you so”. The 1992 referendum was a plebiscite for South Africa’s whites. They were asked in a vaguely worded question whether they wanted the then government to “continue negotiations with the ANC”. Few at the time seemed to realize that with communists (Nelson Mandela’s book “How to be a good communist” is available on the internet from Barnes & Noble for $25), “negotiations” means wearing down the opponent until he capitulates. The ANC’s negotiations were always accompanied by threats of more violence unless their demands were met. Nelson Mandela refused to eschew violence as a condition of his release. Soon after his release in 1990, he told supporters in Cape Town that violence should be “targeted”.
Thus were we bamboozled into becoming the sorry beneficiaries of South Africa’s worst government in the country’s troubled history. Everything that made South Africa great is now under threat. TAU SA continues to make the case for South Africa’s commercial farming sector against the most formidable odds: the ANC government’s legislative assault on this group has reduced its numbers to no more than 35 000, down from 60 000 fifteen years ago. Criminal activity against farmers includes murders, assaults, attacks on staff, theft, unlawful and violent strikes and, worst of all, a none-too-subtle propaganda war against the rights of farmers to even own their land. They have stolen it, we are relentlessly told by many, and this is assiduously reported in the media with no thought to the rights of farmers to have their public say.
It’s a one-sided story in a land that boasts freedom of the press and equality for all in its constitution. To engender a guilt complex among whites and, specifically, within the farming community, the wilful distortion of history continues inexorably. Despite TAU SA’s offer to pay for an advertisement in Johannesburg’s Sunday Times newspaper to set out the historical background of the 1913 Land Act, the paper ignored the request. Instead, the fiction of land theft by whites persists ad nauseum. An exhibition called “Reversing the Legacy”, funded by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (read SA’s taxpayers) “takes one on a thought-provoking journey” declares Annette Bayne, a reporter for the Sunday Times (1.9.13).
Curated by the creative director of the Cape Town Carnival, this live exhibition includes professional actors, large-scale props and multimedia. The exhibition is touring the country, and the images designed to inculcate animosity towards farmers are so remote from reality that this travesty borders on calumny. Visitors to the exhibition must crawl under a tunnel created from weapons casings. As you enter, your way is blocked by white guards “drunk on the power they have over the dispossessed” who, according to the Sunday Times, take their time in holding up the queue. You then enter a world on fire in which forced removals are common, strikers toyi-toyi and scant belongings are piled high on old Bedford trucks. Stone monoliths outside the exhibition mark the passing of the 1913 Land Act, while your passage to the exhibition is under an umbrella of barbed wire. (Sunday Times 1.9.13). The reporter tells us she felt “shame as a white South African walking through a history perpetrated in my name”.
ABOMINABLE LAW
The 1913 Land Act is an “abominable law” which Jacob Zuma refers to as “apartheid’s original sin”, and the exhibition and the government’s funding of it and publicity afforded it is clearly meant to foment hatred towards farmers. Once again the Sunday Times gives almost a full page to this twaddle, and we ask the editor: what would you have done when faced with the realities of the land scramble after Union in 1910? Or don’t you know about what was happening at that time, and the fact that the 1913 Land Act had to be, and was, approved by the British Parliament. The ANC government should set up its “Reversing the Legacy” exhibition in Trafalgar Square, where the blame for the Act, if that is the appropriate term, lies.
South Africa’s future food security is being put at risk by, inter alia, an ignorant and uneducated president, and some equally obtuse media editors. Because they have prominence, they clearly believe they can say what they like. There are consequences of course, but it seems they do not care. In his column, the Business Day editor facetiously details an elementary explanation about how profits will result in increased revenue for the government by way of taxes. This should be obvious to everyone but not, it appears, to the powers that be. It’s a bit late for newspaper editors to start teaching the government of South Africa this type of thing. We don’t have time for on-the-job training! Editors who were critical of apartheid and who without cessation punted and promoted the coming to power of the ANC have reaped what they sowed, especially some business editors. It is not only the farming community that is under the whip. A party whose supporters cannot sustain themselves and who live on the hard work of others must of necessity parasite on the productive, and who else but the ever-obliging business community is there for the leeching?
