South Africa: not civil war but sad decay
Rian Malan
www.spectator.co.uk
When the winter rains closed in on Cape Town I thought, bugger this,
I'm selling up and moving somewhere sunny. To this end, I asked the
char, Mrs Primrose Gwayana, to come in and help spruce up the house. We
were scrubbing and painting and what have you when Primrose's broom
bumped the dining table, and crack - a leg snapped off, its innards
hollowed out by wood-borers. I thought, uh-oh, here's an omen.
Something awful is going to happen. And it has.
Nine months ago South Africa seemed to be muddling through in a
happy-go-lucky fashion. The economy was growing, albeit slowly. Trains
ran, if not exactly on time. If you called the police, they eventually
came. We thought our table was fairly solid, and that we would sit at
it indefinitely, quaffing that old Rainbow Nation ambrosia. Now, almost
overnight, we have come to the dismaying realisation that much around
us is rotten. Nearly half our provinces and municipalities are said to
be on the verge of collapse. A murderous succession dispute has broken
out in the ruling African National Congress. Our Auditor-General
reportedly has sleepless nights on account of the billions that cannot
be properly accounted for. Whites have been moaning about such things
for years, but you know you're in serious trouble when President
Thabo Mbeki admits the 'naked truth' that his government has been
infiltrated by chancers seeking to 'plunder the people's
resources'.
I knew in my bones that it would come to this, but somewhere along the
line I got tired of stinking up my surroundings with predictions of
doom, so I shut up and went with the flow. Ergo, I cannot say I told
you so. But I have a pretty good idea why things went wrong, and it all
began with 'transformation', a euphemism for ridding the Civil
Service of whites, especially white males. Under apartheid, those chaps
ran everything. Clearly this had to change, but white males carried the
institutional memory in their brains, and the blacks who replaced them
tended to flounder. This led to what we call 'capacity problems', a
euphemism for blacks who couldn't or wouldn't carry out the jobs
for which they were paid. Capacity problems in turn led to crises in
electricity supply, refuse removal, road maintenance, healthcare, law
enforcement and so on. Again, white malcontents have complained about
such things for years, but you know you're in trouble when an eminent
black journalist like Justice Malala dismisses the Mbeki administration
as an 'outrage', characterised by 'a shocking lack of
leadership' on the part of a Cabinet riddled with 'incompetent,
inept and arrogant' buffoons.
In short, we're in crisis. Everyone acknowledges it, but somehow we
never see firm corrective action. Previously we were told it was
awkward for a black liberation movement to purge black appointees, even
if they were useless. This year a new excuse emerged.
Back in April, around the time of the ominous table-leg incident, the
actress Janet Suzman and I dined with a bossy American woman who bit my
head off when I opined that our recently deposed deputy president,
Jacob Zuma, would one day step into Nelson Mandela's shoes. For a
foreign feminist, it was unthinkable that a man with four years of
schooling and rape and corruption charges pending should become
president of anything. My explanations to the contrary were dismissed
as racist rubbish, but let me air them anyway.
Zuma is a Zulu, and when he became a target for criminal investigation,
many fellow tribesmen suspected he was being stitched up by President
Mbeki, who was reputedly keen to eliminate him as a potential
successor. Conspiracists noted that Mbeki was a Xhosa, and that various
members of what we call the 'Xhosa nostra' had become billionaires
as a result of their political connections, whereas Zuma's allegedly
improper payments were limited to a trifling £100,000. They found it
even more fishy that the sad and desperate young woman who invited
herself to spend a night in Zuma's home, only to accuse him of rape
in the aftermath, was acquainted with the minister of intelligence
Ronnie Kasrils, a KGB-trained master of the dark arts of espionage,
presumably including honey traps.
Zulus are a warlike bunch, as we know, and the Zuma affair got their
blood up. Thousands turned out to cheer their homeboy at his rape
trial, and to denounce his accuser as a harlot bribed to bear false
witness. Zuma's acquittal sparked riotous celebrations, and when his
corruption trial started last month the crowds were even larger.
