Ramaphosa Elected President Of ANC: South African Rand Soars 4%, Biggest Jump In 2 Years

Update 2: It"s all over, and the best case outcome is now fact, with Cyril Ramaphosa elected president of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress on Monday.

• CYRIL RAMAPHOSA ELECTED PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA"S ANC


• RAMAPHOSA GETS 2440 VOTES IN S.AFRICA"S ANC LEADERSHIP VOTE

Ramaphosa victory threatens President Jacob Zuma’s grip on power after the most divisive vote in the party’s history. Ramaphosa, the deputy president, defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Zuma’s former wife, whom the president had backed. As the FT notes, it is widely speculated that Mr Zuma lent Ms Dlamini-Zuma his support because he believed that as state president she would protect him from prosecution in a corruption case.

Meanwhile, Ramaphosa campaigned on a promise to root out corruption and save the ANC from losing its majority for the first time at the 2019 election.

During his campaign, Ramaphosa made thinly veiled attacks on Mr Zuma’s relationship with the Gupta family, who are accused of using their friendship with the president to influence cabinet appointments and state business, and promised to root out corrupt ANC officials. Mr Zuma and the Guptas have denied allegations of corruption.

As charted below, the South African rand surged against the US dollar on the announcement of Mr Ramaphosa’s victory, higher by more than 4% on the day, its biggest one day gain in over two years. 

“The country outside the 5,000 ANC delegates has breathed a huge sigh of relief,” said Lawson Naidoo, executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, which has campaigned against the perceived attack on independent institutions under Mr Zuma. “We can now put a break on the downward slide of South African politics and economics,” he said.

Ramaphosa, a former union leader who used his ANC ties to become one of South Africa’s richest black businessmen in the post-apartheid period, was seen as the candidate most able to unite business and the government to reignite the economy, which has ground to a halt under Mr Zuma.

* * *

Update: not so fast - according to News 24, a recount for the ANC presidency is underway, adding that "NDZ"s camp insisted on recount after she lost the vote, they say. That may cause the delay in announcement."

Update: a recount for ANC president is underway, say 3 sources with knowledge. NDZ"s camp insisted on recount after she lost the vote, they say. That may cause the delay in announcement. #ANC54 (@AdriaanBasson)

— Team News24 (@TeamNews24) December 18, 2017

* * *

The South African currency and local equities soared on Monday amid investor hopes that pro-reform candidate Cyril Ramaphosa has won a victory in the ruling ANC’s leadership contest. While the South African Rand suffered a bumpy start to the day as it became clear that the vote would go down to the wire, shedding all of its early gains. The ZAR has since soared, enjoying its biggest one-day gain in over two years, as ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu told journalists he was confident Ramaphosa had a clear majority.

With official results expected shortly, the rand is now over 4% higher on the day, rising as high as 12.56 against the dollar.

The rand"s ascent accelerated following Reuters headlines suggesting that Ramaphosa appeared a near-certain winner:

• ANC LEADERSHIP CANDIDATE RAMAPHOSA GRINNING ON STAGE, HUGGING SENIOR ANC OFFICIALS - REUTERS WITNESS


• SOUTH AFRICA"S ANC CHAIRWOMAN SAYS "THE ANNOUNCEMENT WILL BE IN FIVE TO TEN MINUTES"


• ANC LEADERSHIP CANDIDATE DLAMINI-ZUMA SITTING CALMLY ON SEAT - REUTERS WITNESS


• ANC DELEGATES BREAK OUT IN SONG AND DANCE BEFORE EXPECTED LEADERSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT

In addition to the currency, the country’s government bonds also gained, with yields on 10-year debt sliding 21.6 bps to 8.914%. Meanwhile, among stocks, banks were the biggest beneficiaries on South Africa’s equity markets, with the FTSE Johanessburg Stock Exchange index of bank stocks rising 6.6% to the highest level on record.

Readers can watch a live stream of the ANC"s 54th national election here.

Rand Tumbles After South African President Zuma Survives "No Confidence" Vote

National assembly speaker (and purported replacement) Baleka Mbete"s secret no-confidence vote has failed to oust South African President Zuma.

Speaker of Parliament Baleka Mbete shocked South Africans Monday when she announced her decision to allow the vote to proceed on a secret ballot, which would allow party members to vote against their leader outside the public spotlight.

"I understand and accept that a motion of no confidence in the president is a very important matter, a potent tool toward holding the president to account," she said at a press briefing Monday in Cape Town. She did not take questions from reporters.

