‘A new world, yet to be born’

By R.W. Johnson

These latter days of ANC decline are replete with fantastic and barely credible examples of folly, only too frequently bringing to mind Gramsci’s quote about how an old world is dying and the new one is yet to be born, and how — in that interim — all manner of grotesqueries can flourish.

We are about to see another extraordinary example of this. Ramaphosa has announced that the central discussion at the G20 Leaders Summit is to be the fight against global inequality. He thus takes pride in placing South Africa’s commitment to fight inequality at the heart of a global discussion, saying it is “now up to us, the leaders of the G20 and the leaders of the world, to demonstrate the necessary will and commitment to reduce inequality”.

Inequality, he continued, was “a direct threat to democracy, inclusive growth, and global peace”. The goal of SA’s G20 presidency was “to put inequality on the international agenda”, for “inequality is a betrayal of people’s dignity, an impediment to inclusive growth and a threat to democracy itself. Addressing inequality is our inescapable generational challenge. We have the means to build a fair, just and equal world. We have the resources to narrow the gap between and within countries”.

But, as one might have expected, Ramaphosa went on to talk only about the gaps between countries, particularly instancing what he called “vaccine apartheid” in which anti-Covid-19 vaccines had been available to rich countries well before poor ones.

Ramaphosa may or may not have a sense of humour, but he seems entirely to lack a sense of irony. Thanks to apartheid, South Africa was already a very unequal country in 1994, but it has become a lot more unequal under ANC rule. One reason for this is that mass unemployment is probably the most effective way there is of redistributing resources from the have-nots towards the haves, and under the ANC South Africa’s formal unemployment has quadrupled. However, as if that was not enough, the ANC has adopted all manner of measures which seem positively aimed at exacerbating the situation.

Thus year after year inflation-plus wage settlements are awarded to the already greatly overpaid public servants, with each such settlement winching the Gini coefficient (which measures inequality) higher and higher. We are now in the crazy situation where 17 per cent of GDP is spent on paying the public service – compared to 7 per cent among our peers. If only that 10 per cent of GDP was put into capital investment we would have a healthy economic growth rate and far lower unemployment. Currently South Africa’s Gini coefficient stands at 0.67, well ahead of all comers.

Of course if the subject gets raised we are quickly told that this is “the heritage of apartheid”, but this is not so. Unemployment was much lower under apartheid and the public service was not so grotesquely overpaid. Similarly, most of the SOEs are way overstaffed with highly paid jobs. The average wage of an Eskom employee is R800,000 a year and, according to the World Bank, it is overstaffed by a factor of three. The same applies, of course, to the political elite, with a world record number of cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, all on very high salaries plus all manner of perks. (Again, this was all far less so under apartheid.)

Moreover, a lot of ANC legislation seems aimed at increasing inequality. It is well known that BEE has had that effect: a trillion rand has flowed to just 100 lucky individuals. And yet the ANC is still passionate in its support. We also have the so-called Black Industrialists programme, whose entire aim is to create black equivalents of Harry Oppenheimer or Johan Rupert. The whole idea is ridiculous, of course: neither Oppenheimer nor Rupert were the products of such a programme and, not surprisingly, this crazy programme has yet to produce a single black industrialist. But meanwhile huge amounts of money have flowed through this initiative to already quite well endowed black businessmen.

Similarly, of course, all the various forms of state-mandated affirmative action have the effect of promoting people of colour into highly-paid jobs, quite often beyond their real merits and abilities. This too increases inequalities. And right at this moment the government is proudly attempting to set up a R100 billion black empowerment fund, money which will doubtless flow to all the usual ANC-connected black businessmen, greatly increasing social inequalities as it does so.

One could go on and on. The ANC is notoriously the party of corruption at national, provincial and municipal level. This sees small and crooked elites garner huge amounts of resources while frequently defrauding the public by providing poor services or faulty and incomplete projects in return. Note that it is the poor who suffer most from the lack of those services, so the net effect of corruption is, again, to increase inequalities. The fact is that the ANC government has been an absolute nightmare for the African poor.

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I seldom find myself in sympathy with Donald Trump, but I can fully appreciate his decision to boycott this G20. The whole thing is going to be an excruciating embarrassment. The big question is whether any of the participants will be willing to play the role of the little boy who points out that the king is wearing no clothes. One can imagine the speech he (or she) would have to make: –

“As John McEnroe used to enquire, Mr. Ramaphosa, can you really be serious ? We have come all the way to South Africa and you want to moralise about inequality. You say it affects the dignity of poor people but that in itself is a rich man’s view. Long before it affects anyone’s dignity the poor feel downright hungry, they feel the rain coming into the shacks where they huddle and they feel the awfulness and emptiness of unemployment. Many of them would probably laugh at your repeated mentions of “dignity”. Wealthy men like you, Mr Ramaphosa, are often preoccupied with dignity. The poor seldom are.

“You say that we have the resources to reduce inequality. That’s true but so why have you not done it ? South Africa is the most unequal country in the world and under ANC government it has become more unequal every year. We are supposed to discuss inequality here. Yet you are the world’s greatest exponents of inequality. If you were really serious about this matter you would surely have done something about it in the more than thirty years that the ANC has been in power ?

“But you took over an unequal country and made it a lot more unequal. You defend policies like BEE which increase inequality. And yet you and your brother-in-law are the two richest men in the country thanks to BEE. And yet what is there to show for it ? The Oppenheimers and Ruperts built major industrial empires, created new jobs for many thousands of people, created new products and gave away enormous amounts of money. But it’s not clear what you or your brother-in-law did to deserve your wealth.

