Mugabe wannabe slated for South Africa's presidency.

South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, is to vacate his office at the request of the power structure within his own party. Mbeki has been in a power struggle with Jacob Zuma. Zuma is currently not eligible to become president but it is expected that he will shortly run for parliament, be elected to that office and thus become eligible. At that point Zuma will probably take the presidency.

This is just another of the slow steps that South Africa is taking toward Third World destruction. Mr. Mbeki was a big step in the wrong direction, after he took over from Nelson Mandela Mbeki was inspired by power lust. Zuma has even a worse case. Mbeki took some major steps away from markets and toward political control of the economy. Zuma will go even further down that disastrous road.

The New York Times ran a story on this, as expected, which needs some correction. They have either misstated facts or left out pertinent information.

They claim “Mr. Mbeki brought a moribund economy back from its death bed.” Interesting. They didn’t seem to think that Mr. Mandela had taken South Africa to its economic death bed when Mr. Mbeki took over from him. An article the Times printed in 1999, just before Mbeki’s election, mentions high unemployment but says nothing about the South African economy being led to its death bed by Mr. Mandela. But then then “journalist” Suzanne Daley falsely claimed that during the “election season, whites hoarded canned goods and ammunition, while blacks died by the thousands in grisly clashes.”

This blogger was actually there and half this claim is false and the other half exaggerated. No doubt some whites somewhere in South Africa “hoarded canned goods and ammunition” but none that were actually noted at the time. To imply that all, most, or even many whites did this is simply false. And Daley exaggerates when she says “blacks died by the thousands in grisly clashes”. She also entirely left out the cause of those clashes, which was Mandela’s African National Congress supporters going to war with other black political parties. Daley’s comment, immediately following the lie about whites hoarding ammunition, makes it sound as if whites were involved in these clashes. That simply is false. The clashes were entirely within the black community and between black factions. Regardless of her distortions there is no mention that South Africa’s economy was on its death bed at the time. Now the Times reports that it was. They fail to explain how they didn’t notice this then.

The Times says that in spite of Mbeki’s supposedly resurrecting a dead economy he “moved too sluggishly to lift up most of those in need. Unemployment, variously estimated between 25 and 40 percent, has remained a manacle on the millions of South Africans living in shanties.”

This is true but also false. The Times neglects to mention that Mr. Mbeki and the ANC passed law after law to “lift up” the poor. Labor regulations were tightened and businesses forced to hand out all sorts of benefits. Mbeki and the ANC put into practice the very sort of labor laws which the Times promotes. The net result of those laws were an increase in unemployment.

The Times also neglects to mention that in the years leading up to election of an ANC government that economic advancement for blacks was quite strong. From 1985 to 1994 the disposable income of black South Africans had increased by 35%. That of Indian and colored South Africans, who had higher income to begin with, had increased by 24%. In comparison the disposable income of white South Africans had increased by only 3%. In 1967 only 7% of university students were black but by 1993 40% were. It would have been higher but during “the struggle” the ANC actively encouraged black youths to drop out of school, a policy that lowers the income of the dropouts to this day.

The reality is that the tonic the ANC forced onto the country was one of regulation, controls and restrictions. It followed the advice of publications like the New York Times and unemployment grew. Labor is heavily regulated and many workers were regulated out of jobs.

For instance, many homeowners hired maids to help clean their homes and gardeners to work in the yard. Pay was not great but significantly above zero, which was the alternative. The ANC passed legislation requiring each homeowner to provide retirement benefits to these individuals if they worked over a certain number of hours per week. Few homeowners could do this. Many just ignored the law. But many didn’t. And those who didn’t reduced the hours of employment, along with the total pay package, given to staff members. Others who were going to hire staff full time simply didn’t do it. The level of unemployment went up. The amount of compensation that workers received declined in total. True those who remained hired full time were better off. But the bulk of workers were worse off.

Repeatedly the ANC tried to lift up the poor through legislation. And repeatedly the results were the opposite of those desired. It should be noted that these same policies are chic policies in the circles of the New York Times and the preferred tonic for all that ails you in Left-wing circles. Unfortunately those policies don’t work.

Zuma is the man promoted by the trade unions and by South Africa’s powerful Communist Party. And it is there intention to move rapidly toward policies that they find acceptable. Their complaint about current ANC policy was that it wasn’t radical enough. The very tonic that is poisoning the country is being demanded in heavier doses.

Mr. Mandela already moved South Africa into a dirigist direction with a multiplicity of labor laws and racially-based legislation. Mr. Mbeki went even further. Doses of such legislation made the situation worse for workers not better. Other policies, such as in fiscal matters, helped alleviate some of the problems. But Zuma is a fiery radical with no sense of proportion at all. He will take South Africa further away from policies that work and is likely to adapt to populist measures which, while politically appealing, will have dire long-term consequences. Mr. Zuma is a consummate, albeit corrupt, politicians. As such the long-term is of little interest to him. His goal is short-term popularity no matter how devastating it will be to South Africa’s poor.

Mr. Zuma calls himself a socialist and has the support of the Communist Party and the communist-dominated Congress of South African Trade Unions. Zuma has no education and didn't finish grade school. He is a practicing polygamist and one of his wives was Minister of Health. She was particularly inept and corrupt and helped destroy hundreds of working hospitals. She was notorious for squandering most of the country's AIDS budget on a play that cost millions but was only shown to a few hundred people. Mr. Zuma is also well know to share Mugabe's hatred for gay people. He attacked South Africa's gay marriage law saying it was a disgrace but ignoring his own polygamist lifestyle. And he said that no homosexual, when he was growing up, would "have stood in front of me. I would knock him out."

