RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2018, Tucker Carlson highlighted the expropriation of land from white farmers in South Africa.  He stated, “As land seizures based on skin color shows, South Africa is once again becoming a place where an entire group of people is targeted for discrimination and violence on the basis of their skin color.”

Twenty-six years ago, “South Africans engaged in a peaceful revolution.  As late as the 1980s commentators predicted that any transition from white minority domination and black majority rule would precipitate a bloody civil war.  Instead, in 1994 South Africans replaced president F.W. de Klerk with Nelson Mandela in a free and fair election that astonished the world.”  Thus, “South Africans of all races voted in the country’s first democratic elections, choosing Mandela as their first black president.  The inhumane apartheid regime seemed to be miraculously ending peacefully, though much work remained to improve the lives of all South Africans.”  By the “late 1980s, however, South Africa’s economy was in a deep recession and large segments of the country were becoming ungovernable.”

Former president Jacob Zuma (2009–18) “brought the country a reputation for corruption and ineptitude.”  In fact, in 2018, the World Bank ranked South Africa as the most corrupt country in the world.

In 2018, Hammond and Tupy, “in reviewing South Africa’s flirtation with the idea of changing its constitution to let the state expropriate farmland without compensation, wrote that South Africa need only look north to Zimbabwe to see the disastrous consequences of this kind of policy.”  Zimbabwe’s former dictator, Robert Mugabe, gave “the green light to his paramilitary supporters to invade commercial farms, seize some 23 million acres of land and the confiscated farms were resettled with small scale agriculturalists.  Many of the new would-be-farmers had no real knowledge of commercial agriculture and many soon returned to subsistence farming.  The actual commercial farmers left for other African countries and the result was devastating food shortages in a nation once dubbed the ‘bread basket of Africa.'”

According to the Epoch Times, in 2019, “ten million people were unemployed [in South Africa, and] the country had a national debt of more than $200 billion.”  It is a country “ravaged by almost a decade of extensive corruption” and “collapsing water and electricity services.”  This was the grim picture.

Political parties sowing racial discord in a country still haunted by its apartheid past.  Radicals encouraging land invasions.  The most unequal society in the world according to the World Bank, with more than half of the population of 58 million living in poverty and a tiny elite controlling extreme wealth.

In May of 2019, an election was held to “decide whether [South Africa would] be able to repair the damage done by nine years of corruption, which has crippled [the] government and caused great hardship for [the South African] people, said University of Johannesburg Vice Chancellor Adam Habib.”

In fact, South Africa’s “two major political parties, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), bled votes … in the May election that many analysts had described as the most important since the country’s first multiracial vote in 1994.”

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC dropped below 60 percent for the first time, but at 57 percent put in a relatively strong showing, following Ramaphosa’s efforts over the past year to reform the government.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose leaders have encouraged land invasions and have been accused of inciting racial hatred, and whose protests have often exploded into violence, got almost 11 percent of the vote, up from the 6 percent it received in 2014.

‘The EFF is proto-fascist.  It’s particularly violent, it’s particularly militaristic, it’s particularly focused on spectacle; it’s particularly focused on the aggrandizement of the individual leader.’  The party’s leader, or ‘commander-in-chief,’ is … 37-year-old, Julius Malema.  Shortly before the polls, he … made the following public utterance: ‘We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people — at least for now.’  The populist EFF says if ever given the chance to govern, it will seize all banks, mines, and land, and dole out the wealth to impoverished black South Africans[.]

Political commentator Melanie Verwoerd said the EFF inspired fear because its racist messages took South Africa back to a time when the country was on the brink of racial civil war.

Attacks on farmers in South Africa mount, and “being a white farmer can be a life-threatening occupation.”

The Federalist recently argued that South Africa is on the verge of collapse and set to become the next Venezuela.

Moreover, South Africa has been hit hard by COVID.  The South African government has “instituted one of the world’s most repressive coronavirus lockdowns, under which people are not even allowed out to exercise or walk the dog and the sale of alcohol and tobacco has been outlawed.”

These reports should not be surprising when one considers the way South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, chose to celebrate Freedom Day.  Taking to Twitter, Ramaphosa revealed that he had a conversation with his ‘Brother, President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela’ noting, ‘Our two countries share a close and deep historical bond based on friendship, solidarity and cooperation.’  Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that the ANC has turned to the likes of Cuba and Venezuela. For more than a decade, economic freedom in South Africa has been steadily declining as the government has inserted itself more and more into economic and private life.

The ” left-leaning ANC’s socialist economic policies such as central planning, government subsidies and grants has lifted some black South Africans out of poverty, but the economic growth has been stagnant in the last decade.”

Lawlessness now prevails in South Africa.  See this YouTube video about how people have to safeguard their cars in Durban.  As “freedom has declined, so has economic growth and opportunity, so that now more than a quarter of the population is unemployed and, thanks to the failing state education system, largely unemployable.  When one accounts for all those who have simply given up looking for work, the unemployment rate rises to a crippling 40 percent.”

There “is now very little doubt that the ANC is failing and presiding over a slowly failing state.  Like Venezuela, it seems intent on doubling down on bad policies.  One of the most contested issues currently is the government’s policy of Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC), which would allow the state to seize land without paying for it, trashing property rights enshrined in the country’s constitution.  Another is the ANC’s move to effectively nationalize health care, even though state hospitals are failing and private clinics offer high levels of care.”

Though “[l]aws restricting land ownership along racial lines were overturned in 1991 … restitution has proven more difficult.  The ANC had set a goal of returning 30% of white-owned land to black farmers, but by last year reached only 10%.  Historically, the ANC operated with a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ model, but tight funding meant that those transfers happened very slowly and on a small scale.  White farmers control an estimated 73% of commercial farmland today.  To try to ease crushing rural poverty, the government has begun to explore legislation that would allow land to be seized without compensation.”

Ilana Mercer has written that “if you replace a despot, but not despotism, you only oust a tyrant, and not tyranny.”

Seemingly absent from the repertoire of … Mr. Ramaphosa is an understanding that only the rule of law and the protection of individual liberties, especially private property rights — for wealth-creating whites as well — can begin to reduce the dizzying scale of the … problems.  Without these building blocks and bulwarks of prosperity and peace … South Africa cannot be rehabilitated.

In A Democratic South Africa?: Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), Donald L. Horowitz concluded that democracy is, in general, unusual in Africa, and, in particular, rare in ethnically and racially divided societies, where majorities and minorities are rigidly predetermined (also the dispensation presently being cultivated by craven American elites) [emphasis mine].

Apartheid was an unmitigated satanic evil — I still recall the scarred heads of those mercilessly beaten as they cowered in their hovels.  But as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.”  Will this be South Africa’s fate?