“This is grotesque. South Africa is a middle-income country, and yet you have people dying here of starvation on a regular basis. How can you possibly allow that? And since you quite clearly are not serious about reducing inequality, why on earth have you chosen to stage a whole moralising discussion about it here? Are you using this as a fig leaf so you can shelter behind it? For we know absolutely that once this discussion is over, you and your party will go straight back to increasing inequality – and seeking to justify it by claiming that you are doing the opposite.”

One could go on and on, but there’s no need. One can only hope that among the G20 delegates there is someone willing to be honest enough to make such a speech. In reply, of course, Ramaphosa will be careful to dwell on international inequalities and how unfair it is that countries like South Africa don’t have permanent seats on the UN Security Council and the governing bodies of the IMF and World Bank. Etcetera. More highly paid jobs and prestige for the same old ANC elite, in other words.

As for “vaccine apartheid”, it took enormous sums of money to develop anti-Covid vaccines at top speed and under pressure. Someone had to pay for this. Yet Ramaphosa thinks that if it wasn’t immediately given away for free to countries like South Africa, that this constitutes a form of apartheid. The idea that you can keep on bullying the West into doing what you want by alleging new forms of apartheid is a habit the ANC, indeed any South African government, is going to have to drop. It’s worn out.

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And yet this is only one example of the grotesqueries that now flourish. Another was on display last week in the Pietermaritzburg High Court where Judge Nompumelelo Radebe decided that Albert Luthuli, instead of having died in 1967 after being knocked down by a train – as an inquest found at the time – was actually murdered by the police who beat him to death. This was an utterly fantastic verdict.

In order to decide as she did, Judge Radebe had to set aside the evidence given at the time by the train’s driver and fireman. They testified that they saw Luthuli walking along next to the line and blew the engine’s whistle in order to alert him of their approach. But that for some reason – perhaps just age, perhaps defective hearing, perhaps because he was lost in thought – he failed to hear this and was dealt a glancing blow by the train, which they immediately halted. They then alerted the authorities and Luthuli was rushed to hospital at Stanger.

Judge Radebe provided no evidence that the driver and fireman had been lying. She just assumed it. Meanwhile no one is contesting that Luthuli was indeed walking along the railway line, something he often did on his way home. But Judge Radebe believes that somehow policemen waylaid him there and beat him to death. There is no evidence for this, nor any explanation as to what these imaginary police were doing hanging around a rural railway line. Moreover, whereas in the case of Steve Biko it is possible to point at specific named policemen who beat and mistreated poor Biko, and we know exactly what their motives were, in this case we have no names, no identities. These policemen are strictly creations of Judge Radebe’s imagination.

We also have no motives for such an act. Luthuli had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961 for his principled championing of non-violence and it was well known that he had bitterly disagreed with the ANC’s decision to launch armed struggle. In fact this decision was a form of coup against Luthuli, who was thus effectively replaced as leader by Mandela and a younger brigade of so-called “revolutionaries”. Thereafter Luthuli was left high and dry in retirement at Groutville with no further role in the movement, a very sad ending, made all the worse by the fact that armed struggle was an immediate disaster. MK was quickly rolled up, many of its militants were jailed, tortured or hanged and the rest had to flee into exile.

The Security Police were well aware of all this and made absolutely no move against Luthuli. Why would they have ? He was still preaching peace, which was what they wanted, and the result was that the ANC was still divided with the Buthelezi wing sticking with Luthuli. If the police had wanted to kill Luthuli they could have done so at any time after 1961, but they did no such thing. They were not fools. They knew that if anything happened to Luthuli, they would get the blame. So they treated him with care. When Bobby Kennedy came visiting, with his wife, Ethel, the police looked the other way although in terms of his banning orders, Luthuli could not attend a meeting of more than two people.

Judge Radebe has disregarded all that and makes the simple-minded mistake of believing that all policemen under apartheid were murderous thugs. Yet that was not so. There were some good policemen and good doctors who were horrified by what happened to Biko. Indeed, the real bosses of the apartheid security state were livid at the policemen who killed Biko for that caused the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, to join the arms boycott against South Africa. And that was a major disaster: no more Mirages or Alouette helicopters and there was no alternative supplier. And over Angola the SAAF was facing more and more advanced Soviet aircraft.

Judge Hadebe has also discovered that the whole incident was witnessed by a Zulu boy, although no one ever mentioned that before and he has since disappeared. The Judge recommends that an inquiry be launched into his kidnapping though there is absolutely no evidence for that. If indeed the boy ever existed, anything could have happened to him. Since then there has been a major Zulu civil war (ANC/UDF vs IFP), floods, riots and it is in any case all 58 years ago, long enough ago for death from natural causes to be quite possible.

I won’t go on. The whole judgement is a pure work of imagination and has nothing to do with evidence, law or justice. The ANC, congratulating Judge Radebe on her verdict said that she has merely confirmed “what every ANC member has always known in their hearts”. And that is the point: they had no evidence at all for such a belief, but they wanted to believe it. The same is clearly true of Judge Radebe who grew up in Bergville, went to school in Empangeni and did her B.Proc. at the University of Zululand. It is possible that, in that environment, she may have just taken ANC myths as gospel.

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As the elections near, we are in for more of this nonsense, for the ANC is desperate and willing to scrape the bottom of any barrel. Every attempt will be made to whip up feelings about “apartheid atrocities” in an attempt to mobilise racial animosities against whites, for the basic hope is that Africans will vote ANC out of racial loyalty if they have no other reason. Indeed, there is already discussion of reviewing the Biko inquest. Perhaps they will discover that Helen Zille, far from being a crusading journalist uncovering the truth about Biko’s death, was really campaigning for his execution? All things are possible in this strange half-light as the old era continues to die.

FEATURED IMAGE: Statue of Chief Albert Luthuli, Nobel Prize winner and ANC president, in Stanger (now KwaDukuza) in KwaZulu-Natal. (Wikimedia Commons)