Whatever his faults, and he had many, Mandela was no Mugabe. Mbeki, however, did have a tinge of Mugabe about him. He was inclined toward the petty machinations of Mugabe and used his power to settle personal scores. Zuma is much closer to Mugabe than Mandela. He shares Mugabe's desire to enrich himself through the powers of office. He proposes the same sort of destructive, but populist policies. And he works with the same sort of rhetoric as Mr. Mugabe. With Zuma on the rise South Africa is one giant step closer to becoming the new Zimbabwe.

SA's president covers up for dictator Mugabe again.

This blog has repeatedly warned that the crisis in Zimbabwe is made worse by the support that South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, gives to Mugabe. Mbeki, who was a prominent member of the Communist Party, had regularly played up to Mugabe and supported him. I wrote:

But just as this election will tell us much about Zimbabwe it will actually tell us more about the African National Congress in South Africa. While the West refuses to criticize the party of their "saint" Nelson Mandela the reality is that the ANC is an authoritarian party very similar to Zanu-PF. And South Africa's regime, dominated by the Communist Party, has continued to help keep Mugabe in power and lied on his behalf. The South African government notoriously declared one election in Zimbabwe "free and fair" before the voting actually started -- yet the election was dominated by Mugabe's thugs beating and killing opposition party supporters.

South Africa’s president, the “former” Communist Party member Thabo Mbeki, has come out of the closet and openly defended the thuggery of Robert Mugabe. Mugabe has refused to release election results which are widely believed to have shown he lost the election. This was followed up by attacks on opposition leaders by government goons. Yet Mbeki says there is no “crisis” in Zimbabwe and said: “It’s a normal electoral process in Zimbabwe.”

Mbeki calls his strategy “quiet diplomacy” but what he means is that he goes and meets Mugabe and encourages him to continue to stamp out political freedom. The West is still enamoured with the African National Congress and wants to believe the fantasy that they are modern, liberal and open to a free society. The ANC has always been dominated by authoritarians and that tendency has only become worse in recent years.

The ANC is in a close alliance with the Communist Party of South Africa, a fact the mainstream media in the West tends not to mention. The government is officially made up of three organizations. One is the ANC, the second is the Communist Party and the third is the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Each gets to nominate one-third of the seats in parliament. The SACP nominates their third. Then COSATU, which is controlled by the SACP nominates a third, most of whom are also members of the SACP. Then the ANC nominates a third, many of who are SACP members. Mbeki was a member of the SACP and his father was a prominent leader of the party trained in Moscow.

The African National Congress will NOT condemn the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe -- they admire him for it.

One member of the Mbeki family, however, is not buying into the propaganda of the ANC and the SACP. That is Moeletsi Mbeki, who I had the privilege of meeting in London a couple of years ago. Moeletsi has been a strong advocate of private sector development as opposed to having the State operate the “commanding heights” of the economy. He authored a paper for the Cato Institute on the topic of private development.

Moeletsi’s brother’s government made sure that he (Moeletsi) was banned from appearing on the government owned broadcasting system. The Washington Post reported that the creation of a blacklist which banned critics of the government from the airwaves, “emanated from SnukiZikalala, the top news executive for the agency, a publicly funded behemoth that many fear is reverting to its apartheid-era roots as a tool for government propaganda.”

This is true. The SABC is wholly-owned by the government. And regulations prevented private cable channels from presenting news. The so-called Truth and Reconciliation Committee targeted the private newspapers and raked them over the coals for reporting on the rampant corruption under ANC rule. That was enough to stifle much of the criticism. The reality is that the SABC, at least under the latter days of apartheid, was actually freer than it is today. Critics of apartheid did appear regularly on the SABC before the ANC took power. I know many such people and appeared on three or four television shows myself.

The Post, hardly a “right-wing” publication, noted that nine commentators have been banned by Zikalala, “a former government spokesman who received his journalistic training in Communist Easter Europe.” A report from the SABC itself confirmed the existence of the blacklist. The government then tried to prevent the report from seeing the light of day. The Post describes the new SABC:

Many newscasts are dominated by the pronouncements of government officials. Critical reporting into societal problems remains rare. And controversy often is played down, making the SABC on some days resemble less the BBC than the state-controlled newscasts common throughout much of Africa.

It appears that many on the ANC blacklist were banned from the airwaves entirely over their criticism of Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwean journalist Trevor Ncube has been banned from discussing the situation in his own country. Journalist Elinor Sisulu, Zimbabwean Archbishop Pius Ncube and Moeletsi Mbeki have also been banned from appearing -- all because of their outspoken criticism of Mugabe. Journalist William Gumede was banned for writing a book about President Mbeki. The Post writes:

"The big influence there was the Communist Party," Moeletsi Mbeki said of Zikalala. "The ruling party must control the way people think. That's the school of thought that he came from."

Karima Brown, a former ANC activist is one of the journalists banned from appearing on the air said: “The ANC may have abandoned its socialism, but has it abandoned its Stalinism. I don’t think so.” I believe she has over stated their abandonment of socialism as well since the Mbeki government nationalized all mineral resources not that long ago.

Moeletsi Mbeki has been clear that the Zimbabwean elections have been routinely rigged and that his brother’s government has helped cover this up. The one point I disagree with Moeletsi about is that he believes the ANC regime has a “do nothing” policy in regards to Zimbabwe. I believe they are actively supporting the regime and that includes selling Zimbabwe electricity, on credit, at rates that South Africans can’t get. The purpose of President Mbeki’s policy is to support Mugabe.