Malema: a stick being used to beat Zuma? Just a thought …

I am sure no-one has failed to notice the flood of South African high achievers passing through the United Kingdom over the last week or so.

A golfer was there recently, some swimmers,  a group of cricketers … and, oh yes, Julius Malema.

Julius told BBC and Sky News that he was in London working hard and meeting investors behind closed doors – to explain the ‘economic freedom campaign’ – and to give nuances on the nationalisation call.

He – charmingly – defended the racial make-up of the South African Olympic team: “we are proud of our athletes”, he said; and he came clean on his support for Kgalema Motlanthe to succeed Jacob Zuma at Mangaung in December.

This is his Mangaung prediction:

“I am coming back to the ANC in December; once we have removed president Jacob Zuma – because we are going to remove him successfully in December … and then I will walk into that conference, shake his hand and proceed to occupy my rightful seat.” (Catch that BBC clip here.)

It is difficult not to admire the audacity … and delight in the anxiety that those who conducted the Polokwane Putsch must be feeling.

But to my mind things swerve away from the comic and towards the dark when I think about this a little more.

It is a series of small things that worry me.

Surprise! (From New Zimbabwe, August 1 2012)

He pitched up at the Chingford Rugby Club and joined a group of Zimbabweans for a braai – and was apparently welcomed with open arms. He dined with Lenox Lewis

With Lenox Lewis in London – (from New Zimbabwe August 1 2012)

and spoke to a group called the Pan African Congress (not our PAC – but it has some similarities) and was covered in a spooky online journal called The Zimdiaspora  under the headline “We are inspired by Mugabe – Malema” as follows:

Turning to … Zimbabwe and its politics of land and mineral wealth redistribution, Malema had glowing praise for the president of Zimbabwe Robert Gabriel Mugabe for confiscating land from the whites and giving it to blacks. He stated they found inspiration from the actions of Mugabe as an African leader and were grateful to see him standing up against whites and their economic enslavement of blacks.

Glowing praise for president of Zimbabwe Robert Gabriel Mugabe? Sounds like a writer constrained by the diktats of belonging to a government department, something like, say … hmm … the Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Organisation?

What would covert aspects of the Zimbabwean state get from promoting the increasingly virulently, anti-Zuma Malema in London ? (I am not unaware that there is a wild leap in that last sentence … but still am going to just take it and move along.)

It’s a tenuous link but my nose is twitching: Zanu-PF’s preparation to hold off the MDC challenge is multifaceted and very sophisticated. A significant part of the pressure on Zanu-PF to meet its obligations under the Global Political Agreement and move towards democratic elections is coming from the SADC facilitation under the leadership of Jacob Zuma.

The next Zimbabwean election is going to be won or lost on the precise wording of the laws and constitution that set the conditions for elections – including how the security apparatuses will be controlled.

That wording is being finalised as I write this …. as Julius Malema takes his campaign against Zuma to the world stage, during the Olympics … no expenses spared.

I realise I have to be cautious; it is not as if the Malema ANC Youth League faction is not brilliant at self-promotion and has an almost preternatural ability to play into the current media obsessions.

Malema was quoted in the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail in June saying that Jacob Zuma was not the right person to be the SADC mediator in Zimbabwe because ‘he hates Robert Mugabe.’

I think that the possibility that Malema is acting as an asset for a (partially) hostile foreign power will play against him in the ANC’s internecine strife … or at least his enemies will try and make that case to his detriment. (Note added on 03/08/2012: I am not suggesting that there is necessarily any intention on Malema’s part … the point is rather that in effect he might be fulfilling Bob’s/Zanu-PF’s agenda as opposed to ‘the national interest’ as embodied – supposedly – by the South African president … or even more narrowly that the possibility of this being true will probably been used against Malema by the incumbents he is campaigning against.)

We must guard against paranoia and the instinct to see everything we can’t quite explain as evidence of the hidden hand of spies, aliens or the Elders of Zion – but equally we would have to be very naive to believe that the hundreds of billions of real dollars spent each years on espionage and dirty tricks just disappears into the ether, leaving no imprint on the world.

Greeting – and a few thoughts of home – from Belgrade

I am in Serbia on a social visit and I thought I would record here some of my initial observations about stuff we might learn from this country about some aspects of SA politics and culture.

