Tarnished Rainbow

South Africa, the self styled 'Rainbow Nation' has a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but its for Chinese investors. Its they who pull the strings in most of sub saharan africa these days.

What makes this subservience to Chinese investment all the odder, is that the Chinese take all the mineral resources back to China, they use their own companies to extract and transport the resources, and they use Chinese companies with their supervisors to do any infrastructure work (leaving africans to do the dangerous shovelling jobs), and in short make Africa 'pay for the aid' to a far higher degree than Western aid donors ever do.

Also the amounts the Chinese 'pledge' in trade credits is far less than the West, and yet the African states will tow the political line for them, while taking Western aid for granted, and ignoring any democratic governance rules we would want followed.

If the Chinese wanted Mugabe out, the South African government would do it, and not bat an eyelid ...


No Meeting For Two Old Friends 

As we have just seen with the shameful blocking of the award of a travel visa to the Dalai Lama, and the open attack on this decision by Desmond Tutu. If its still a rainbow nation, its a very tawdry little rainbow ....

AWB Loses Its Figurehead

In South Africa, the right wing Afrikaner Resistance leader Eugene Terreblanche, was hacked to death with pangas (machetes) by two black employees, ostensibly in a row over wages. But in the 'non rainbow nation', the murder took on a deeply political and racial overtones.

His supporters claimed that the murder was fuelled by ANC leaders such as the militant ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, still singing songs that urged their supporters to 'shoot the Boer' .... this practise was stopped by a court decision, but this only provoked further ANC militant anger and they are promising to fight for the right to carry on calling for acts of racial murder.

But white leaders such as AfriForum youth leader Ernst Roets, say Mr Malema's actions were responsible for the recent murders of several white farmers in Gauteng province. "What we have here is an extreme form of hate speech - it should be prohibited according to South African law. It is simply immoral to try to justify a song like this, to say that is must be seen in context."

There is still much racial division in South Africa, and with the World Cup only a few months away, there could yet be race and violence problems to spoil the party.

Anger In Rainbowland

One of the modern myths of our times is that the release of Nelson Mandela meant that South Africa became the tolerant 'rainbow nation'of many cultures and colours, at peace with itself. You would have thought that this idea would have been sadly disabused by now, but the liberal wing of the media is still intent on perpetuating the myths that it formulated at the time, via such movies as "Invictus" (starring American actors .... Morgan Freeman, and Matt Damon).

The sad truth about the 'rainbow nation' is rather different, and it may be a generation or so, for this other 'truth' to be acknowledged.

However this story from the BBC points to the grim reality of post apartheid South African life for the majority of the population. I doubt if Hollywood will ever lend itself to a movie about this alternative dose of reality.

Democracy or Conspiracy at work in South Africa?

In a strange turn of events in South Africa, the President Thabo Mbeki who has outwardly been a model of propriety and democratic (ish ... this is Africa!) behaviour, has been ousted in a bloodless coup by his greatest rival Jacob Zuma. 

I touched on the background to this event a few weeks ago, but with reference to the threats by his supporters, to use unconstitutional means to overturn any court decision that they didn't support, I little suspected that this was the beginning of the end for Mbeki, who only a few days ago was negotiating the "Zimbabwe settlement". 

Zuma, who has been bedevilled by allegations of corruption, sexual misbehaviour, and other undemocratic behaviour, has somehow survived all of this, with most legal cases being tied down from ever getting to court by his lawyer, whilst he publicly asks for 'his day in court'. A tactic that works with his constituency of barely literate, poor blacks who are politically naive at best, and often followers of the 'land grab politics' of Mugabe at their worst. 

These supporters are the same people who recently took to ethnic cleansing to remove foreigners from many areas. Thabo Mbeki on the other hand only recently got linked to a corrupt arms deal (not terribly convincingly), and then suddenly a judge suggests that he had 'interfered with a case against Zuma' (although not all agreed with the judge), and he is forced to resign by his own (Zuma controlled) ANC party. 

It is a forgone conclusion that Zuma will win the party elections as he already is party president (which is effectively the same thing), and thus when he takes over as President Zuma of South Africa, he will have completed one of the strangest power transfers in African history. 

What this all means for South Africa is hard to judge, on the one hand Thabo Mbeki has accepted his demotion without apparent rancour and peacefully, whilst on the other, this does appear to be a coup (although not with the guns that usually accompany an African coup). Mr Zuma is a strange mixture of deviousness and populism, and its this mixture that makes it hard to predict how this will play out ... but perhaps poorly. 

He recently apparently pledged to help white Boers who were now living in poverty in their own White Townships (the ANC has always accepted Boers as "Afrikaner Africans" but considered the English speakers as "Colonials"). However his anthem "Umshini wami" (Bring Me My Machine-Gun)" tends to suggest that his power base is similar in nature to that of Robert Mugabe's "War Veterans" i.e. young, unemployed males prone to violent behaviour....... and they recently threatened violence if court decisions went against them, which is not a good sign. 

I expect there to be a honey moon period, but should he be baulked in anyway by the courts or constitution, then there may a temptation for him to just override them .... I may be wrong, but there are hints that he has that kind of 'Big Man African politician' personality. 

"Debate is almost non-existent and no one is apparently accountable to anybody apart from their political party bosses. It is bad news for democracy in this country". Helen Suzman