'100% Zulu Boy' T-shirts were still evident, but now there were red
flags too, because radicals had started rallying to the Zuma cause.
First to join were the young lions of the ANC Youth League. They were
followed by the Young Communists, then by large sectors of the trade
union movement and the Communist party proper. All that remained was
for Winnie Mandela to take sides, and lo: when the judge dismissed
Zuma's corruption charges in late September, she materialised among
the jubilant masses, praising the Lord for answering her prayers.
These developments confounded naive left-liberals, who had repeatedly
assured us that Zuma was politically dead. Feminists recalled the
dalliance with Ms Lewinsky that almost destroyed Bill Clinton. Aids
activists were scandalised by Zuma's failure to use a condom during
the rape-case escapade, even though the woman involved was
HIV-infected. Moralists contended that even though criminal charges had
proved unsustainable, there were enough facts on the table to show that
Zuma was sorely lacking in probity. For such people, it was unhinging
to see Zuma become the leading contender for South Africa's
presidency, greeted at every turn by adoring supporters who informed
reporters that the Ten Commandments were an alien invention that
didn't apply to African males. Their campaign song was even more
unnerving: 'Bring me my machine gun.' A Serbian journalist living
here took one look at this and wrote a piece headlined, 'Time to
Panic'.
Hmm. My friend Steve, a capitalist who golfs with the black elite, says
this is nonsense. 'Zuma is charming,' he says. 'If he actually
gets the job, things will settle down and it'll be business as
usual.' Maybe so, but the next general election is three years away,
and meanwhile government is incapable of acting against the borers in
our woodwork.
Let's look at law enforcement, one smallish aspect of the growing
problem. After years of slow decline, crime surged earlier this year,
with insurance companies reporting a 20 per cent rise in claims. Some
blamed a strike by security guards, who took to looting shops they had
previously guarded and throwing scabs off trains. Others pointed the
finger at feral refugees from Zimbabwe. 'Capacity problems' in the
police were certainly a factor, too. In the middle of all this, a
convoy of expensive cars carrying senior ANC dignitaries rolled up at a
prison outside Cape Town. Uniformed warders swarmed out of the gates,
and the gathering turned into a revolutionary song-and-dance
extravaganza in honour of Tony Yengeni, a popular ex-MP about to start
serving four years for fraud.
Is this not bizarre? A politician accepts a discounted Mercedes from an
arms contractor, lies about it, gets nailed - and several of the
ruling party's most prominent leaders hail him as a hero, a
staggering insult to their own criminal justice apparatus. In her
eagerness to charm the rabble, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete
went so far as to claim that Yengeni had never committed fraud, even
though he pleaded guilty to same. The main opposition party, the
Democratic Alliance (DA), termed her behaviour 'disgraceful', but
there was no retribution.
Why? Because a crackdown by Mbeki might cause figures like Mbete to
defect to Zuma, who is not particularly punctilious about whom he
accepts as allies. Don Mkhwanazi, for instance, got into hot water
after hiring a 'well-known crook' to assist him in his duties as
boss of the Central Energy Fund. Mkhwanazi claimed racists were
defaming him, but fell silent when it emerged that his bent chum (who
earned £300,000 a year) was channelling money into a bank account that
paid Mkhwanazi's mortgage in a posh Jo'burg suburb. Mkhwanazi
resigned in disgrace. Today he is a trustee of Zuma's unofficial
election campaign.
My pal Steve says one shouldn't take such things too seriously,
noting that respectable people have also cast their lot with Zuma.
Maybe so, but Zuma's core supporters are scary. The other day they
put on a spectacular display at a conclave of Cosatu, South Africa's
mighty Congress of Trade Unions. Whenever an incumbent cabinet member
appeared, delegates rose to their feet, waving red flags and chanting,
'Tell us, what has Zuma done?' One minister was jeered off the
podium. The deputy state president was 'humiliated and degraded' by
hecklers, who went on to sing, 'It is better for us to take over this
country, we will go with the Communists.' President Mbeki wisely kept
his distance, but they had a song for him too: 'We will kill this big
ugly dog for Zuma.'
