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It’s cycling season in Europe, with a plethora of races taking place from early spring. No need to book a coach tour to see this part of the world:  television coverage of European cycling will reveal from the sky some of the most beautiful villages, cities and farmland on earth. Not a piece of paper flapping in the wind. Everything in its place – immaculate farms with no crop fences, well-marked roads, orderly cities and towns. Houses with trimmed hedges, and built-up areas with cars parked outside all night. No dusty markets with food exposed to the elements. No zinc squatter camps, no vagrants hanging around towns. Traffic lights that work, traffic roundabouts with centred gardens. Trees are everywhere.  Local police monitor the cycle routes and the watching crowds. Beautifully-maintained old chateaux and ancient ruins, all carefully preserved. Church spires reach for the sky in most towns, while farm animals graze behind the farmhouse, free from theft and harassment. Everything is well kept, with due regard for what went before and what is to come.  To honour tradition and the hands and hearts that maintained this heritage is essentially the name of the game in Europe.

The ambiance is compelling  – from the Tour of Flanders in April, where wild spring flowers grace the roadsides, to the Giro d’Italia which started in Rome this year. All roads lead to Rome they say!   The Tour de France, the top cycling race of the season, draws us through famous French towns and rural villages where a seductive charm and beauty takes one’s breath away. Cycling through Spain’s olive trees in the Vuelta a Espana in late August/early September reveals a country of grand cities and Moorish-type architecture that is in a class of its own. The heat and the cobalt blue sky and the large farms of avocados and oranges soak up the sun, and they remind us of South Africa – at least the South Africa that used to be...

PRESIDENT RAMAPHOSA

What then does President Ramaphosa think when he visits these spick and span countries in Europe and elsewhere, and observes the standards they have set for themselves as functioning, self-respecting nations? What goes through his mind when he compares these countries with the  disarray into which his party has dumped South Africa? Or does he compare at all? South Africa has joined the group of nations where third world conditions are part and parcel of everyday living:   sewage flows in the streets, garbage is not collected, state hospitals are bankrupt and dirty, and food is bought and sold in makeshift shanties, exposed to the elements.

Many people in the world live like this for years on end. If the conditions disturb them, neither they nor their governments do anything to better the circumstances. This environment in which millions of South Africans live has become the norm, not the exception. We are referred to as a “developing” country. We used to be called “developed”. There are no apologies, no remorse for this destruction of the first-world South Africa the president inherited in 1994. He finds it acceptable because he does nothing about it. Thus the current slum conditions are the president’s norm. He purposely reserved millions of state jobs for politically-supportive people who were in the main hopelessly incompetent. He went against common sense and the norms and values of successful countries, and he clearly doesn’t care. He has been to the successful countries, seen what they have accomplished, and comes home to the slums and the dirt, the poverty and the unemployment and sets up a National Dialogue (costing R700 million) to “fire up the economy, with measures planned to fix dysfunctional municipalities”. He says he will ensure that “municipalities will appoint capable qualified people to senior positions, and that those that fail to do so will be penalised”. (BusinessTech 8.5.2025)

THE HUMBUG CONTINUES

So there we have it  – the chicanery, the humbug, the vacuous promises he has no intention of keeping! The story of appointing “capable people” has been trotted out for years. Files are full of his direct quotations. But local government service delivery deteriorates by the day! In the 2023/4 local government audit report, only 41 of 257 councils received clean audits, while only 71 filed financial statements of “acceptable quality”. The president abdicated cleaning up local government ages ago, but he still waffles on about “capable people”!  The president also declared he will “address the binding constraints on growth”. Everyone knows who is actually constraining growth – the president himself and his dreaded ANC.

Right now media advertisements for municipal, state jobs and universities declare, without ambiguity, that government and government-funded entities support Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) affirmative action. Thus whites need not apply for these positions. Here are some of the ads for BEE applicants in two newspapers in June 2025: Wits University, Mossel Bay municipality, Civilian Secretariat for Police Service, Office of the Chief Justice, Department of Military Veterans, Cederberg municipality, Transport TETA, Department of Health, Sundays River municipality, Ngwathe municipality, Gauteng Province, Council for Quality Assurance (Umalusi), Department of Higher Education and Training, SA Pharmacy Council, City of Umhlathuze, Mogale City, Council on Higher Education, Vacant Offices of Sheriffs (Department of Justice), GCIS (Government Communications), Ethekwini municipality, National Radioactive Waste Disposal Institute (Department of Mineral Resources), NERSA, Coega Development Corporation, Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services, Gauteng Department of Education, Enoch Mgijima municipality, Capricorn municipality, National Student Financial Aid scheme (NSFAS). There could be more but some ads are basic and direct the reader to visit the website for further details.

Is it any wonder South Africa is stumbling along? It is clear the president speaks with forked tongue, to be polite. We have caught him out many times. His cadre deployment policy reaches into every facet of the South African state.  All the ads with details of the many and various qualifications set out for the job at hand are clearly ignored. Politics triumphs over common sense.

MR. MTHOMBOTHI NAILS IT.