Cultural Betrayal

Firstly, I am in Belgrade – a city of 1.6 million people built on the confluence of the Danube and the Sava – and a peculiar mixture of modern flash, Soviet-era bland and medieval tatty. The scars of the Nato bombings are still dramatically evident in a sort of carefully preserved tableau, a series of monuments to that seminal betrayal, that you can’t miss on your way in from the airport

Serbian/Yugoslav Army HQ? Taken a few minutes ago (thanks Jaimo) – I will double-check what the building’s original function was … before it (and a few of its neighbours) were bombed on May 1 1999, becoming (permanent?) monuments to Western perfidy

Why betrayal? Because everyone my age here has the same (as me)  … memealogy? (okay, I made it up – memes are cultural genes and you can work it backwards from genealogy). The cultural literacy is all Rolling Stones, Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, The Alien, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Billy Joel (you dredge up the cultural icon from the 60s, 70′s and 80′s and I bet I share it with Serbians of an appropriate age – except they are more culturally literate. Interestingly, just like in Yugoslavia, in SA we got this stuff a few years late – in SA because of apartheid and National Party awfulness, in Yugoslavia because of a slightly different set of transgressions.)

… and then one day their beloved Americans and English cultural tutors bombed them and killed the firemen trying to save people from the buildings – ostensibly to stop some new, particularly ugly, transgressions. Oh the treachery, the faithlessness …

Ethnic uniformity

The second thing that strikes me is the populace is ethnically identical. They are all white. There are no black people, no Arabic looking people; no any kind of people who are in any way different looking from what I think of as Slavic – which is just a minute variation on your bog standard white person – the men with chiseled features and the women with unusually long legs and everyone with white skin … not olive or dusky or anything, but white – in the old Apartheid conception of the skin colour.

“The city was more cosmopolitan”, my Serbian friend tells me, “before the disaster of Slobodan Milošević – before then you could see more  Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslims, Slovaks …”

We are wandering down a medieval street crammed with crowds of handsome young people. I ask him to show me some individual examples of these groups that survived the virtual and literal ethnic cleansing that accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia.

His attempt seems half-hearted, even dispirited.

“Hmm maybe she is Croat,” he says indicating a woman flicking through some blouses at a street kiosk. She is one of the tall, long-legged, light-brown haired, chiseled cheek-boned and haughty beauties that shoal in these alleys, as ubiquitous as sardines at the right time in Durban.

“Ok, maybe not” he shrugs as I frown at him in confusion.

We finally manage to agree that “those gypsies” selling knock-off Ray-Bans look ethnically dissimilar to the majority. But to me  it’s a margin call – any one of them could have been my old ‘Leb’ Catholic chinas in the Johannesburg of my youth; definitely ‘white’ under apartheid’s racial taxonomy.

Remember it took the terror of ethnic cleansing to create this level of uniformity, but even before that, in the old Yugoslavia, the full range of ethnic diversity could have been encompassed by the differences between, say Rafael Nadel and Charlize Theron …

Let’s compare monstrous barbarisms

Everyone here above a certain age seems haunted by what happened after the collapse of Yugoslavia. You would think that this lot would be immunised to bombs, betrayals, racial and religious purging and radical disjuncture in their social organisation.

It started with the Celts invading  the “Paleo-Balkan tribes” in 50 000 BCE  (okay, I’m exaggerating) who in their turn were replaced by an endless Roman occupation; sacked by Attila the Hun in 442 and then one thousand five hundred years of bloody, impossible to follow conquest, resistance, sacking, rapine, pillage … I could go on and on. It was the Byzantines, the Franks, the Bulgarians, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Crusades, the Serbian Empire (briefly) the Hungarians again, the Ottomans (for five hundred years! … and yes, they did persecute the Christians but not half as badly as the Christians did to almost anyone of any other faith during the Crusades … and there are a whole lot of beautiful and ancient churches that the Ottoman-Turk conquerors and rulers left standing) and the Austrians.

And of course, that is only before the First World War, and as you know all the important stuff happened since then.

I know our African and South African histories are important and it is appropriate that we wrestle as long as it takes – which will be forever, obviously – with the ongoing consequences of slavery, colonialism and apartheid.

But being here does tempt me to wish my countrymen and women had a slightly less myopic view of our own trials and tribulations.  I read this morning that Belgrade is trying to scrape together the finances to build a memorial to Judenlager Semlin, the largest German-run concentration camp in Southeast Europe where in May 1942 the Nazi’s proudly announced one of their first major European campaign successes: Serbia was “Judenfrei”. The men had been executed earlier, but the last 7000 Jewish women and children were killed in the camp in the first few months of 1942.

By May Serbia was Judenfrei.

