12 To 12 Part 5-10

Before I go though, here are a couple of updates. The latest round of Stage 4 power cuts ended on Sunday 24 March 2019. They were ten days of hell, which apparently cost the South African economy around R4 billion per day. Like an American politician said once, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money… Now on to the expropriation of the land issue that’s been dogging South Africa for more than a year. Do you remember when Ernst Roets of AfriForum was interviewed by a guy from Fox and afterwards U.S. president Donald Trump tweeted that he had tasked the Secretary of State to look into farm murders and land expropriation in South Africa? Do you also remember how the South African government accused president Trump of interfering in South Africa’s internal affairs just because he enquired about what’s happening, then called the leaders of AfriForum liars and traitors because they dared to discuss what was happening here and asked for help from other countries? Well, that overreaction was bullshit designed to prevent other countries from finding out what the ANC-led government is doing, and afterwards there were articles about how “expropriation of land without compensation” is not specifically targeting whites. At around that time Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini also thought that indeed the envisaged land grab was not specifically aimed at whites, so he warned that any attempt to confiscate land held by the Ingonyama Trust, which as I recall is more than 2 million hectares, would trigger a war. Within days, Cyril Ramaphosa went to see the king and afterwards statements were issued to the effect that government was not going to confiscate the Ingonyama Trust’s land, or land already owned by black people in general. So who does that leave then, the frigging Martians? Nope, the white people, because sure as God made little green apples, the government was not going to take land owned by blacks…

What happened after president Trump’s tweet was that the whites I spoke to thought it meant they would be protected, that president Trump was going to invade South Africa if white-owned land was targeted for expropriation. No matter how much I tried to explain that the U.S. president can only deploy troops for at most 60 days before he has to get congressional approval or withdraw them if approval is not granted, that just moving the 82nd Airborne is going to take 6 or 7 weeks, never mind ten divisions with support assets, and there is no way just one division can overcome a country one tenth the size of the United States in 30 days, they quite simply didn’t want to hear me. Donald Trump was going to rescue them, and that was that. The naivete would’ve stunned others, but I’d seen enough examples of it over the last 25 years to no longer be surprised. I might not be surprised, but I am angry and concerned. I’m angry about how in this so-called Information Age people can be so ignorant about realpolitik along with how and why American presidents decide on military intervention. Just look at how long it took Bill Clinton to intervene in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for God’s sake. Now imagine the likelihood of intervention on behalf of South African whites. I am concerned because such a belief is keeping most of the white South Africans complacent in the face of imminent danger.

The word is that the earliest a law to expropriate land might be passed is December 2019. Contrary to what I feared and the ANC might want to do ahead of the 8 May national elections, that’s over eight months from now. In the mean time, the Department of State seems to have followed through on president Trump’s request for information, because I read last week that a delegation led by a deputy secretary or under secretary is visiting South Africa in order to see what’s happening with the land expropriation and farm murders. The guy said the delegation had met with some people (presumably farmers and/or leaders of farmers’ organisations) and president Cyril Ramaphosa among others. Discussing what Ramaphosa told them, the deputy secretary or under secretary said he was told the South African government is trying to deal with farm murders. Well, I reckon Ramaphosa lied again because the Commandos have not been re-established, farmers are increasingly forming their own self-defence groups based upon the Neighbourhood Watch and Commando systems, the police still do not have enough cops and vehicles patrolling rural areas, farmers are still murdered at a rate of 50 to 60 a year and not a hell of a lot of perpetrators are being caught. The expropriation of land issue has largely disappeared from national discourse over the last two months or so, and until a bill is presented for public comment, we have no clear idea about what the ANC is going to do. This is a problem which does nothing to soothe white people’s fears and coupled with the terrible state of the economy, just might push more whites to emigrate. I can’t fault those who have lost their faith in South Africa. Hell, I have thought the same for 25 years now, and not a day goes by without asking myself if I’ll live long enough to see the end game. Nevertheless, I have one little hope. It is that the American delegation investigate thoroughly what’s happening in South Africa and their report will not seek to give the ANC and Ramaphosa more breathing room to execute what might very well trigger a civil war here.  

Dear readers, this is the country I live in. This is what happens. It is hard to be happy or find a good reason to wave the flag when I can’t find work because of my skin colour and have to go armed to the toilet in my own home- well, rented apartment. As things stand, and it saddens me to say this, I’ve got more reasons to wear black every day of the week instead, not just on Black Monday as Steve Hofmeyr asked that time. All right folks, enough of the depressing stuff. I’m going to bid you farewell and as usual, share a joke. Not sure if this one is a good idea, but what the hell, here it goes…

Late at night after being released from prison, Nelson Mandela finally gets home. He walks into his bedroom and finds it pretty much as he’d left it. At the foot of his bed is an old army trunk. He pulls out a bunch of keys and begins to search for the right one. Finally the lock turns, the lid flips open, there are flashes of light and thunder, then a genie pops out. “Thank God you got me out of there,” the genie tells Mandela while pointing at the cramped locker. “Man, I’ve been stuck in that shit hole for 27 years, where the fuck have you been?” Nelson tells him, “Sorry about that genie, but I was in prison”. “Oh, okay,” says the genie. “Look, I’m grateful to be out, so I’m gonna grant you a wish. Any wish, you say it and I’ll do it”. Mandela thinks about it then says “Genie, I’ll be doing a lot of travelling from next year and I hate to fly. I want you to build me a freeway between Cape Town and New York so I can drive to America”. The genie conjures a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil, then sits down to work out numbers. Eventually he wears out the pencil and runs out of paper, so he conjures a scientific calculator and punches in numbers like mad. Ten minutes later, he tells Mandela “Nelson, I’ve got some big problems here. The ocean is very deep and I’m gonna have to pour a shitload of concrete. Then I’m gonna have to make the bridge high enough that ships don’t sail into it but low enough so that planes don’t fly into it. This is too hard, think of something else”. Mandela scratches his head, then says “Okay, genie. I want you to make every black man, woman and child in Africa as smart as white people”. The genie begins to punch numbers into the calculator, but it crashes in seconds. He then conjures a Cray super computer and sets it to crunch numbers. Twenty minutes later, the super computer burns out. The genie starts to pull his hair out in frustration. After a while he sighs and says “All right Nelson, forget it. How do you want the freeway, with three lanes or four?”

End of Part 10.

The Southern Wrong Racist

South Africa

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