Posts Tagged ‘African National Congress’

The Decline Of Johannesburg

Saturday, February 22nd, 2025

Of all the transitions to majority rule in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa’s was probably the most successful, with the Apartheid regime coming to a negotiated end rather than a violent bloodbath.

But thirty years of African National Congress rule, either solo or in coalition, find South Africa undergoing a gradual collapse toward Sub-Saharan standards, as seen in this France 24 video on the decline of Johannesburg.

  • “Johannesburg, once the economic powerhouse of all of Africa. But over the last 20 years the city, has fallen into decay, the inner city streets are lined with trash, potholes, and degraded footpaths. And broken infrastructure has led to contaminated rivers and wasted drinking water.”
  • “Adele is part of a resident crisis committee. She says her complaints to the council about broken pipes often go unheard.” “Now we just have rivers of excrement and trash.”
  • These an upstream river trash catch facility that’s been broken for two years.
  • “Johannesburg restricted access to tap water for residents in November, but more than a third of available drinking water is wasted from broken infrastructure.”
  • “The African National Congress has been bleeding support in Johannesburg since 2016, leading to chaotic coalitions. Infighting and opportunism which has seen the city ruled by ten different mayors over the last five years. With each change of mayor, infrastructure contracts are often abandoned and administration staff are fired. On top of that, corruption has plagued the mayoral committee during the tender process.”
  • There’s some high-minded blather about separating the bidding process from politics. Good luck with that.
  • “The decay of Johannesburg goes beyond broken pipes and sink holes. In the city center, entire 15-story buildings are hijacked by criminal syndicates or squatters who refuse to pay for services or rent.” Gangs will just dump bodies in the building to let them rot in place.

    • When competent government and dedication to the rule of law gives way to a spoils system, decay inevitably follows, either in Johannesburg or in America’s deep blue inner cities…

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, video, Waste and Fraud | 4 Comments »

    Mangosuthu Buthelezi, RIP

    Sunday, September 10th, 2023

    South African Zulu leader and key figure in helping end apartheid Mangosuthu Buthelezi has died at age 95.

    Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a towering figure in South African politics and outspoken Zulu chief, has died at the age of 95.

    During the racist apartheid regime, he founded the Zulu Inkatha [Freedom] party after becoming disillusioned with the African National Congress (ANC).

    Thousands were killed in clashes between supporters of the two parties in the early 1990s.

    But he was later welcomed back into the fold, serving as President Nelson Mandela’s minister of home affairs.

    Chief Buthelezi was a shrewd but controversial politician, who disagreed with the ANC’s tactics of armed action against white-minority rule and trod a moderate path as leader of an ethnic-Zulu homeland.

    He was opposed to international sanctions on South Africa, arguing that they would only harm the country’s black majority.

    Buthelezi was a key figure in ending apartheid, not only as ancestral leader of the Zulu nation, the largest ethnic group in South Africa, but also as elected leader of the (at the time) KwaZulu bantustan homeland. Both he and his Inkatha Freedom Party were strongly pro-Western, pro-capitalist and anticommunist, as opposed to the ANC, who were unabashed allies of the South African Communist Party. The ANC itself was riddled with communist sympathizers, including Mandela’s wife Winnie, who was a real piece of work, and who advocated “necklacing” ANC’s political opponents by setting fire to gasoline-filled tires around their neck.

    Despite this, Buthelezi insisted that Nelson Mandela’s release was a precondiction for a political solution in South Africa.

    For decades, the Soviet Union had been funding communist revolutionary organizations around the world, the economic strain of which was one of the many factors (along with communism’s horrible economic inefficiency and low oil prices) that forced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to institute perestroika and glasnost. Those dire economic straits meant the Soviets could no longer afford to fund their “franchise for totalitarianism” program for communist parties in Africa and elsewhere.

    The combination of Soviet bankruptcy, Buthelezi’s insistence on a peaceful, democratic and capitalistic post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s moderation, and South African President F. W. de Klerk belief that apartheid was unsustainable all came together to allow South Africa a peaceful transition to majority rule.

    For all the troubles South Africa has experienced over the last 40 years, it has fared far better than the like of Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola, and Buthelezi’s influence was a big factor in making South Africa’s transition a peaceful one.

    I met Buthelezi at a 1987 Dallas-area conference put on by the Landrum Society, a conservative group founded (I think) by Dallas Morning News columnist William Murchison. Buthelezi struck me as a smart, dignified man.

    In addition to his political work, he also got to play his own ancestor in the classic film Zulu. How cool is that?

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy | 8 Comments »

    South Africa Burning

    Wednesday, July 14th, 2021

    Though there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of this among the American MSM, those who watched the #antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots unfold in real time will find what’s going on in South Africa familiar:

    The death toll in South Africa has risen to 72 as violence continues across the country following the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma.

    Crowds looting and setting alight shopping centres clashed with police in several cities on Tuesday.

    The BBC filmed a baby being thrown from a building in Durban that was on fire after ground-floor shops were looted.

    A day earlier, 10 people were killed in a stampede during looting at a shopping centre in Soweto.

    The military have been deployed to help police overstretched since the unrest began last week.

    South African police said in a statement they had identified 12 people suspected of provoking the riots, and that a total of 1,234 people had been arrested.

    If officials are actually arresting rioters, that would be a significant difference from how many Democrat-run cities and counties (especially those with George Soros-backed DAs) handled last summer’s riots.

    President Cyril Ramaphosa has called it some of the worst violence witnessed in South Africa since the 1990s, before the end of apartheid, with fires started, highways blocked and businesses and warehouses looted in major cities and small towns in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces.

    Ministers have warned that if looting continues, there is a risk areas could run out of basic food supplies soon – but have ruled out declaring a state of emergency.

    Post-apartheid South Africa was a relative success story for Sub-Saharan Africa, especially compared to places like Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The collapse of communism allowed F. W. de Klerk to negotiate an end to apartheid with Nelson Mandela and transition to majority rule. But the ruling African National Congress party has long been plagued with rising crime rates and charges of widespread corruption. Indeed, corruption charges against Zuma preceded his ascension to the presidency. Successor Ramaphosa has promised to stamp out corruption…while being accused of corruption himself.

    Riots over the arrest of political figures is a sign of a tribal, post-liberal social order. They start as “peaceful protests” and then almost instantly descend into sprees of arson and looting. More than 100 mobile phone towers have been destroyed, which sounds less like a political protest and more like blood-red anarchy. And now there are reports of food shortages. “Kwanalu, the KwaZulu-Natal agricultural union, estimates the losses for the provincial farming community to be in the hundreds of millions of rands.”

    In a post-national tribal atmosphere, violence ceases to be a choice of last resort and becomes a tool to address every resentment, to be resorted to to win every argument. And this is the future that Social justice and Critical Race Theory are helping bring our way…

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Social Justice Warriors | 5 Comments »