And this is not a The Holocaust trumps all kind of statement – I just mention it  in the context of the previous 2000 years of European history. The Germans might have achieved a unique scale with their technological and organisational excellence, but the great rivers of cruelty and tears are old, deep and cold here and they flow through every valley of this geography – and not only to and from the mighty lake that was The Holocaust.

The Economy and the European Debt Crisis

The Serbian economy has hit the wall and the government is trying to decide on a balance between cutting public sector wages and salaries by about 6% and increasing VAT to about 22%. The options are limited and there is an absolute consensus that extremely hard times have arrived. This is the European debt crises writ slightly smaller – because Serbia is not part of the European Union.

But what I see are people eating and drinking in restaurants – and partying as hard and as healthily as it gets.

There are almost no beggars – and those that there are are obviously professionals with studied acts:

• the near-sighted (with ridiculously cute thick glasses) slightly retarded child playing – very badly – the violin, every item of clothing and scuff on his thick medical black shoes a carefully choreographed act that everyone consents to and ignores.
• An old hunched-backed crone, her nose not six inches from the floor, tapping along on a short, gnarled staff, an arthritis crippled hand held out blindly above her … I am convinced she is a 22-year-old actress who couldn’t find a waitressing job.

The point is there are none of the streams of dead-eyed, exhausted people searching and researching the refuse; people you will find in any South African city. There is a medieval character to Belgrade, which means there are a million nooks and crannies and little hollows in ancient buildings and monuments everywhere. In South Africa those would all be occupied – where they were fenced, the fences would be broken and tunneled under – there would be evidence that someone was eking out an existence in every hollow, in every gap.

But here, nothing.

Sure, there is an occasional drunk sleeping on a park bench, but that is pretty much as bad as it gets. I have absolutely no doubt that I am not seeing the whole picture and certainly there are large areas of the city with awful Soviet-era council housing-type tenements, covered for 10 metres from street level with graffiti that looks to me just like Cape Town’s gang signs.

In South Africa we feel like we are bursting out of our seams, with the poor competing intensely for the leavings of the rich and thereby driving some kind of desperate but highly energetic economy. Here it feels older and emptier, certainly dowdy in places, but calm and stoic.

Everyone has time for a coffee and a rakia.

Don’t get me wrong. These people descend from women who have thrown their babies onto invader’s spears; their forefathers and mothers have eaten dogs and rats and stones to stave off the inevitable rape and slaughter that awaits the fall of the castle walls; they have catapulted the last live chickens at their enemies who have besieged them for years, and successfully convinced the invaders to just give up and go home.

So I  am not exactly saying that this is tired old Europe with nothing left to do but casually sip a coffee in the shade, sneering at the inevitable heat death that comes with impossible debt, dipping personal income and stagnant growth – of the economy and the population.

I am also not exactly saying that we are fresh and chaotic and ready to burst onto the global stage with the vigour and desperate energy of youth.

But there’s something in there, some little kernel or nugget – maybe a hope that I haven’t quite allowed myself to feel yet …

But it’s mid-afternoon and so hot that it is impossible to process this any further. Time for my first rakia and 4th double espresso – I’ll think about this tomorrow.

Egypt, my Egypt

I am clicking “Publish” in a rush … I suspect I will come to regret this later.

Anyway:

The popular mobilisations in Tunisia, Egypt and a swath of authoritarian North African and Middle Eastern states are interesting and important for more reasons than can be named, let alone examined, here.

But the aspects that have fascinated me are the over excited “I told you so!” claims of pundits, politicians and much of the Twitterati.

And not just the assertion that they had this right all along, but that they somehow understand the clattering Nasserite dominoes better than anyone and would just like to point out that it’s coming to get you. Yes, you (insert name of political opponent here), the revolution is coming for you.

There are literally hundreds of “takes on the crisis” I would like to poke fun at and take to task over this absurd conceit, but there is one I will look at (only slightly) more seriously.

Blunt Blade’s Bollocks

Blade Nzimande takes George Galloway’s excellent communist tirade in his column in the Morning Star (read it, it is also bollocks and brutal and crass but has enough thought and truth in it to warrant a second look) and turns it into the obscure and rambling  “Tunisia and Egypt: The deepening crisis of US imperialism and neo-liberalism“.

Where are the South African communists of yore who could always be relied upon to lift the veil, expose the skull beneath the skin and see the ape within the man? Oh yes, they are all dead or helping run the Department of Transport or become  bloated and insecure plutocrats … hmm, is that everyone?

Blade has it that Tunisia and Egypt are manifestations of a series of crises in capitalism “and its contemporary neo-liberal ideology”.