The no confidence vote, she said, "constitutes one of the severest political consequences imaginable" and her decision to allow the vote to proceed anonymously is "about putting the resilience of our democratic institution to test."

Mbete needed 201 votes (Zuma"s ANC dominates the Parliament with 249 out of 400 seats and so for the motion to pass, at least 50 party members would have to defect to the opposition - something that has never happened before in a party that defeated South Africa"s apartheid system and is known for its loyalty).

However, some have argued that the number is lower. If the need arises, National Assembly will seek legal opinion on whether majority in no-confidence motion on President Jacob Zuma is based on number of seats in assembly or if vacancies in NA should be subtracted, Speaker Baleka Mbete tells lawmakers in Cape Town.

• Mbete says simple majority to be calculated as 201, or 50% plus one seat of 400 seats in National Assembly.


• Democratic Alliance, which is the main opposition party, argues seats should exclude 5 vacancies, which takes total number of seats to 395 and lowers majority needed to pass the motion

South African lawmakers began to cast their votes at 1043am ET (ZAR had leaked very modestly lower into the start of the vote).

Voting finished at 1150ET and the count began (as lawmakers squabbled over constitutional details).

Counting finished at 1235ET. ZAR dropped on the riging on the 5-minute warning bells.

The result:

Motion of no confidence in South African President Jacob Zuma was defeated by 198 votes against 177 supporting it, Baleka Mbete, the speaker of the National Assembly, announces at a sitting in Cape Town.

9 of the 384 members in the assembly, where the ANC has a 62% majority, abstained

The reaction is clear... The Rand tumbled...

Zuma will now retain his position as ANC president until his tenure ends in December. His term as president of the country runs through 2019.

ANC STATEMENT ON VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY #NoConfidence #ZumaVote #SecretBallot pic.twitter.com/kNVTdMS24n

— Year of OR Tambo (@MYANC) August 8, 2017

Here’s How To “Go Long” Africa

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

About a month ago, the South African government raised the minimum threshold for black ownership of mining companies from 26% to 30%.

It"s called "black empowerment" or "affirmative action" and is intended to provide black people with greater access to wealth, education, and to correct the inequality created by the white-led government who relinquished power in 1994 - 23 years ago.

I got a message from a buddy who runs a global macro fund, asking me for my opinion on buying the selloff which naturally occurred in the South African mining stocks. I"ll provide you with the gist of my response here. I"ll speak about South Africa but much of what applies to SA applies to the entire continent.

I know a thing or two about Africa - the natural consequence of being a "child of the land" and having traveled the continent extensively and done business there.

Obviously, I don"t know everything, maybe even a whole lot, but here"s what I do know.

The bright spots in Africa, as dim as they are, are mean reverting. What this means is that - despite what the social justice warriors may tell you or the do-gooders with an immense sense of civic pomposity who try to convince us all that"s required to fix Africa"s problems is a kind heart and a healthy donation - this is not only counterproductive, but actively destructive.

The problem is that, unlike in the West where your donation to Sally-Ann next door (who"s raising money for a homeless shelter, or that new football club for your local community) actually finds its way to the intended cause, this never happens in Africa. The kids will still have flies on their faces but the army will have bigger guns and Swiss bankers will get to upgrade their Audis.

An entire industry has sprung up around this nonsense with NGOs, and, of course you and I don"t have a say in the money forcefully taken from us via taxation and given to these sclerotic and parasitic organisations such as the UN, which is nothing more than a power station for converting money into nothing at all.

What we do have a say in is where we place our investment dollars so this article deals with that.

The Path

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but when an African dictator is overthrown... usually by a well intentioned liberator, he, at least for the first few years, is treated as a hero... those well intentioned liberators quickly become dictators themselves. Nobody seems to realise this even though it happens with greater consistency than gravy.

Nelson Mandela was a rare divergence from this trend, but if you cared to look under the covers, you"d have noticed that those surrounding him were, without exception complete lunatics. The country went from being governed by white lunatics to having a generation of relative calm, but is now hurtling rapidly towards the abyss. It"s now governed by a new set of lunatics - this time black. It"s said that it only takes a generation to go from civilisation to barbarism, and South Africa is a fascinating case in point.

The discovery that the schools, universities, and the country are being run by farm animals is plain for everyone to see, though it"s considered highly racist to say so. Stupid is as stupid says no matter the colour of your skin.

Consider the Farm Animals in Charge

President Jacob Zuma:

This continent is the biggest continent in the world. All continents put together will fit into Africa.

Someone fetch this man an atlas please...

ANC MP:

Not all that visit our beautiful country come with the right intention, as they did 2,000 years ago by the person named van Riebeeck. He overstayed.

