Omega Exodus: Hell’s Petals, Part III

Theft does harm, but if it exceeds a certain limit, even the biggest organization will become unable to perform its core functions, never mind anything else- and the “comraids” in the ANC stole like there was no tomorrow… It was estimated that between 1994 and 2014, some R600 billion was stolen from government departments. It wasn’t necessarily a matter of bureaucrats transferring money to their accounts, although that happened from time to time. Usually it was more a case of bribes in return for awarding government contracts, altering contract requirements to favor a predetermined firm, using relatives to run firms which were then given contracts, and so on. The problem caused by such corruption was that it pushed out civil servants who had integrity and competence. Coupled with legislation such as Affirmative Action, Employment Equity and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, the government became bloated, inefficient and ultimately incapable of doing anything.

There were thousands of schools in rural areas which were built with mud bricks, and many were in such a poor state that kids had to learn under trees. Those in the townships often lacked facilities such as libraries, laboratories and sport fields, while some didn’t even have working toilets. The black parents who could, moved their kids to formerly whites-only schools. The fees were much higher, but there were enough teachers and facilities, which were often paid for out of additional fees levied on the parents. Healthcare was a disaster. Government hospitals were the kind of places where you went in for appendicitis and came out an amputee or a corpse. Preventable diseases were rampant in wards because the doctors and nurses didn’t follow basic hygienic protocols such as washing their hands between patients. Linen was often unwashed and the beds in terrible state, so from the Noughties onwards patients began to bring their own food, linen and mattresses. In contrast, private hospitals were white-owned, clean, properly staffed, efficient and extremely competent. The costs were high, of course, but even government employees had private health insurance. Business was no different. Black-owned firms were awarded government contracts, but often could not deliver quality products. Many lacked knowledge of basic business principles, to say nothing of advanced skills. As such, around 90% of farms which the government bought from whites and handed over to blacks failed within a year or two, and many were found to have been stripped of everything, including the plumbing. There were some success stories, but they were few and far between. When blacks looked at how everything they tried failed and saw that the whites were succeeding, they began to think that the whites were deliberately setting up black people to fail.

They didn’t want to understand that corruption and incompetence cannot be tolerated, that it was their duty to insist the ANC got its act together. Instead they voted for the party every five years and did not give it any incentive to change. As such, government-owned enterprises such as Eskom, Telkom, South African Airways, the Post Office, Public Investment Corporation, PetroSA and many others became feeding troughs for politically connected crooks and squandered billions of rand every year, which necessitated frequent taxpayer bailouts. This burdened the government budget and diverted money from necessary projects like building schools. Add to it every other form of corruption and maladministration, and what you get is an evident state of failure which is contrasted by the whites’ success. The resentment grew over the years, until South Africa went into recession and things really began to get out of control. Oh, the Public Investment Corporation lost ten billion? Well, look at the private pension funds and investment firms, they’re doing well. It’s their fault, so let’s take their money! Until 2017, the best the government could do was to coerce banks and pension funds to spend 25% of their investors’ money on bonds. By 2019, they managed to pass another law which raised that to 50%. This gave government access to cheap money, but it had to pay it back, and that in turn had to come from the budget, which was already strained by increased welfare payments and bailouts for state-owned enterprises along with the unstoppable hemorrhage from corruption.

There were other knock-on effects. The banks and pension funds now had less to invest in companies on the stock exchange and that forced companies to look elsewhere for money, which took longer and cost more. Prices went up, manufacturing and innovation went down. At a time when the economy needed increased activity, it slowed down and GDP rose only by 0.3-0.5% annually, far short of the more than 6% it needed. Crime went up, driven by desperate and starving people. Emigration kept rising and so did the capital outflow. The ANC’s solution was to do what the EFF had been saying for years, that is to increasingly nationalize assets and means of production in white people’s hands. By 2024, banks were government-owned, with bloated staff complements which drove down efficiency. Investment firms were fighting a desperate battle to avoid being nationalized, which it looked like they were going to lose. Engineering firms, the automotive sector and construction companies became the targets of Zimbabwe-style “indigenization”, which stipulated that they had to be at least 51%-owned by black South Africans. Farms were expropriated. Some farmers refused and fought against police units, which ended in bloodshed. The few who were left had small plots of land and were not very profitable, so they stayed in white hands, but even that was slowly coming to an end. South Africa had been a food exporter until the Noughties. Besides farming, its fishing industry was also pretty good, managing to meet both local and foreign demand. After that, bungles in the awarding of fishing quota permits, illegal Chinese fishing in the South African Economic Exclusion Zone, a series of droughts, an increase in farm attacks and farmers who switched from agriculture to game farming turned the country into a food importer. The expropriation of land was a disaster. Farms failed en mass by the end of 2023 and the country only avoided famine through imports.

Things were bad and getting worse. The ANC ran out of maneuvering room before the 2024 national elections and Cyril Ramaphosa declined to serve a second term as president. By the time Cyril climbed on a plane for a holiday overseas in the first week of August, Desmond Mkhize, a relative unknown, had been the new South African president for two weeks. And then, on the Friday evening of the third week of August 2024, the president made an announcement on national television that there had been a coup attempt by right wingers and white former politicians along with ex-SADF soldiers… After that, whites in finance, politics and business had been arrested nationwide, supposedly for having provided support to the coup attempt. Within days, black people who lived near the suburbs where whites had been arrested demanded to be given the houses of the “white criminals”. The government passed legislation overnight to immediately seize those properties and handed them out to the demonstrators. The police and army had too much on their plate, dealing with the mass of arrests of whites and either couldn’t or wouldn’t interfere when the blacks, emboldened by how some among them had received houses, began to break into other whites’ homes.

Of white cops and soldiers nothing was seen since the end of the third week of August 2024. Nobody knew what had happened to them, and nobody asked, though Daniel suspected they’d either been taken into custody or killed by their black colleagues. The looting was apparently disorganized. Most of the blacks were too poor to own a car, so they used the public transport networks in cities to get around and carry what they took. In general, the buses, trains and minibus taxis operated from early morning until around 18:30 in the evening, so in a weird way looting was done during business hours. The crime statistics wouldn’t be out until March 2025, if ever again, but straight away there was a noticeable spike in car thefts and truck hijackings. By the looks of it, blacks were making their own transport arrangements… There was a national wave of rapes. The whites who resisted the looters were killed, but in many instances they died even when they didn’t fight, hacked with machetes, shot, stabbed, or stoned to death. There were bodies of butchered whites on suburb streets, but that was mostly in the areas nearest to where black people lived, because the looting spread from there outwards and it only expanded along the road network used by public transportation. From the first week, cops and soldiers operated in daytime only, careful to carry out their orders to arrest “coup sympathizers” and avoid entanglements with crowds of blacks.

Bad as the situation was, it had allowed some whites to get away under the cover of darkness, when the blacks were at home. It started slowly, with one man or a family at a time, but by this time many of the whites had hit the road, going they knew not where. Dan Iancu knew all of this. He also suspected that very soon, perhaps in a matter of days, movement was going to become dangerous. He reckoned they’d either have to find a way to go around the roadblocks, or through them, because there was no way this shit was going to end. The government was going for broke on this one, at least that’s how it seemed. It wasn’t going to be easy and much as they looked to him for reassurance, Dan knew there was none to be had. Either they made it, or they didn’t. The only thing that could be guaranteed was to try- or definitely die if they didn’t. End of Part III. To be continued…

Mircea Negres

Port Elizabeth

South Africa

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