In short (in as far as I can understand Nzimande) the USA as the global representative of the corporate/capitalist machine has fostered dictatorships in the Arab world because they have agreed to leave the USA’s good friend Israel in peace.

So far so good, but then things start to unravel. Political upheaval in these Arab and North African countries sets back the USA’s task to reproduce the conditions of capitalist accumulation – through an amazingly complex web of dialectical causality. Thusly, the selling of upsized McDonald’s meals to the American guest workers rebuilding (if they work for Haliburton) and de/restabilising (if they work for Blackwater USA) any countries the US has recently invaded is threatened, because democratic governments are more likely to take a hard line on Israel … eh … oh goodness, there goes the thread.

You cannot successfully characterise Tunisia and Egypt as “crises of capitalism” unless you take an amazingly complex and interlinked world and reduce it to a childish little model that even the crudest Marxists would reject as ‘reductive’ and ‘over-deterministic’.

If  the term “capitalism” means the totality of international relations between states, global trade, the activities of local and international corporations and the shaping effects of culture, history and technology, then it is less than useless to characterise Tunisia and Egypt as “crises of capitalism”.

If the term “capitalism” refers (as I suspect it does, when used by Nzimande) to the secret set of rules in a secret club of greedy Americans who seek to control the world to protect and deepen their wealth, then I am sorry, but you can’t really be expected to be engaged with.

There are powerful and organised interests at play in North Africa and the Middle East and only a fool would not look to the USA for the sources of some of those forces. But there is also chaotic human activity and chance and rapidly unwinding and reforming complex systems that are part of what is happening and the blunt scalpel of Blade Nzimande’s theory takes us nowhere.

I would still recommend Galloway’s piece (as more insightful and the source of any interesting thoughts in Nzimande’s words on the subject) because part of what is happening in the Middle-East and North Africa is the unravelling of another mystifying US strategy to define, protect and advance its “national interests”.

What I wish the communists would give more attention to is not the greedy and rapacious aspects of US imperialism, but rather how it is often profoundly misconceived and poorly executed.

In my view human society should not be conceived of as “shaped” by particular forces or of being set on a certain “trajectory”. The totality of human existence is not an object (plastic and/or in motion). The totality of human existence – including the bits of it in Tunisia and Egypt – must be conceived of as a system so complex that making predictive statements is not hugely useful. Also, attempting to reduce the complexity to make it more understandable is a worthwhile endeavour only if undertaken with extreme caution and care.  Cooking it up as proof that your side is winning adds no real value.

In as far as the statement: “what is happening in the Arab world is a failure of US imperialism” is true, I suspect the reason is that successive US administrations have misconceived both the nature of history (as has Nzimande) and the nature of their own interests – not an error Nzimande appears obviously to have made.

Who is Cronin’s enemy?

Jeremy Cronin’s criticism of Cosatu’s  recent hosting of a “Civil Society Conference” is impossible to understand without understanding his – and the SACP’s – assumptions about the world and South Africa in November 2010.

Cronin’s premise is that “an enemy” is attempting to make the public debate about the future of South Africa focus on minor issues where “the enemy” believes it can score a victory over the ‘progressive forces’ (of which Cronin assumes he and his organisation and his government are a part).

Cronin and the SACP accept some version of the following as a true and accurate reflection of reality (although Cronin himself would probably not phrase things so crudely, mechanistically and deterministically, it amounts to the same story):

Global capitalism and its local allies are securing their ability to continue to accumulate wealth

The bad guys in Cronin’s universe are a complicated (and brilliantly disguised) set of global business interests linked to and by the interests of powerful Western countries, especially the USA and the UK. What this enemy wants and needs is a world in which it can make loads and loads of money – especially by paying the lowest possible wages and taking resources and wealth from the Third World and packing these tightly around themselves in the playgrounds and fortresses of the First World.

Any change in any society that puts checks and balances on its ability to make money must be opposed – destroyed even before it takes root. Thus, thoroughgoing transformation of South Africa would strengthen the hand of the poor and dispossessed relative the the global capitalist/imperialist elite and must, therefore, be stopped.

Global capital/imperialism are constrained from arguing directly in favour of the oppressive political systems and unequal economic arrangements required to support their ability to extract wealth.

Instead they weaken the existing popular governments in the Third World, encourage the spread of corruption and (crucially for our purposes here) divert real debates about change that would benefit the poor and marginalised into light-weight debates about the individual rights and freedoms of the small group of citizens who have moved on from being concerned about the basic conditions of survival. And they do this by hoodwinking essentially good people and organisations who have a weak understanding of the world.