Here he"s referring to Jan Van Riebeek, who was a Dutch colonialist who founded Cape Town. Jan was born in 1619 and died in 1677. 2,000 years?

KwaZulu-Natal MEC Nomusa Dube:

We will do an investigation and talk to the Department of Science and Technology on what is the cause of the lightning, and if it only happened to the previously-disadvantaged as I have never seen any white people being struck by lightning.

I kid you not when I say that medieval thinking is prevalent. Fellow hedgies don"t believe me... until they go and actually live there and only then they do.

EFF leader Julius Malema:

There’s no system that has worked successfully for Africans, except the Zimbabwean system.

Well, I guess it really depends on what you"re trying to achieve.

If the outright collapse of your economy, the murder of those with business skills and knowledge, which in Africa largely means white people, and the impoverishment of an entire nation is your objective, then yeah sure it"s the best system ever.

President Jacob Zuma:

A shower would minimise the risk of contracting the disease (HIV/AIDS).

Someone spread the word! Install showers everywhere. Why, oh why, didn"t we think of trying that?

Former Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang:

Shall I repeat garlic, shall I talk about beetroot, shall I talk about lemon… these delay the development of HIV to Aids-defining conditions, and that’s the truth.

Got it! Garlic, beetroot, lemon, and showers - dynamite combination. Someone bottle this and patent it quick because GlaxoSmithKline will pay you millions for the recipe.

God expects us to rule this country because we are the only organisation which was blessed by pastors when it was formed. It is even blessed in Heaven. That is why we will rule until Jesus comes back. We should not allow anyone to govern our city [Cape Town] when we are ruling the country.

Anytime someone refers to a celestial power of any description providing them authority over you, you can be damn sure they"re delusional. Ask yourself this: if you were seated on a bus next to someone who turned to you and said that he"d been getting messages from God, Allah, Yahweh, or whatever their chosen celestial dictator, would you want to move closer or further away?

The late minister of safety and security, and the former minister of justice and constitutional development, Penuell Maduna were confronted with a statistic that said “one person is raped in South Africa every 26 seconds” on the American television program “60 minutes”. And in the typical ANC way, they attempted, but embarrassingly debunked the obvious rape problem of South Africa as exaggerated. See their illogical and indiscreet response beneath:

“We’ve been standing here for 26 seconds and nobody has been raped.”

Like almost all government "plans" affirmative action does the exact opposite of what we"re told it"s intended to do. It solidifies racism as a policy and awards and punishes people based not on their skills, intellect, or talents but on their skin colour which is by its very definition racism.

As a result, people fill positions when they are wholly unqualified to do so. What those who support the concept of affirmative action fail to understand is that equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcomes. It"s Atlas Shrugged in real time.

Is there a solution?

Of course, but it"s unlikely to be used.

The truth is the Europeans cocked up Africa when colonising it by ramming differing cultures and ethnic groups together into what are today referred to as "countries" but the various ethnic groups that exist bear no resemblance to any of these countries. It"s why Africa"s borders will continue to be redrawn. This normally involves the sort of problems involving men running around blowing chunks out of each other with heavy artillery, or chopping each other up with pangas ( the name for machetes  in Africa).

South Africa is in the process of mean reverting to look like its neighbouring countries north of the border. Until or unless South Africa, and indeed much of the rest of Africa, develop an entirely new framework beginning with redrawn borders and including a system allowing for the creation of collateral, we"re fighting an uphill battle and the trend is most certainly not our friend.

The truth is Africa, like much of the Middle East, will continue to lurch from one disaster to another. This is unsurprising since the thing these regions share with one another is that their political, economic, social, and cultural systems are by all accounts medieval. They"re completely backward and destructive.

How to "Go Long" South Africa (and Africa in General)

Speculating after the inevitable crashes can yield double digit returns but not without risk, and make sure you don"t overstay your welcome. Investing for the long haul, on the other hand, is betting against the underlying fundamentals and trends and only likely to bring you more pain than a good dose of genital sores.

The way to play it is by using old fashioned logic. Africa will continue to be run by people not slightly but profoundly unqualified to walk your dog let alone manage a country.

What this means is that the supply of stupidity will increase as will the steady volume of refugees who will head for the welcoming arms of Merkel"s Europe, the welfare benefits, and the soft life that Africa could only hope to provide. They"ll do this after finding they have no idea how to run businesses they"ve been given and finding themselves hungry and in danger from the inevitable tribal and ethnic conflicts which erupt under such conditions. This will continue.