Rian Malan
www.spectator.co.uk
When the winter rains closed in on Cape Town I thought, bugger this,
I'm selling up and moving somewhere sunny. To this end, I asked the
char, Mrs Primrose Gwayana, to come in and help spruce up the house. We
were scrubbing and painting and what have you when Primrose's broom
bumped the dining table, and crack - a leg snapped off, its innards
hollowed out by wood-borers. I thought, uh-oh, here's an omen.
Something awful is going to happen. And it has.
Nine months ago South Africa seemed to be muddling through in a
happy-go-lucky fashion. The economy was growing, albeit slowly. Trains
ran, if not exactly on time. If you called the police, they eventually
came. We thought our table was fairly solid, and that we would sit at
it indefinitely, quaffing that old Rainbow Nation ambrosia. Now, almost
overnight, we have come to the dismaying realisation that much around
us is rotten. Nearly half our provinces and municipalities are said to
be on the verge of collapse. A murderous succession dispute has broken
out in the ruling African National Congress. Our Auditor-General
reportedly has sleepless nights on account of the billions that cannot
be properly accounted for. Whites have been moaning about such things
for years, but you know you're in serious trouble when President
Thabo Mbeki admits the 'naked truth' that his government has been
infiltrated by chancers seeking to 'plunder the people's
resources'.
I knew in my bones that it would come to this, but somewhere along the
line I got tired of stinking up my surroundings with predictions of
doom, so I shut up and went with the flow. Ergo, I cannot say I told
you so. But I have a pretty good idea why things went wrong, and it all
began with 'transformation', a euphemism for ridding the Civil
Service of whites, especially white males. Under apartheid, those chaps
ran everything. Clearly this had to change, but white males carried the
institutional memory in their brains, and the blacks who replaced them
tended to flounder. This led to what we call 'capacity problems', a
euphemism for blacks who couldn't or wouldn't carry out the jobs
for which they were paid. Capacity problems in turn led to crises in
electricity supply, refuse removal, road maintenance, healthcare, law
enforcement and so on. Again, white malcontents have complained about
such things for years, but you know you're in trouble when an eminent
black journalist like Justice Malala dismisses the Mbeki administration
as an 'outrage', characterised by 'a shocking lack of
leadership' on the part of a Cabinet riddled with 'incompetent,
inept and arrogant' buffoons.
In short, we're in crisis. Everyone acknowledges it, but somehow we
never see firm corrective action. Previously we were told it was
awkward for a black liberation movement to purge black appointees, even
if they were useless. This year a new excuse emerged.
Back in April, around the time of the ominous table-leg incident, the
actress Janet Suzman and I dined with a bossy American woman who bit my
head off when I opined that our recently deposed deputy president,
Jacob Zuma, would one day step into Nelson Mandela's shoes. For a
foreign feminist, it was unthinkable that a man with four years of
schooling and rape and corruption charges pending should become
president of anything. My explanations to the contrary were dismissed
as racist rubbish, but let me air them anyway.
Zuma is a Zulu, and when he became a target for criminal investigation,
many fellow tribesmen suspected he was being stitched up by President
Mbeki, who was reputedly keen to eliminate him as a potential
successor. Conspiracists noted that Mbeki was a Xhosa, and that various
members of what we call the 'Xhosa nostra' had become billionaires
as a result of their political connections, whereas Zuma's allegedly
improper payments were limited to a trifling £100,000. They found it
even more fishy that the sad and desperate young woman who invited
herself to spend a night in Zuma's home, only to accuse him of rape
in the aftermath, was acquainted with the minister of intelligence
Ronnie Kasrils, a KGB-trained master of the dark arts of espionage,
presumably including honey traps.
Zulus are a warlike bunch, as we know, and the Zuma affair got their
blood up. Thousands turned out to cheer their homeboy at his rape
trial, and to denounce his accuser as a harlot bribed to bear false
witness. Zuma's acquittal sparked riotous celebrations, and when his
corruption trial started last month the crowds were even larger.