If this is the enemy, who’s on Cronin’s side?

In this version of the universe the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions are the structural expressions of ordinary people’s struggles to be free and fed.

Because Cronin is constructing this version of the world wearing his South African Communist Party beret, we must understand that Cronin assumes himself and his organisation to be part of a long-term plan that will overthrow the global yoke of capitalism and imperialism and construct a society based on human imperatives other than profit.

So what’s wrong with that?

Communists like Jeremy Cronin are not misguided in fearing and distrusting global corporations of private enterprise. Left to their own devices humans will extract as much from each other – or from groups other than the group to which they feel they belong – as is possible.

They will take until they are stopped. This is reflected in every business cycle and it is reflected in every attempt to re-regulate markets after bubbles (always caused by a feeding frenzy) have burst.

Additionally big global corporations will spend billions of dollars sucking up to politicians especially in the most powerful nations on earth – or more directly manipulating the political process.

However, there are two significant things  wrong with Jeremy Cronin’s (and the SACP’s) version of the world:

Firstly, the communists’ (and all tight party organisations and religious groups’) vision is obscured by their need to see the world as completely structured by two big gangs that are at war – the white hats and the black hats, the good and the evil, the oppressor and the victims.

There are more complex political choices to make than just to pick a side and back it to the hilt and defend its doctrines against all comers.

Global markets and trade and international relations are structured by hugely complex forces, not the least of which are government and supra-governmental organisations attempting to regulate various forms of behaviour. i.e democratic political processes attempting to subdue, moderate and direct the functioning of human fear and greed.

“Picking sides” in such a complex world is no easy matter.

Secondly, the communists fail to see that they and their organisations are subject to the same raging impulses of greed and terror that structure global capitalism – in fact they are structured into it, (only subject to no shareholder and less accountable and regulated than your standard global business).

The conference that Cronin criticises was precisely an attempt to discuss the best ways to regulate those impulses because they appear to have become the dominant impulses within government and the ruling party.

It is fine for Cronin to dispute this, but it is not fine for him to argue that his allies accept the functioning of criminal greed in his government and organisation because his government and organisation is struggling to combat these matters at a higher level.

We do not live in a simple world. It is my belief that the enemy is not out there in his serried ranks on the plains, he is in here with us, in our homes, in our families and in our beds. The enemy is right inside us, in our own hearts and in our own heads.

Until we realise this our best politicians will continue this Quixotic tilting at windmills.

The fearful symmetry of Terre’Blanche and Malema

I don’t really have time for this, but the moment seems to insist. So:

I awoke this morning to a world framed as if by an immortal hand or eye.

The bludgeoning to death of Eugène Terre’Blanche together with the Zimbabwe public display by Julius Malema feels like a tableau arranged by a naughty god with idle hands.

Here’s the shape of it:

• Malema, on a Zanu-PF platform, admires the seizure of white owned farmland and sings “kill the boer” – catch his words here. This is on a Zanu-PF platform. That party spent much of the 1980′s ransacking the liberation pantry. Just as the last few goodies were being looted and eaten by the engorged Zanu-PF fat cats popular discontent started to escalate and began focusing itself on the ruling party. With no wealth left to buy off the masses, the Zanu-PF cronies turned to what was left of the productive economy: the commercial farming sector. The land was largely white owned.  Zanu-PF orchestrated the forceful invasion and seizure of the farms and commercial agriculture and foreign earnings collapsed.
• Terre’Blanche, who infamously, and almost on a whim, beat a black man into permanent brain damage,  is an icon of white supremacy – much diminished now and something of a joke; but undoubtedly sanctified by the manner of his death (it appears he was killed by young black labourers over a dispute about money). Already there is noise of a white backlash – although it is too early to say whether this should be taken seriously or not.

I don’t really need to say anything more. This story tells itself and it has its own energy … except perhaps it should be mentioned that Jacob Zuma has just attempted to mediate between the MDC and Zanu-PF – the history of Zanu-PF’s violent attempts to crush the MDC refers. Julius Malema is the President of the ANC Youth League – and I suspect someone more important and threatening than he first appears, as I argue here. Jacob Zuma is the president of the ANC and of the country and the SADC negotiator between the MDC and Zanu-PF … and Julius Malema refused to see the MDC while he was in Zimbabwe.

The hidden hand in service delivery protests

The local state – its politicians, agenda and bureaucracy, is under popular attack

It is starting to be whispered that there is a “hidden hand” in the service delivery protests*.

