RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1980 Bulawayo was the pearl of Rhodesia. Beautifully maintained, it was well laid out with attractive gardens, public spaces, excellent utilities and competently functioning services. Former residents speak nostalgically of their happy memories.Try it now (above). Berlin 1945 is not too much of an exaggeration. Buildings are crumbling, closed and shuttered ruins, exuding an air of emptiness, desolation and gloom. The railway station is permanently closed. Giant potholes making the road look like the surface of the moon ensure travel over 20kms is impossible. There are no shoulders and cars just cruise on regardless through the unsigned intersections. Alongside the road sit or lie listless ghost people with pathetic displays of goods. The museum, formerly one of the best in Africa, now has dusty untended cabinets mostly invisible due to the theft of light bulbs.

It is a picture of utter dystopia, African style. In one of the worst examples of vicious irony, a statue of Joshua Nkomo, the leader of ZAPU, has displaced Cecil Rhodes – no doubt intended as a reminder to the locals of the near-genocide of Nkomo’s followers by Mugabe’s North Korean thugs should they have any ideas about protesting their fate.

What produces this oasis of desolation and despair, no different to the state of the rest of Zimbabwe? Forty-five years of rule by ZANU, that’s what, a depressing rebuttal to Ian Smith’s comment that had Rhodesia Front been left to gradually bring in full voting while retaining white expertise and institutional memory there would have been a far superior outcome.

What does this tell us? Every independence or liberation party in Southern Africa, if not the rest of Africa, once in power has held on regardless, running their economies into the ground and producing desolation, poverty and misery for their people that dwarfs anything they experienced in the colonial days. Look at Mozambique, Angola, Namibia where the governing parties have held on, going to any lengths to ensure that no democratic process can evict them, regardless of the desire of the suffering population.

It is not difficult to find how this comes about. These parties are run by unreconstructed Stalinists, hardwired with the National Democratic(!) Revolution ideology. This template is the map for centralising all state institutions, stripping away democratic rights and crushing all opposition to create a one-party state. The results are predictable and appalling. The mass of the population are driven into severe poverty, infrastructure is ruined, the remaining middle class is crushed while the party and its acolytes become enormously richer, stripping the country of every resource they can lay their hands on. It is kleptocracy that dwarfs countries like Nigeria, even Russia.

Consider Zimbabwe. Infrastructure gone, farming ruined – the former breadbasket of Africa now has to import food – and fully one-third of the population has fled to other countries. Mozambique is no better. The government has ruthlessly suppressed all protest after an election it lost. Such is the desolation and poverty that an ISIS group has invaded the oil-rich north, where they have no difficulty finding supporters among the wretched population. 

Which brings us to South Africa where the governing ANC has steadily advanced its agenda over three decades. What has this produced? A bankrupt country, teetering on the financial precipice from one year to the next, with levels of corruption, plutocracy and theft that leave even  Nigerians speechless, is accompanied by appalling failures in providing care and employment to the black constituency. Health, infant mortality, schooling and basic facilities, far from showing improvement, are plummeting by the day. Nothing sums up the decay and incompetence (to say nothing of government disinterest) more than the tragedy of a young child drowning in the festering cesspool of a school toilet.

Crime, unrestrained by incompetent and bribed police, has reached levels that make the old West look like a school picnic. The military, formerly among the world’s ten best, is a useless entity, unable to put a division into combat and peopled by more overweight alcoholic and ageing generals than actual soldiers. Companies refuse to invest in mining knowing that any profits will invariably be creamed off by ANC acolytes. Huge Mafia-like crime cartels have made the railways unworkable by looting cables and rails as well burning coaches. The taxi industry with the homicidal enthusiasm of Capone’s bootleggers kill anyone who interferes with their ruthless monopoly. Johannesburg is on a heading to be a crumbling ruin.

Then there is the electricity crisis. That groupspeak term ‘loadshedding’ is for the present under control but all the indications are that it will only get worse, the illusory efforts by the government only showing that they have no motivation, let alone ability, to solve the problem.

And on it goes.

The joker in the pack, so to say, is the current president – a visible reminder how clowns use their front to cover a deep strain of despair. Any hopes of improvement after his election have long since evaporated. The crisis-driven television appearances, when cannot be avoided, show a man who brings to mind a panic-stricken possum — eyes frantically darting around while churning out rickety platitudes with utopian fantasies of high-speed intercity trains, rocket ships and universal health. All this from a government that cannot provide the most basic healthcare to people on the bottom of the social pile.

Why all this in a country of such great potential? Having started with a mission-Christian philosophy of non-violence, the ANC unresistingly slid into the clutches of the Soviet Union and uncritically absorbed the ideology they were force-fed like geese. Socialism with total authoritarian control within 20 years was the goal when taking over.

So bad was the situation that the usually dormant ANC-supporting masses turned on the government last year and the ANC lost its majority in the election. The Government of National Unity, was formed to general acclaim, but this is rapidly vanishing. The Democratic Alliance, supposed to bring the ANC back to rational governing, has utterly failed as the ANC passes one appalling law after another, including the installation of a public health system modelled on the NHS when the existing hospitals can barely provide proper care. The latest effort, a law providing for appropriation of private land without compensation, a la Mugabe, despite the predictable lies and evasions, will further ensure that investments from other countries dry up.

Now there is a Trump in the woodpile. Surrounded by several young South African activists, in addition to Elon Musk, he has frozen all aid. The ANC, still sustaining a Cold War/Third World mentality, has shrieked hysterical defiance, displaying remarkable stupidity towards their biggest trading partner. Their answer is that they can replace American imperialism with their BRICS friends. Really? Russia with a disintegrating economy and a war with Ukraine grinding on. China, which takes far more than they ever give? Brazil? Come on. Perhaps they can go to North Korea for aid. The Road to Serfdom, Freidrich Hayek’s epochal work, has never been more apposite. In South Africa’s case, the road to Bulawayo is getting shorter by the day.

Clinical Associate Professor Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist, historian and writer  He has positions at the University of NSW, Western Sydney University, Wollongong University and Stellenbosch University.  He writes on history of psychiatry and medicine, crime, genocide and biography.

His latest book is The King who Strangled his Psychiatrist and Other Dark Tales. His Frontal Lobotomy podcasts can be heard on Apple and Spotify