What it means is that what Africa produces, other than misery, will go through continuous bouts of supply problems. This will be reflected in their currencies. You can short them on run ups and buy them for a bounce on the inevitable crashes.

Here is the Greenback vs the South African rand:

But the best way to play Africa is to buy the stuff they produce since it"s a given that it will come under all sorts of constraints such as affirmative action, nationalisation, outright theft like in Zimbabwe, and any number of other harebrained schemes that they come up with.

Gold, cobalt, platinum, coffee - you get the picture. This is I believe the safest way to play Africa and right now may not be a bad time to "go long Africa".

- Chris

"We learn from history that we don"t learn from history!" ? Desmond Tutu

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Zimbabwe 2.0: South Africa President Proposes Land "Expropriation Without Compensation"

With every passing day the formerly booming nation of South Africa is getting ever closer to the formerly banana republic of Zimbabwe.

On Wednesday, South Africa"s ruling African National Congress proposed at its 5th annual national policy conference that in addition to potentially nationalizing the country"s central bank, that land expropriation without compensation should be allowed where it is "necessary and unavoidable," President Jacob Zuma said.

There was a hard push from supporters of President Jacob Zuma for a decision on the redistribution of land without compensation‚ which would necessitate a change to the constitution. But as the Sunday Times reported, according to the ANC’s economic transformation subcommittee head‚ Enoch Godongwana‚ both this proposal and the current system of redistribution with compensation remain on the table for debate by branches. Zuma‚ however‚ hinted in his closing address that there could be legislative changes for expropriation without compensation.

“We agree on the imperative to accelerate land redistribution and land reform. Again we had robust discussions on the modalities to achieve this. We agree that using the fiscus for land redistribution must be accompanied by other measures if we are to achieve the goal at the required pace,” said Zuma in his closing remarks at the six-day conference held in Johannesburg.

“Where it is necessary and unavoidable this might include expropriation without compensation‚” Zuma said.

As discussed several months ago, land will be a key issue ahead of a December conference where a successor to Zuma will be chosen. The two current frontrunners are Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, former African Union chair and Zuma"s ex-wife. As a reminder, Dlamini-Zuma has made land redistribution from whites to blacks without compensation one of her main policies.

The policy conference - which has been the top news item in South Africa for the past six days - made a dramatic turn-around and ditched the term "white monopoly capital" as being the main hindrance to the rapid socio-economic transformation of the black majority. Most of the delegates appeared to have given President Jacob Zuma and his supporters the thumbs down on this issue. They have recently used the term "white monopoly capital" in what appears to be an attempt to regain lost support among the masses.

"Nine out of those eleven commissions said the phenomenon of monopoly capital is a global one and it manifests itself differently in various parts of the globe and therefore it would not be correct to characterize ours simply as white monopoly capital," said Joel Netshitenze of the ANC"s national executive committee.

* * *

Ordinary South Africans are meanwhile keeping close tabs on the policy conference, adamant that the ANC come up with solutions to overcome deep poverty, the uncontrollable rise in unemployment and inequality.

The ANC should once again become "the party that people voted for so many years ago," says Mbali Nyando, lamenting that 22 years into democracy, the living conditions of the people, black people in particular, are "deteriorating rather than improving."

Bheki Khumalo told DW that the ANC should focus on unemployment, a "major issue among the black people." People are unemployed, hungry and they have lost hope, he says, appealing to the ANC to work more closely with entrepreneurs.

And if South Africa decides to follow in Zimbabwe"s footsteps, the already hopeless people will be even hungrier and even more unemployed.

The American Architects Of The South-African Catastrophe

Yes, it has happened. A mere 23 years after the 1994 transition, in South Africa, to raw ripe democracy, six years following the publication of a wide-ranging analysis of that catastrophe, Into the Cannibal"s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, a Beltway libertarian think tank has convened to address the problem that is South Africa.

The reference is to an upcoming CATO “Policy Forum,” euphemized as “South Africa at a Crossroad.” One of the individuals to headline the “Forum” is Princeton Lyman, described in a CATO email tease as having “served as the U.S. Ambassador to South Africa at the time of the transfer of power from white minority to black majority.” At the “Forum,” former ambassador Lyman will be discussing “America’s original hopes for a new South Africa and the extent to which America’s expectations have been left unfulfilled.” (Italics added.)

The chutzpah!

The CATO Institute’s disappointment in the South Africa the United States helped bring about is nothing compared to the depredations suffered by South Africans, due to America’s insistence that their country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed.