'100% Zulu Boy' T-shirts were still evident, but now there were red
flags too, because radicals had started rallying to the Zuma cause.
First to join were the young lions of the ANC Youth League. They were
followed by the Young Communists, then by large sectors of the trade
union movement and the Communist party proper. All that remained was
for Winnie Mandela to take sides, and lo: when the judge dismissed
Zuma's corruption charges in late September, she materialised among
the jubilant masses, praising the Lord for answering her prayers.
These developments confounded naive left-liberals, who had repeatedly
assured us that Zuma was politically dead. Feminists recalled the
dalliance with Ms Lewinsky that almost destroyed Bill Clinton. Aids
activists were scandalised by Zuma's failure to use a condom during
the rape-case escapade, even though the woman involved was
HIV-infected. Moralists contended that even though criminal charges had
proved unsustainable, there were enough facts on the table to show that
Zuma was sorely lacking in probity. For such people, it was unhinging
to see Zuma become the leading contender for South Africa's
presidency, greeted at every turn by adoring supporters who informed
reporters that the Ten Commandments were an alien invention that
didn't apply to African males. Their campaign song was even more
unnerving: 'Bring me my machine gun.' A Serbian journalist living
here took one look at this and wrote a piece headlined, 'Time to
Panic'.
Hmm. My friend Steve, a capitalist who golfs with the black elite, says
this is nonsense. 'Zuma is charming,' he says. 'If he actually
gets the job, things will settle down and it'll be business as
usual.' Maybe so, but the next general election is three years away,
and meanwhile government is incapable of acting against the borers in
our woodwork.
Let's look at law enforcement, one smallish aspect of the growing
problem. After years of slow decline, crime surged earlier this year,
with insurance companies reporting a 20 per cent rise in claims. Some
blamed a strike by security guards, who took to looting shops they had
previously guarded and throwing scabs off trains. Others pointed the
finger at feral refugees from Zimbabwe. 'Capacity problems' in the
police were certainly a factor, too. In the middle of all this, a
convoy of expensive cars carrying senior ANC dignitaries rolled up at a
prison outside Cape Town. Uniformed warders swarmed out of the gates,
and the gathering turned into a revolutionary song-and-dance
extravaganza in honour of Tony Yengeni, a popular ex-MP about to start
serving four years for fraud.
Is this not bizarre? A politician accepts a discounted Mercedes from an
arms contractor, lies about it, gets nailed - and several of the
ruling party's most prominent leaders hail him as a hero, a
staggering insult to their own criminal justice apparatus. In her
eagerness to charm the rabble, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete
went so far as to claim that Yengeni had never committed fraud, even
though he pleaded guilty to same. The main opposition party, the
Democratic Alliance (DA), termed her behaviour 'disgraceful', but
there was no retribution.
Why? Because a crackdown by Mbeki might cause figures like Mbete to
defect to Zuma, who is not particularly punctilious about whom he
accepts as allies. Don Mkhwanazi, for instance, got into hot water
after hiring a 'well-known crook' to assist him in his duties as
boss of the Central Energy Fund. Mkhwanazi claimed racists were
defaming him, but fell silent when it emerged that his bent chum (who
earned £300,000 a year) was channelling money into a bank account that
paid Mkhwanazi's mortgage in a posh Jo'burg suburb. Mkhwanazi
resigned in disgrace. Today he is a trustee of Zuma's unofficial
election campaign.
My pal Steve says one shouldn't take such things too seriously,
noting that respectable people have also cast their lot with Zuma.
Maybe so, but Zuma's core supporters are scary. The other day they
put on a spectacular display at a conclave of Cosatu, South Africa's
mighty Congress of Trade Unions. Whenever an incumbent cabinet member
appeared, delegates rose to their feet, waving red flags and chanting,
'Tell us, what has Zuma done?' One minister was jeered off the
podium. The deputy state president was 'humiliated and degraded' by
hecklers, who went on to sing, 'It is better for us to take over this
country, we will go with the Communists.' President Mbeki wisely kept
his distance, but they had a song for him too: 'We will kill this big
ugly dog for Zuma.'
