At Johannesburg’s swank precinct of Melrose Arch, window shoppers ogle the new Rolls Royce, Lamborghini and Aston Martin models. Others gape at a behemoth SUV fit for crude oil potentates. The limos are gloating monuments to, “money is no object.”
Drive a mile in any direction and your hoopla flips at the tell-tale degradations of a city in its dying gasp. Roads are potholed, decrepit water pipes languish in abandoned diggings, traffic lights are blinded victims of the black market for cables. Don’t be misled by gated complexes for the well-heeled. Many taps ran dry for a week and toilets had to be flushed with containers filled at a swimming pool or borehole tap.
So stark a contrast may seem delusional. Yet the Hollywood and broken parts are contagions of one cancer; alternate spectral images of a bedlam country where anything goes; the brats of a President brandishing his power and privilege to dispense plundered patronage. Customers for the limos come from the pick of Ramaphosa’s cronies. The collapsed infrastructure is the imprint of crime syndicates operating with impunity under the President’s deployment of comrades to positions where public funds and assets are treated as juicy low- hanging fruit. The syndicates range from saboteurs of the power grid to crooks leveraging government tenders.
In a country where half the working age population is out of work while most of the remainder have government jobs, it is “grimly rational to kill” to get in on the action. The fact that the upper echelons of law and order are no less embroiled in criminality, makes getting away with murder a sure bet. The disease is rampant: no one in government wants to work, they want deals to make them rich.
It all boils down to the President’s twin duties: feed the gluttony and keep the gluttons out of jail. A perfect case in point arose in July. In the tradition set by heads of state that went before him, he appointed a police chief from the crime underworld. When the stink became intolerable he routinely suspended the comrade (on full pay) and appointed a costly commission to confirm the truth, which everyone himself included, already knew.
It was all so avoidable. The 47th President Donald Trump was cutting his political teeth when he tapped a handbag maker for his ambassador to South Africa - a harmless woman who embodied what ‘Novice’ means.
“It’s all about trade and investment” said Lana Marks on taking up the position vacant for three years. Her bubbly outlook gave way to admitting that Washington had its eye on Ramaphosa’s gang-ho itch to confiscate land. The conflicting statements prompted me to send the ambassador a pertinent tweet for President Trump: “Mr Ramaphosa sir, if it’s all about trade and investment, tell us how the two are compatible with stealing property from the lawful owners.”
Turning to Afrikaner farmers murdered in horrific ways, Marks dismissed it as criminality not racial targeting, and was, “very pleased that South Africa is dealing with things in a very transparent manner. President Ramaphosa and the government are doing their utmost to address it.”
The “transparent” President calls his craving to seize property, “Land Reform” and mollified interested investors by stating what to him seemed obvious: it would “not undermine investment in the economy or damage agriculture.”
Pricking the Ambassador’s comfy bubble I proposed a second tweet for Trump:
“Mr Ramaphosa, sir, give an example or two of countries where land seizure and killing of farmers caused no damage to the economy or to agriculture.”
Though the ambassador failed to decode Ramaphosa’s dystopian sentiments and denial that Afrikaner farmers were being targeted, his power base understood the message:
Take back your land from whites - I’ll help you get rich without having to do a stroke of work. For her part Marks assured government leaders that all was hunky dory, there being nil chance that Washington would disqualify the country from long-standing trade concessions.
Famous last words?
It was not trade concessions but sanctions that marked last week’s "Punitive Jackson Bill” through the Committee stage, threatening to punish Ramaphosa and his party cohorts with personal sanctions. Jackson celebrated by tweeting that it would give Trump “the tools necessary to hold their corrupt government accountable.”
“Corrupt”? That’s hardly the word for a dark development anyone could have seen coming a mile away. The government more than made alliances with Iran and its terrorist proxies; it staffed its international affairs department with Islamist ideologues, headed by a black convert to Islam. Naledi Pandor, ugly as sin, is her name. She chatted on the phone with Hamas ten days after Oct 7, the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust. And congratulated Hamas, so it claimed. Logged on record she followed up the call with a sudden and unexplained visit to Tehran, upon her return cobbling together a legal team to lay a case of Israeli genocide at the International Court of Justice.
For a subsequent logged telling event, when Trump bombed Tehran’s nuclear plants to smithereens this government department signed a book of condolences at the Iranian embassy in Pretoria.
It was all part and parcel of in-your-face behaviour. In sync with its lawsuit against Israel at The Hague, the government hosted a Sudanese warlord wanted for genocide in Darfur. Fracturing the taboo and body of law meant to punish genocide is all in a day’s work for rogue President Ramaphosa. According mass murderers diplomatic honors is what his government does. Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim also got red carpet treatment He and Mandela’s raving anti-Jew grandson laid a wreath at the foot of the icon’s statue. The culminating calumny was perpetrated only last week.
No gambit could be grimmer or more disgusting than exhuming a civil rights icon for the purpose of a vendetta against the Jews. It began with Martin Luther King, bulwark of liberty and Zionism enthusiast. Nelson Mandela was next. The literal giant of humanity was hardly cold in his grave when he got hijacked for settling antisemitic scores.
It was impossible not to see this artifice coming. The Nelson Mandela Centre has been occupied and repurposed by Pandor, Ramaphosa’s picked Islamist. At the helm she’has extended the Centre’s religious war against Jewish Zionists to Christian Zionists. This is more than sad - South Africa is a Christian country both historically and culturally. So is neighbouring Mozambique where Al Shabaab has been decapitating Christians, destroying churches, displacing whole villages and making forced conversions to Islam.
See the indigestible aspect? While South African troops are part of a peace keeping force helping Mozambique combat a genocidal jihadi group, the Nelson Mandela Centre has promised to pay anyone who combats, not Al Shabaab but Christian Zionism which it calls, “a force for genocide.”
Watch this space. The Zion Christian Church mightn’t take this like the lamb which lies down with the lion. It’s tens of millions of black followers across Southern Africa incorporate beliefs and practices which impart a real African context on Christianity. Try pinning the “Genocide” label on them.
I have taken the refurbished Nelson Mandela Centre as a personal affront. During the golden years he was President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela lent his irresistible stature to my cause, empowering me to singlehandedly make the country’s media pay a price for antisemitism.
But the emperor has no clothes. How can the government accuse Israel of genocide when it makes no secret of its alliances with the genocide-bent regimes of North Korea and Iran, to name but two?
The Emperor does not however need clothes. He needs to get dressed. And Trump must dress him. It’s time he did. The South African President and robbing government must be kitted out as promoters and enablers of violence, Jew-hatred and global jihad.
Steve Apfel is a diversity freak: Economist. Former director and founder of the School of Management Accounting. Veteran authority on anti-Zionism . Activist with a record of defeating antisemites. Prodigious author. This was his latest out-of- the-box work on the global menace posed by probably the wickedest of all freely elected governments.
Steve blogs at https://substack.com/@steveapfel1