Aborted Attempts at South African Decentralization

This audacity of empire is covered in a self-explanatory chapter of Into the Cannibal’s Pot, titled “The Anglo-American Axis of Evil,” in which Lyman makes a cameo. (It’s not flattering.) From the comfort of the CATO headquarters, in 2017, the former ambassador will also be pondering whether “growing opposition will remove the African National Congress [ANC] from power.” The mindset of the DC establishment, CATO libertarians included, has it that changing the guard  —replacing one strongman with another — will fix South Africa, or any other of the sites of American foreign-policy interventions. 

So, what exactly did Princeton Nathan Lyman do on behalf of America in South Africa? Or, more precisely, who did he sideline? 

Ronald Reagan, who favored “constructive engagement” with South Africa, foresaw the chaos and carnage of an abrupt transition of power. So did the South Africans Fredrick van Zyl Slabbert, RIP (he died in May 2010), and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The first was leader of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, who, alongside the late, intrepid Helen Suzman became the PFP’s chief critic of Nationalist policy (namely Apartheid). The second was Chief Minister of the KwaZulu homeland and leader of the Zulu people and their Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). At the time, Buthelezi was the only black leader with any mass following who could act as a counter to the ANC. These men were not “lunch-pail liberals” from the West, but indigenous, classical liberal Africans — one white, one black — who understood and loved the county of their ancestors and wished to safeguard it for their posterity.

Both Buthelezi and Slabbert had applied their astringent minds to power-sharing constitutional dispensations. Both leaders were bright enough to recognize democracy for the disaster it would bring to a country as divided as theirs; they understood that “a mass-based black party that received enough votes could avoid having to enter into a coalition and could sweep aside the minority vote.” Thus, Buthelezi espoused a multi-racial, decentralized federation, in which “elites of the various groups” would “agree to share executive power and abide by a system of mutual vetoes and spheres of communal autonomy.” Paramount to Buthelezi was “the preservation of the rights of cultural groups and the protection of minorities.” Slabbert studied a “new system that entrenched individual rights, encouraged power-sharing through a grand coalition of black and white parties, and gave a veto right to minorities in crucial issues.”

Although he eventually threw his intellectual heft behind simple majority rule, in better days, Slabbert had spoken with circumspection about “unrestrained majoritarianism,” expressing the eminently educated opinion that, were majority rule to be made an inevitable corollary of South Africa’s political system, the outcomes would be severely undemocratic. It’s worth considering that even Zimbabwe for its first seven, fat years of independence, allowed “white members of parliament [to be] elected on a special roll to represent white interests.”

Washington Destroyed South African Federalism Before It Began

In his tome, Partner to History: The US Role in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy (2002), Princeton Lyman, the American Ambassador to South Africa from 1992 to 1995, records the active role Americans performed in the transition to democracy, especially in “dissuading spoilers” — the author’s pejorative, it would appear, for perfectly legitimate partners to the negotiations. One such partner, introduced above, was Buthelezi; another was military hero and former chief of the Defense Force, Constand Viljoen.

Avoid “wrecking the process”: This ultimatum was the message transmitted to the Afrikaner general and the African gentleman, loud and clear. The United States, with Lyman in the lead, failed to lean on the African National Congress (Nelson Mandela’s goons) to accommodate a federal structure. It promised merely to hold a future South African government to its “pre-election commitments, including shared power and the protection of minorities.” Until then, the skeptical Buthelezi was instructed to trust the ANC to relinquish the requisite power. Enraged, Buthelezi threatened to take his case to the American people and “spotlight” the knavish confederacy between their government and the ANC. (Then, Republicans were generally with Buthelezi, Democrats with the ANC. These days, both parties are with the ANC.) Being the man Prime Minister, F. W. de Klerk was not, Buthelezi rejected the pressure and overtures from the West. “I am utterly sick of being told how wrong I am by a world out there,” he wrote to Lyman. The dispensation being hatched was “an instrument for the annihilation of KwaZulu.”

Viljoen, who represented the hardliner Afrikaners and the security forces, believed de Klerk had abdicated his responsibilities to this electorate. He planned on leading a coalition that would have deposed the freelancing de Klerk and negotiated for an Afrikaner ethnic state. Likewise, Buthelezi, whose championship of self-determination had been denied, was fed up to the back teeth with being sidelined. He and his Zulu impis were every bit as fractious as Viljoen; every bit as willing to fight for their rightful corner of the African Eden. For setting his sights on sovereignty, the Zulu royal and his following (close on twenty percent of the population) were condemned as reactionaries by the West (and by CATO’s point person).