The problem (of the protests) is serious and threatening and government is starting to worry about high-profile violence during the World Cup.

These protest share a strong crossover constituency and architecture with the xenophobic violence that occurred May 2008. At that time, Thabo Mbeki’s spooks argued that a hidden hand was at work – in one bizarre version Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation was fingered as triggering the violence to punish the Mbeki government for some impenetrably Byzantine set of motivations.

This time around the speculation is that the spreading protests have something to do with Alliance tensions i.e. the conflict (endlessly discussed in these columns) is fueling service delivery protests – I suppose that would mean either the ANCYL or Cosatu/SACP using popular discontent against the sitting council dominated by either the leftists of the nationalists respectively.

To argue that Alliance tensions is the (or even a) main driver is a bit of a stretch. The protesters themselves foreground slow delivery of housing and the whole gamut of services (toilets, sewerage, water, refuse , telecommunications, roads) but also have a sharp focus on corruption, maladministration, nepotism – and therefore, indirectly, on cadre deployment.

From M&G – Modderfontein Road in Ivory Park after service delivery protests

The protests appear to be coordinated. They have similar beginnings: “elders” – or the moral equivalent -  meet in a town hall to discuss grievances; they decide to march to the municipal offices in the town centre; they carry placards about Eskom, housing, corrupt council officials; on the way they are joined by youth and the unemployed, and the march swells; somewhere near the edge of the town centre police stop the now more threatening and chaotic march; stones are thrown and rubber bullets fired; the protest breaks into smaller groups and spreads; councilors and council property are targeted and running skirmishes with the police occur over a few days; the ANC sends a SWAT team to the area and this team either moves against the council or stands firm against “anarchic” and “violent” protesters. At any point during this process the attention of the mob can turn to the foreigners – Zimbabweans, Malawians, Somalians , Mozambicans, Angolans, Nigerians and those from the DRC.

It has become something of a legend and commonly accepted “fact” by foreigners living in South African townships that post the World Cup and in the lead-up to the local government elections in 2011 the xenophobic violence will erupt on a scale beyond anything that has happened in the past.

The Davies-J Curve – the real hidden hand behind the violence

One of the reasons the government and the intelligence agencies are suspicious about the violence is that it occurs always in municipalities where there has been a degree of successful service delivery. The violence does not seem to happen in areas that are absolutely poor and unserved and have remained so for some time.

Interestingly this is precisely the situation predicted by US sociologist working in the late 1950′s, James C Davies. His theory is that rising expectations is related to the possibility of armed conflict but only when rising expectations – brought about by, for example, some degree of service delivery – meets a downturn. His theory became known as the Davies J-curve.

What happens is that when material and other conditions are improving, expectations rise faster than the individuals own situation. The system seems to be able to cope with this, except when there is a downturn of some kind – this is the sharply curved “Reality” line in the diagramme above.

This predictive framework (usefully discussed by the Centre for Security Studies here) almost perfectly mirrors what has happened in townships and poor municipalities since 1994. The violence seems to spike in early winter and it seems to be concentrated in areas that have had by-elections. In general it seems to be at its worst after national local government elections.

We must assume that in the lead up to such elections the ruling party and its councils push service delivery and the promise of service delivery. After the elections delivery collapses.

Thus the expectations are on an ascending path as the reality of delivery veers sharply downwards.

Violence results and often the weakest and poorest are both the victims and perpetrators of that violence.

* Orange Farm, Sedibeng, Siyathemba township in Balfour, Leandra, Lesilie, Oogies, Accornhoek near Bushbuckridge, Chochocho near White River in Mpumalanga, Protea-Glen, Dobsonville-Gardens in Soweto, Ennerdale in Fine Town, Reiger Park in the East Rand, Parys, Diepsloot, Attridgeville and Mamelodi – all names of service delivery protest hotspots culled from recent press reports. While I cannot place all these towns on a map (and am not even sure that some are not colloquial names for the same place) it seems clear that there is an unfolding crisis of governance in many of South Africa’s 283 municipalities , especially in the poorest, semi-rural communities.

Apartheid Reparations and Foreign Investment

Could IBM, Fujitsu, Ford, General Motors , Rheinmetall and Daimler be guilty of “knowing participation in and/or aiding and abetting of the crimes of apartheid; extrajudicial killing; torture; prolonged unlawful detention; and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”?

Should they be tried for this crime in a US federal court?

If they are found guilty should they jointly pay billions of dollars to a group of black South Africans who have brought the class action suit under the peculiarly named Alien Tort Claims Act in the New York federal court?

