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How does a citiz enry handle a government that is impervious to criticism, cavalier in its actions and totally unable to understand cause and effect? The African National Congress’ (ANC) thinking processes are foreign to rationality, as understood throughout the sane world of successful nations. Failed states are many, and the reasons are varied, and obvious. Ideology, whether modern or based on the twisted ramblings of historical ideologues, is the cat among the pigeons. Where ideology cannot produce food for the people, or fix a tap, or manage an economy, rationality should eventually triumph. In 1989, communism self destructed, with the help of sanity. It was a monumental failure that cost millions of lives. But there are those who stick to a failure like gravy to rice, and the ANC takes the cake in this regard.  Against all factual proof, the ANC continues on a path of continual bungles.(They call these  fiascos “challenges”). This attitude, to be kind, is lunacy. It is Myanmar, it is North Korea and others of this ilk.

The ANC government’s thinking moments are infused not by ways to improve our land but by ways to grab what is not theirs, to sabotage that which they did not create, and to hold on to power at all costs. President Ramaphosa is busy with his umpteenth plan for progress and prosperity – this time he offers 3.5% growth by 2029 under his “30 Key Reforms” project.  This is meaningless humbug of course because his party’s previous plans and predictions have resulted in a country without basic water provision, endemic corruption (nothing escapes the ANC’s cookie jar pilfering), no food or medicine at large public hospitals, the infrastructural collapse of South Africa’s biggest city, persistent illegal electricity connections throughout the country, and more and more BEE seizures because the ANC cannot successfully grow a potato or mend a pipe, never mind run a country.

Moody’s rating agency has downgraded South Africa to a (hopeful) 1.5% growth, lower than that of the country’s National Treasury at (hopefully)1,9%.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

Consequence appears to be a foreign concept in these parts. Cause and effect as a process is an unassailable fact of history, yet it appears to be entirely absent within the mindset of the ANC. It has its roots in DNA and history. What is sown eventually reaps. Reflecting on the history of the sub Saharan sector of this large continent, little if anything was created to last, nothing was planned, and much was destroyed. In Dr. Andrew Smith’s “Journal of his expedition into the interior of South Africa 1834/6” , described as “an authentic narrative of travels and discoveries, the manners and customs of the Native tribes and the physical nature of the country”, Smith wrote and sketched what he saw.

It is a masterpiece whose counterpart would rarely be seen today, given our instant news, the plethora of social opinions and the almost suffocating barrage of information and just plain noise to which contemporary citizenry is exposed. Smith’s book is an eye opener. It explains a lot and why South Africa today is being undermined from within, by destroyers of monumental efficacy. Their historical roots should have been taken into account before handing over the country to the crushingly inept ANC.

ANDREW SMITH

Trained as a doctor, Smith arrived in South Africa in 1821 and stayed until 1837. He recorded for a government 6 000 miles away what he saw and to whom he spoke, and his illustrator Charles Davidson Bell (a surveyor on the staff of the Cape Town Surveyor General’s department) sketched hundreds if not thousands of pictures of what he also saw. These included native kraals (as described in the book), cattle on the hoof, game hunting with spears, medicine men administering their potions, warriors dressed in fighting regalia, women grinding corn, grass and adobe huts, and dancing with spears. He talked with various chiefs of minor tribes who sometimes sought protection from other tribal marauders .

He visited some parts of the country “in times of turmoil”. He refers to the Mfecane and “the depredations and massacres initiated by the Zulus in their wars of expansion.” He met Chief Mzilikazi who founded the powerful Ndebele kingdom.

This was what Smith encountered in the early part of the nineteenth century with reference to the “native tribes” for which he was given a mandate on which to report. At the same time, millions in the rest of the world were building railways, high rise buildings, roads, factories, cars. They were setting up modern sanitation structures and experimenting with communications systems. The commercial steam engine was already more than 100 years old. Naturally Smith also wrote of the colonel English residents of the Cape, the trek boers, the towns that had been established and the roads that had been built. But the “native tribes” had not changed from what they had been for thousands of years in Africa. They had not moved forward at all.

COMMERCIAL FARMING AND PRIMITIVE SAVAGERY

Fast forward to the 21st century and commercial farming in South Africa. Nowhere in the Western world do farmers experience the type of malevolent antagonism displayed by the ANC government towards this particular community. This is all the more bizarre because without this community’s regular and dependable provision of food not only for the ANC and its followers, but for the whole of South Africa, the ANC government would have  fallen long ago.

Since taking power in 1994, the ANC has made it a policy to target farmers, in many and varied ways. SA’s commercial agriculture industry is one of the few sectors of the economy that is strong and self sustaining, yet it endures official harassment, social hazards and in many instances, a highly dangerous farming environment. These conditions are not even imagined by farming counterparts in other countries. Apart from the consequences of a mismanaged state resulting in power outages, little or no service delivery from municipalities, a crumbling road system, railways that are being stolen piece by piece or have disappeared, an impotent police force, and stock, equipment and harvest theft, farmers are confronted with primitive and barbaric behaviour not seen in any other Western farming environment. It takes a special kind of intestinal fortitude to farm in South Africa under these circumstances.

ILLEGAL HUNTING ON FARMS

In a recent press release, TLU SA’s general manager Bennie van Zyl decried the growing phenomenon of illegal dog hunting on private farms that is “spiralling out of control”. This criminal practice is exposing a serious failure of law enforcement, despite the existence of legislation and guidelines that can hold offenders accountable.

Criminal elements enter private farms without permission and bring their dogs to hunt the farmer’s game and/or livestock. Property owners who protest are threatened with their lives and the lives of their families. The police are nowhere to be seen and in some instances, are part and parcel of the illegal activity . Money changes hands as the dog owners bet among themselves how many animals can be killed by which dog. The traumatised game and livestock don’t stand a chance against this onslaught.

Some of the criminal hunt gangs stay overnight, using the farmer’s water, electricity and other facilities. They fish and hunt illegally, stealing livestock and harvests and breaking into farm workers’ houses.

Poaching on private game farms is relentless. The illegal wildlife trade is having a field day in South Africa: recently 48 vultures were found almost dead after eating a poisoned carcass. They were saved at the last minute by the usual crowd of concerned citizens who take it upon themselves to try and protect this country’s wildlife. Killing vultures (and indeed other animals) for “belief use”(the new term for traditional African medicine involving animal parts) are very much part and parcel of daily life in today’s South Africa. This behaviour affects many communities, especially farmers who live cheek by jowl with these practices.

Recently almost 250 African traditional healers and occult practitioners told an pollster that animal body parts are used, inter alia, to appease the ancestors, cure illnesses and to even win the lottery! This and the hunting, killing and poaching on private farms, the cruel mutilation of living cattle in the fields by thieves, causes deep trauma to many South Africans. Imagine this sort of thing happening to French or German farmers. If by some stretch of the imagination it did happen, it would be nipped in the bud by governments who cared about the producers of food for their countries. Not so in South Africa. The president couldn’t care less. He doesn’t even acknowledge these horrors, let alone take action or call for their cessation. Indeed, nothing much has changed in attitude and behaviour since 1835, right up to presidential level.