Hardly a dog of an American commentator missed the opportunity to lift his leg in protest against Buthelezi, for making common cause with Afrikaner decentralists and against the ANC. “Wreckers” is how the gray eminence of American newspapers — The New York Times, also known as “Pravda on the Hudson” — dubbed the two leaders and the millions whom they represented. The two, alleged the Times in a 1994 editorial, were locked in an “unscrupulous alliance to disrupt the first elections in South Africa in which all races will have a vote.” Following the might-makes-right maxim — and committing a non sequitur in the process — Times editorialists demanded that the leaders of these African and Afrikaner ethnic minorities relinquish demands for sovereign status because their political power was at best “anemic.” Meanwhile the Times dismissed Buthelezi as a puppet in Pretoria’s blackface minstrelsy.

This was drivel. Buthelezi, a crafty leader who had rejected “the ignoble independence accorded to other homelands” within apartheid’s framework, was never a collaborator. Understand: For two centuries Africans and Afrikaners had been clashing and alternately collaborating on the continent. Shaka (1787–1828), Dingane (1795–1840), Mpande (1798–1872), Cetshwayo (1826–1884) — Buthelezi was heir to these Zulu kings who had been wheeling, dealing, and warring with Boers well before the inception of The New York Times.

Masters of mass mobilization, the ANC used the political tinderbox ignited in the ramp-up to the first democratic elections to great effect in discrediting the security forces, and claiming that the apartheid government was fomenting the intra-ethnic violence between Inkatha (Zulu) and the ANC (Xhosa). But while the ANC accused the security forces of arming Inkatha, the latter faction blamed the security forces for allying themselves with the ANC, especially when Zulu hostels and squatter camps were raided in response to ANC pressure. For the National Party government, the ongoing ethnic conflict was a lose-lose proposition.

But not for the savvy ANC.

Nelson Mandela harnessed the situation by accusing Prime Minister de Klerk of “either complicity or of not caring enough about black deaths” to stop black-on-black violence. The foreign press helped fuse fact with fancy by transmitting this claim, later to be dismissed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (That body eventually determined that there was “little evidence of a centrally directed, coherent and formally instituted third force.”) Nevertheless, a constellation of unfavorable circumstances was aligned against Buthelezi, who capitulated in the end.

Buthelezi was the intellectual bête noire of the communist ANC — and one of the few leaders in South Africa to mine the Western canon widely and wisely for what it teaches about liberty and the dangers of centralizing political power. He cited with characteristic passion and poignancy, in July 2009, a poem (“The Second Coming”) that W. B. Yeats wrote in January 1919:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …

In contrast to what South Africa became, the United States is a country where the constitution was supposed to thwart the tyranny of the majority. This averting was meant to occur by means of a federal structure, in which powers are divided and dispersed between — and within — a central government and the constituent states. Yet the Americans sided with the ANC — the consequence of which has been the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party. 

Why Is South Africa Being Stirred Up?

Authored by Alexander Mezyaev via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Since the middle of February, the internal political situation in South Africa has worsened once again. During South African president Jacob Zuma’s annual address to the country’s parliament, the main opposition parties, primarily the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters, became rowdy and delayed the president’s speech for an hour. For security reasons, the parliament building was surrounded not by the police, as it was last year, but by  the SADF staff.

The opposition parties know they are not in a position to take power democratically, so the only choice they have is to destabilise the situation in the country. To be more precise, this means provoking bloodshed and seeing it through to a regime change. The actions of the parliamentary Economic Freedom Fighters party – insulting the country’s president or the parliamentary speaker and behaving like clowns – only seem like hooliganism at first glance. In fact, the tactic is intended to bring different segments of the population into conflict with each other and cause riots that will lead to fatalities. In the meantime, the Economic Freedom Fighters have so far done nothing to try and achieve their declared objectives legislatively. One of the main points of their political programme was the nationalisation of land without compensation, but while the Freedom Fighters were raising an uproar, a bill to change the Land Act, which provides for such nationalisation, was put forward by the African National Congress. This initiative of the ruling party led to even more ferocious attacks being launched against it by the Democratic Alliance, which represents the interest of local and transnational monopoly capital.

On 22 February, the High Court of North Gauteng (where the country’s government is located), ruled in the case brought by the Democratic Alliance that South Africa’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is «unconstitutional and invalid». What’s more, the court ordered President Zuma to revoke the notice of withdrawal. Against the backdrop of the recent coup in Gambia, the events in South Africa seem like an attempt, amid instigated large-scale riots, to make the government use force against ‘peaceful protesters’, thereby paving the way for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

The danger of last year’s pogroms against ‘foreigners’ has come back with a vengeance. On 24 February, large-scale demonstrations were held in a number of cities, including the capital, against immigrants, who then held their own demonstrations in response. Violence was unavoidable. The situation was summed up fairly shrewdly by the leader of the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa: «In our view, the xenophobic attacks are well coordinated and political. Opposition parties which are fighting the ANC government want to make South Africa ungovernable and they are mobilising communities to attack foreigners».