Here is a copy of the ‘Second Amended Complaint’ including a list of plaintiffs and defendants that is available on the Khulumani Support Group (an Apartheid victims support organisation) website. It spells out all the ways in which the plaintiffs believe each company or category of company became guilty of a crime by  bolstering, arming or funding the Apartheid regime. Note that since this time the list of defendants has been narrowed to those mentioned in the first paragraph of this post.

An interesting aspect of this fascinating drama is that Thabo Mbeki’s government openly opposed this case on the grounds:

1. it threatened South Africa’s sovereignty to try such a matter in a  US court, especially because the much praised domestic negotiation  had agreed that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the binding forum and chosen process;
2. it would discourage foreign investment.

Jacob Zuma, on the other hand, has removed government’s objections to the process and last year had Justice Minister Jeff Radebe write to the American court and tell it the South African government believed the US court to be “the appropriate” place in which to resolve the matter.

The Zuma regime was surprisingly joined by the Obama regime in endorsing the US court as the appropriate place for the motion to proceed. The amicus curiae brief the US government sent to the court is a useful summary of the facts of an extremely complicated matter and can be read in full here - I found the link on Simon Barber’s excellent “American Notes”  blog.

The go-ahead for the US court to hear the matter from both the US and the South African government is based primarily on the fact that while amnesty would have been the result of full participation in the TRC process, the defendants – and, in fact, most businesses operating in Apartheid South Africa – never participated in the process. Thus there was relatively minimal disclosure (at the TRC anyway) of business’ dealings with the Apartheid regime and hence no amnesty.

The founding myth of the Rainbow Nation is that we have dealt with the past and go into the future with knowledge and forgiveness. The case in the US federal court challenges this assumption and asks some extremely difficult questions that have consequences way beyond South Africa.

Here are some of the questions as I see them:

1. The TRC process failed in a number of ways; will cases like this one help redress the failure, or will they undo the few successes – with regard to reconciliation and forgiveness – the TRC did have?
2. The TRC process created a collective victim group and a collective perpetrator group in a way that allowed single people (including legal persons) to avoid carrying the can or receiving any significant compensation for Apartheid human rights abuses. Won’t legal processes with more clearly defined defendants and plaintiffs redress this?
3. Won’t raking the muck of the past continue to cause conflict and division, especially between black and white South Africans in the present and the future?
4. How does a publicly owned company that has operations across the globe assess risk associated with politics in the countries in which it operates – especially when oppressive governments are its direct clients and customers? Recent examples might include Nestle in Zimbabwe and Google in China.
5. If the domestic government is not a customer, it still sets a regulatory environment that might make the company guilty of an offence if it complies with the law. Yes?
6. Is disengagement from a particular country dominated by an oppressive government always the right approach?
7. What does this say for domestic businesses?
8. Should aspirant black business men and women have refused to accumulate capital in Apartheid South Africa – except as criminals?

The list of questions could probably go on ad-infinitum, but that will do as a start.

One thing you may have noticed I left off was the Mbeki government’s first objection based on the fact that such cases might deter foreign investment. Such cases might place more onerous due diligence requirements on any company that operates across borders and in countries where governments might become guilty of human rights abuses. No company is specifically going to punish an ANC led, democratic South Africa if a US court finds it culpable of bolstering the previous NP led Apartheid South Africa. It’s not logical and it is not in the company’s interests.

Pirates of Polokwane* Shaik their Booty

That was going to be my headline for the story I was going to write about the appointment of Mo Shaik to head the secret service.

I decided not to write about it. I simply can’t.

I was going to point out that the South African Secret Service is responsible for all non-military foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence functions. I was going to say that in the post-9/11 globalized world that makes SASS scary powerful.

I was going to gently hint to possible readers about Mo’s recent history of scheming mediocrity, of his Stalinist grandiosity and his few weeks training with the Stasi in the GDR in the 80′s that supposedly qualifies him for the job – but I realised the adjectives were over-the-top -  and detracted from the general story.

I wanted to remind readers that Mo brought his friend Cyril Beeka to Polokwane as his bodyguard. I was going to leave that out there like a mysterious depth charge …

Then there was Trevor Manuel squashing Mo at Polokwane, when Mo said there may be a place in Zuma’s government for Trevor, if only he could break his habits of thought.

It would have been useful to put in the quote from Trevor when he snapped back:

Your conduct is certainly not something in the tradition of the ANC. It is obvious you have no intention of becoming part of any elected collective within the organisation, yet you arrogate to yourself the role of determinant

Hmm, I was going to say that Trevor underestimated Mo …. but maybe he overestimated Zuma. I was going to ask you to consider what Trevor Manuel must be feeling now.

