The governing capacity of a failed state is unable to fulfil the administrative and organizational tasks required to control people and resources and can provide only minimal public services. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
A country whose government is considered to have failed at some of its basic responsibilities, for example keeping the legal system working correctly, and providing public services electricity, water, education, hospitals, etc. Failed states are increasingly trapped in a cycle of poverty and violence. (Cambridge Dictionary)
Common characteristics of a failed state include a government too weak or ineffective to provide public services; has widespread corruption and criminality;refugees and sharp economic decline” (UK Essays) https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/characteristics-of-a-failing-state-politics-essay.php
In 1984 the Editor of New Republic Michael Kinsley, coined the axiom, "A gaffe (blunder) is when a politician tells the truth."
Example: A party figure more powerful than the President of SA, Secretary General Ace Magashule made a gaffe explaining the decision to let two party leaders off the hook after being implicated in a $1 billion heist of a state bank. “These comrades have not been charged by anybody,” he admitted.
Voices of integrity in government are few, and courage to put comrades behind bars in short supply. There are Magashules at every level. In South Africa criminals rule the roost. (See Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule's Web of Capture, Penguin Random House SA)
The President, Mr Ramaphosa, answers to them and, as deputy to a former president who answered to mafia families he whistled in the wind and let him retire with ill-gotten gains. Today Mr Ramaphosa presides over the carcass of what used to be a country with pretensions.
Even the virus crisis was seized with loot in mind. Had the rule of law been operational, the head of the Covod-19 Command Council would be in the orange baggies of a convict instead of directing the cruelest lockdown of them all on top of a jobless rate of 50% and hunger stalking wherever you look. The woman and her ring of cigarette smugglers deprived the public purse of billions in lost duties. By letting her ban the legal industry the President had to dishonor the relief he promised to the jobless and hungry.
Party members are expelled if they set foot on the tarmac of Ben Gurion International. Foreign Affairs bureaucrats walk the talk of the local BDS franchise.
It is day 100 of lockdown in the failed state. The ruling party has good reason to be scared to come out of it. The day people get their lives back could be a day of reckoning. For every life spared by the lockdown, twenty nine lives were destroyed, some by violence, others by physical and emotional health.
No, it does not speak of respect for the one life saved. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Police crackdowns on shanty dwellers led to eleven beaten to death or gunned down for the crime of breaking arbitrary rules. And symptomatic of the inhumanity of state hospitals, Tembisa on the East Rand denied a Covid-19 patient food for days on end before he succumbed to the virus. The ruling party then jived and chanted at the American consulate while it clamored for BLM.
If American black lives matter more than South African black lives, so do Palestinian Arab lives matter more than Israelis. The ruling party “supports human rights and stands with the oppressed Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid”. The top lawman in the land, you see, the Chief Justice, had expressed what Israel meant for him.
“I'm under an obligation as a Christian, to love Israel, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, which actually means the peace of Israel. And I cannot, as a Christian, do anything other than love and pray for Israel, because I know, hatred for Israel, by me and for my nation can only attract unprecedented curses upon our nation.” Well, it seems to have worked.
The party always had a mania about Israel. Political spin and talking heads pretend that hating the country where Jews live has something to do with a quest for justice and an aversion for apartheid. The claim could not be further from the truth.
Party members are expelled if they set foot on the tarmac of Ben Gurion International. Foreign Affairs bureaucrats walk the talk of the local BDS franchise, so rotten that it lost the license to tell lies about Israel under the BDS brand. But dare challenge bizarre views and you’re toast.
Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng is toast. He is threatened with removal from office. For loving Israel he is guilty of “endangering the justice system.” This from a governing party that beat the rule of law stone dead so that comrades could loot the country to their heart’s content.
Two things that the Chief Justice said brought haters out of the woodwork. One, he connected Israel to the bible, and two referred to God’s blessings and curses. To me the latter struck the rawest nerve.
Then a law professor entered the fray to do a non-political, objective hatchet job on Mogoeng Given that law professors who recognise the sovereign rights of Israel are as rare as a pig in Palestine, we can speculate if the professor would have delivered the opinion he did, or any at all, had the Chief Justice laid into Israel for crimes against humanity.
Israel more than any country attracts claims beyond wild, and most especially Jews with a chip on their shoulder who compete with Palestinian Arabs to come up with the wildest. Here is one example of suggested reading: The Chief Justice the Bible and Palestinian Real Estate,Daily Maverick 01.07.2020.
But for my money, the claim that Jesus was a Palestinian (Arab?) wins hands down. Yasser Arafat’s PR, Hannan Ashrawi, disclosed the astounding fact to the Washington Jewish Week on February 22, 2001. No one blinked. She was not the first or the last to bring Christ into play. It is done annually. “Every Christmas, Palestine celebrates the birth of one of its own,” proclaimed a PLO’s statement at Christmas time. I don’t know if anyone has made Jesus into a Muslim, but the PLO seems to leave that possibility wide open.
Hate is one of the more perverse emotions. More than it destroys the subject of hate it destroys the hater. In party politics hatred can harm a whole country. Antisemitism in fact could be at the bedrock of South Africa’s collapse into a failed state.
Hell, though, is not the end of the world. Life in a failed state is not entirely bad. You have to deal with elements more or less stable, more or less controllable, more or less mad. Only one thing really matters – to recognise the curse that brought you to hell and what will keep you there unless you learn that those who curse Israel will be cursed.