Behind this picture is the blatant desire to disrupt the government’s plans outlined in President Jacob Zuma’s address to parliament. These plans include amendments to the law on mineral resources in terms of the State’s right to exercise sovereignty over all the country’s mineral resources, and changes to the racial imbalance within the country’s mining industry. At present, nearly all of the major mining companies are owned by transnational corporations (diamond mining is dominated by De Beers, which is owned by Anglo America plc, and platinum mining is dominated by Anglo Platinum Limited, which is part of Anglo American Platinum Ltd owned by Anglo American plc). The government is planning to pursue direct state involvement in this sector of the economy. A bill on these issues will be introduced into parliament this year.

There are also other plans. An interesting programme is being implemented in South Africa’s agricultural sector to create collective farms. The construction of free housing will continue – more than four million families have already been provided with houses. Nine million households that did not have electricity have now been connected to the grid. Only two of the six million jobs that the government planned to create by March 2019 have so far materialised, but this is also an achievement. A total of seventeen million people, almost one in three, receive social support from the government.

In addition, the government has responded to last year’s mass student protests over the increase in university tuition fees by allocating 32 billion rand to support higher education. This will not solve the problem entirely, but it will allow those less well-off to continue on with higher education.

The bold steps being undertaken by President Jacob Zuma in the social and economic sphere are being reinforced by the pan-African scope of South Africa’s foreign policy. Good examples of this are the plans to create a pan-African free trade zone by merging three regional organisations – the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC) – and South Africa’s participation in peacekeeping operations in Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Mozambique, South Sudan, Libya, and Somalia.

The ruling African National Congress party conference is set to take place at the end of 2017. The ANC will elect its new leader and, by extension, the country’s most likely president (should the ANC win the parliamentary elections). The approach of this political challenge, along with the South African government’s determination to continue along its chosen course, is increasing the anxiety of those who regard what’s going on as a threat to their centuries-old positions – positions that are no longer looking quite so unshakeable.

"It's A Declaration Of War": South Africa's President Calls For Confiscation Of White Land

After South Africa"s embattled president Jacob Zuma pledged, in a surprising address to parliament one month ago, to break up white ownership of business and land to reduce inequality (in a State of the Nation address which was disrupted by a fistfight), it now appears that Zuma"s intentions to convert what was until recently Africa"s most prosperous economy into a new Zimbabwe were all too real, and as the Telegraph reports, the South African president officially called on parliament to change South Africa’s constitution to allow the expropriation of white owned land without compensation.

Zuma, 74, who made the remarks in a speech on Friday morning, said he wanted to establish a “pre-colonial land audit of land use and occupation patterns” before changing the law.

“We need to accept the reality that those who are in parliament where laws are made, particularly the black parties, should unite because we need a two-thirds majority to effect changes in the constitution,” he said.

In recent months, Zuma, who has lurched from one scandal to another since being elected to office in 2009, has adopted a more populist tone since his ruling African National Congress (ANC) party suffered its worst election result last August since the end of apartheid in 1994. The party lost the economic hub of Johannesburg, the capital Pretoria and the coastal city of Port Elizabeth to the moderate Democratic Alliance party, which already held the city of Cape Town.

The ANC is also under pressure from the radical Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema. Malema has been travelling the country urging black South Africans to take back land from white invaders and "Dutch thugs". He told parliament this week that his party wanted to “unite black people in South Africa” to expropriate land without compensation.

“People of South Africa, where you see a beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you,” he said. Although progress has been made in transferring property to black South Africans, land ownership is believed to be skewed in favour of whites more than 20 years after the end of apartheid. The Institute of Race Relations, an independent research body, said that providing a racial breakdown of South Africa’s rural landowners was “almost impossible."

“In the first place the state owns some 22 per cent of the land in the country, including land in the former homelands, most of which is occupied by black subsistence farmers who have no title and seem unlikely to get it any time soon,” the group said. “This leaves around 78 per cent of land in private hands, but the race of these private owners is not known.”

As the Telegraph adds, Zuma’s comments caused outrage among groups representing Afrikaans speaking farmers on Friday.

The Boer Afrikaner Volksraad, which claims to have 40,000 members, said its members would take land expropriation without compensation as “a declaration of war”.