Without murmur this community accepted the legalized theft which is Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). They have supported the ANC financially and in kind, and have been continually prevailed upon to donate to ANC projects and the party, from the relatively paltry R120 million for rural schools in 2000 (as a special request from President Mandela) to expensive seats at ANC dinners just to be “near” the president and his friends. The Johannesburg Mail & Guardian(6.9.13) reports that Gold Fields South Africa has “buried a New York law firm’s finding that a R25 million share allocation to ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete constituted bribery”. This was in a “contentious 2010 empowerment deal in response to an alleged threat by her representative”. Did this alleged $25 million “allocation” buy immunity from the ruinous gold mine strikes that have torn the industry apart over the past six months or so?
THE CROCODILE
To what avail? The crocodile has turned to consume them. Hundreds of companies are turning overseas to invest. Mining groups are mechanizing and retrenching. (New technology being piloted by Anglo-Gold Ashanti will allow mining at depths heretofore unreachable. This will be done mechanically. Three thousand three hundred Amplats miners received their Section 189 retrenchment notices on 2 September). The government’s avaricious BEE requirements are so onerous that thousands of businesses have closed their doors. The government’s equity laws are ridiculed by SA Institute of Race Relations CE John Kane-Berman. He calls BEE incentives “perverse”. “The ideology of demographic proportionality implies that 2.66 million of SA’s 3.55 million top jobs must be filled by Africans. However, only 992 000 Africans (4,1% of those aged 20 or older) have completed post-school education. This leaves a shortfall of 1,67 million qualified Africans”. (Business Day 2.9.13).
This failure of policy is borne out by the monotonous repeat advertising for top jobs in government departments in the country’s employment pages where every government, provincial and municipal position is qualified by the phrase that “we are an employment equity employer”. This is government speak for no whites need apply. This charade goes on for months, even years, while the country’s functionality is impaired. But we repeat: those in power do not care. If they cared, South Africa would not be in the state it is. They are dangerously self-delusional. During a recent TV interview on the new ANN7 television station, a lady minister assured her questioner that “there is no crisis in South Africa”, while ANC Youth League Interim President Mzwandile Masina told the BBC on 7 August this year that the ANC has “delivered” to South Africa. When questioned about corruption, incompetence, theft and nepotism, his answer was that “others are undermining the ANC” and that the ANC “continues to inspire most South Africans. We have done well over the last 19 years.” It didn’t matter what question the interviewer asked, Masina had his own answer. He said everything negative was simply a “perception” and that the ANC was “the only party fighting corruption in South Africa”.
TAU SA is just as curious as to how we can be saved from this rubbish, as the Business Day editor puts it. We are dealing with people on another planet, and they have power, but not all the power. With BEE they are trying to wrest the power of business from those who created these businesses, but the ANC doesn’t have the DNA to run businesses, let alone run a country.
The same applies to commercial farming. The onslaught on the commercial farming community is not simply the vindictive outpourings
of a class bedevilled by feelings of inferiority. It could be the beginning of a plan to rid South Africa of its productive farmers: they have control over the country’s food supply, the thrust of the offensive against farmers and the business community could be to wrest power from these groups so that the ANC, like Robert Mugabe, would dominate the most vital components of the economy. Reducing the country to ruin is not a problem. One only has to see how the Zimbabwean president operates.
How to stop this slide? Don’t give the ANC anything more that they can destroy. They are destroyers by nature. A small scale farming operation has been started by Massmart in four provinces to grow fresh produce, utilizing poor people who need guidance but who are not afraid to work. Private enterprise has stepped in where the ANC government has failed. The ANC cannot even organize something like this! No wonder its farm redistribution policy failed so spectacularly!
This is how we know them, and this is why we cannot give any more. Refuse to pay exorbitant amounts of money to attend their dinners. Don’t donate to their political party. Don’t prop them up when they should be doing the work themselves. They can’t exist without the productive people in this country, so guard what you have.