We quote columnist Barney Mthombothi (Sunday Times 29.6.25) who makes no bones about who is to blame for South Africa’s plight. “The ANC inherited the best-functioning economy on the continent. They could have, in thirty years, taken a shot at tackling the poverty in our society.  They could have helped change the narrative of Africa as a place of coups, corruption and crime, where millions wallow in poverty and disease. They have done none of that. Instead they plundered the place, lined their own pockets and by dint of incompetence that defies belief, ran the country into the ground. Almost all state institutions and parastatals are manned and run by comrades who are amply rewarded.”

THE PLUNDER CONTINUES

The self-enrichment rot set in even before the ANC takeover in 1994. The “democracy for the people” nonsense was soon laid bare as a ruse to get the ANC’s grubby hands on the cookie jar. There was no pretence. It was their bounty. This was their due, although they did nothing towards building the South Africa they said they deserved. There was no talk of a national dialogue then. The country was working but the destruction was just around the corner.  The signs were everywhere.

“In 2007, the Swiss-based Institute of Management Development brought out its annual competitiveness survey of the world’s leading fifty five industrialised nations, showing that South Africa had fallen from 38th to 50th place, by far the biggest drop of any country. The main reason for this, said the Institute, was that the South African business executives surveyed had pointed to ”discrimination”  - Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and affirmative action - as major weaknesses.” (SA’s Brave New World” by R.W. Johnson, 2009).

Money started leaving the country as the ANC accelerated its interference in business, with their demands for shares and company profits. Unable to create anything themselves, they needed to parasite on others, notwithstanding the fact they had just inherited a functioning country! These ANC scavengers had nothing to offer in return for business’s largesse. It was legal extortion. From 1992, Thebe Investments was set up to advance the principle of BEE. Scores of pages in R.W.Johnson’s book are devoted to the scramble for a piece of South Africa’s business world’s profits, and one is astounded at the Byzantine methods and struggle accounting utilised in the enrichment of the elite. Citizens often remarked that people who couldn’t fix a tap had worked out the intricacies of how to siphon millions from their host companies, while securing government tenders worth billions without following the rules.  Cyril Ramaphosa was an early beneficiary of BEE, and is today a very rich man. He is not a “clever businessman” as is so often punted. He just knew how to work the system.

Today we are faced with crime, corruption and collapse. These are so embedded in South Africa’s day to day life that it will take a political reformation such as the demise of the ANC, to hold our head up again. Nepotism has played a significant role in the collapse of Johannesburg as a functioning city, once called the City of Gold, the jewel of the African continent. City Power Johannesburg is a state utility wholly owned by the city of Johannesburg. Its responsibilities include buying electricity from power producers and supplying it to the public. It has almost 2 000 employees.

In August 2022 Ms. Tshifularo Mashava was appointed CEO of Johannesburg City Power. She was welcomed and saluted as the perfect person for the job, with a Curriculum Vitae as long as one’s arm. Now, to their credit, News 24 has exposed cases of nepotism within City Power that is so extensive that it is a wonder that the city can even turn the lights on! Ms. Mashava has allegedly employed four family members and other unqualified personnel amid crumbling infrastructure and poor services. Two of these members were employed as “specialists for revenue collection in the finance department.” Another family member is the senior manager for employee services and another is an “intern” at the facility.
So much for revenue collection! City Power admits to a R40 billion infrastructure backlog, with a R16,3 billion negative bank balance, due to severe under collection to the tune of R18 billion The entity also owes Eskom R4 billion. City Power’s head of Human Resources has three family members employed by the utility, while Union shop stewards have been hired as electricians!

And Mr. Ramaphosa has let this happen to Africa’s once top city without blinking an eye. As a deflective panacea, he’s offering the hapless inhabitants a R700 million national dialogue! And the City Power debacle is the tip of the ANC’s ruinous iceberg.

The SA president is no different from those up north who also made promises, and who are now running around with the begging bowl. As R.W. Johnson reported to those who said it would be “different here”, the ANC “stuck to the African script”, referring to the plunder and destruction that is part of the African continent’s DNA.

RESPECT

The human value respect separates us from the animal kingdom. They live on instinct for self-preservation. Judging from his behaviour and his reaction to the result of his party’s destruction,  , the president fails miserably in the self-respect department. In addition, he has no respect for what others created, for 350 years of hard work by people who developed the South Africa he was handed on a plate.

Did we ever hear one word of appreciation for the 32 00 farmers who provide food for 65 million people every day and who, whether he realises it or not, keep him in power? The blame game suits him down to the ground – apartheid and colonialism are the whipping boys. But the president has adapted himself very nicely thank you to the low hanging fruit of Western civilization. He is a long way down on the totem pole pecking order when it comes to the human norm of respect and appreciation and effort to maintain what he received. He is strangely silent about what his party has done to the hard work of others. The world sees this, even if he doesn’t. His requests for investment are leaves in the wind.  His BEE policy has seen to that. Mr Bloomberg and others have seen what he and his party have done to this once wonderful country, and the doors are closed. National dialogues won’t do the trick either.