It would have been interesting to talk about the Mandla Judson Kuzwayo Unit of the ANC underground and Operation Bible and Nkobi Holdings – and Mo’s central role in the Heffer Commission in 2003. But what could I say about these things that would stand up in court?

It would have been important to describe  Mo Shaik’s role in the struggle (by the now ruling ANC faction) to prevent Jacob Zuma facing corruption charges. Or his more general role in backing Zuma’s rise to the presidency.

And I would have liked to remind us of the damage done to our politics by a partisan security establishment – and by loyalist appointments.

Then I would have had to go into Mo Shaik’s tight relationship with brother’s Chippy and Shabir – I don’t really know much about Yunus.

It almost would not have been necessary to mention that Chippy headed SANDF defence procurements – the heart of the arms-deal scandal.

And of course the “dying”  convicted fraudster Shabir needs no introduction – not in his role in bribing Jacob Zuma and not in his preferential access to arms deal contracts through his relationship with Chippy and Zuma.

But then I realised I am just too discomforted to talk about this without drowning the criticism in hyperbole.

Would I be able to avoid words and phrases like “bombastic”, “mediocre”, “quasi-criminal”, “political bully” when talking about this and similar appointments?

Who cares if I think this is the first serious public sign of a deep and threatening  malaise in the ANC government?

So I decided I wouldn’t write anything about it until I had calmed down and taken a deep breath.

So I didn’t.

* See the incomparable Zapiro’s “Pirates of Polkwane”

(PS – added on October 5: the DA comment published on Politicsweb is unusually good. See it here.)

SA pushed to do more on Zimbabwe by Clinton?

Let’s see how that plays…

The Voice of America says US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, will, in her meeting with ”senior South African officials” in Pretoria today:

  push South Africa to do more to counter embattled President Robert Mugabe’s negative effect on the Zimbabwe reform process.

South Africa under Thabo Mbeki would have bridled and gritted its teeth at the implied imperialist bullying. Word might have gone out that the USA was seeking regime change in South Africa through a delicate and implacable process of  setting Thabo Mbeki up for failure, by isolating the South Africans from the African fraternity, by undermining sovereignty …. oh, whatever! It was always impossible to understand Mbeki’s coded warnings about the shenanigans of the imperialists.

The point is, I suppose, Thabo Mbeki’s administration was deeply suspicious of the USA, the UK and of European intentions and actions in Southern Africa. The Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe was constantly hinted to be a front for various combinations of imperialists interests, as were the Kroll trained Scorpions of the National Prosecuting Authority.

It would be naive to imagine that the CIA and MI5 do not have significant interests and intentions in Southern Africa – and some capacity to work towards their objectives. The subject of a later post will be the rise of intelligence services in the post 9/11 world in which the cyberuniverse contains endless information lodes that are both deposited and mined by these intelligence agencies.

But seriously, are we to think of whatever Hilary Clinton says today about South Africa and Zimbabwe and the role of Mad Bob and the MDC as part of a grand imperialist plan for our region?

The first answer is “no” because the USA and their intelligence services have demonstrated that 1.) they have bigger problems to worry about and Southern Africa without oil and without Muslim fundamentalists does not warrant that kind of attention; 2.) their intelligence capacity and ability to manipulate world affairs has been shown to be less formidable than one might have expected –  as revealed by that country’s endless bungling in the Middle-East.

The second answer is “yes’ (to the question: does the USA have a plan for this region?). As the world’s policeman the USA is obliged to have an opinion and a strategy about everything. Zimbabwe, while not very high on the list of concerns and objectives of US foreign policy does touch on several strands of US concern in the sub-continent. South Africa represents a major chunk of Africa’s GDP, Angola, with significant US oil interests, has the potential to be drawn into Zimbabwean affairs, Zimbabwe itself sits on the greatest unexploited Platinum reserves and China has a significant and growing interest in, and relationship with, the region. US foreign policy must ultimately focus on the long term and the long term is all about the containment of China.

But at another level it can be unproductive to comb everything that Clinton says today or fails to say for evidence of, and guides to, the deep strategic thinking of the Great Dragon. In diplomacy and the world of the spook the search for hidden meaning and intentions can become self-fulfilling. Clinton is settling into her office and Obama is still carving his role in the world and in Africa. These are not simple or obvious matters and there is undoubtedly a degree of exploration that still needs to take place before “grand strategies” can be unfurled.

I await further reports of her meeting with interest.