“We are ready to fight back,” said Andries Breytenbach, the group’s chairman. “We need urgent mediation between us and the government. "If this starts, it will turn into a racial war which we want to prevent.” As noted above, Zuma first mentioned the expropriation of land in his opening of Parliament speech last month, but Friday was the first time he called for a change in the law.

In his February speech, he controversially called in the military to maintain “law and order” on the streets of Cape Town ahead of expected protests calling for him to step down.

It was the first time in South Africa’s history, including the heavily militarised apartheid era, that the president has ordered the military to provide security at parliament.

Meanwhile, the populist wave is spreading and as discussed at the end of February, the local police had to fire rubber bullets into a crowd after anti-immigrant protests turned violent in the capital Pretoria.

President Zuma’s aggressive move toward redistribution comes as his African National Congress party prepares to elect a new leader to succeed him in December and as he finds himself under growing pressure over corruption allegations. It is disturbing that in order to deflect from his own failings as president, Zuma is willing to risk an economic fate reminiscent that of its neighbor to the north, Zimbabwe, where shortly after a similar confiscation of what land, the economy disintegrated into a hyperinflationary supernova.

It took Zimbabwe 15 years to admit its mistakes, and invite white farmers back. It now appears that South Africa will have to learn from the mistakes of its northern neighbor in due course.

Zimbabwe 2.0: South Africa's President Vows To Redistribute White-Owned Land And Businesses

In a stark flashback to the events that led to Zimbabwe"s terminal collapse into banana republic status, as well as unleashing hyperinflation and economic devastation, on Thursday South African President Jacob Zuma pledged to break up white ownership of business and land to reduce inequality, in a State of the Nation address which as the WSJ reports was disrupted by a fistfight, walkouts and a release of pepper spray in the parliamentary chamber. It appears South Africa is not fond of implementing "Rule 19."

Scenes of verbal and physical clashes inside the parliament, some 27 years to the day after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, as well as Zuma"s contentious speech, highlight the precarious future course facing Africa’s most developed economy.

As the WSJ reports, on Thursday, lawmakers from the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters "shouted over an initial attempt by Mr. Zuma to start his speech, after complaining about what they said was a threatening increase of security inside and outside Parliament. Previously the president had for the first time deployed several hundred troops to help lock down Cape Town’s parliamentary precinct in anticipation of potential clashes between ANC and opposition supporters."

Things then quickly got out of control:

“You’re a constitutional delinquent,” EFF lawmaker Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said of Mr. Zuma, referring to a court finding last year that the president had violated the constitution when he refused to pay back public money that an official report found was used for unnecessary upgrades to his private home. Mr. Zuma has since paid back some of the funds. When EFF lawmakers, dressed in their customary red workers’ overalls and maids’ uniforms, refused to quiet down or leave the chamber, they began fighting with parliamentary orderlies. Some lawmakers used their red hard hats to hit the orderlies, while other legislators were dragged out of the chamber.

Soon after, South Africa’s other main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, walked out in protest over the increase in security. ANC lawmakers shouted after Mmusi Maimane, the DA’s first black leader, as he led his party’s MPs out of the chamber, calling him a racist and sellout. Around the same time, several DA members in the visitors’ gallery
reported that tear gas had been released into the gallery, which quickly
emptied.

According to the chairwoman of South Africa’s upper house, Thandi Modise, an initial investigation showed that the substance released was pepper spray and called the incident a “breach of security” that shouldn’t have happened. She didn’t say who was behind the incident.

Meanwhile, Zuma didn’t acknowledge the disruptions when he returned to the podium to continue his speech. Instead, he focused on the one issue which may soon plague South Africa for years to come: the stark economic divide between black and white South Africans, one of the issues that the EFF has seized on in recent years.

To appease the rising populist anger, and taking a page out of developed economies around the globe, Zuma then said that “today we are starting a new chapter of radical socioeconomic transformation., The president added that 22 years after the end of apartheid “white households earn at least five times more than black households.”

President Zuma’s focus on redistribution comes as his African National Congress party prepares to elect a new leader to succeed him in December and as he finds himself under growing pressure over corruption allegations. He also said that he planned to send back to Parliament a bill that will make it easier for authorities to redistribute land taken away from blacks during colonization, although white landowners will still receive market prices for any seized land.

Where have we seen this kind of land "redistribution" not too long ago? Oh yes, Zimbabwe.

It took Zimbabwe 15 years to admit its mistakes, and invite white farmers back. It now appears that South Africa will have to learn from the mistakes of its northern naighbor in due course.