South Africa’s corruption crisis and the European Left

Economists agree that South Africa has almost been bankrupted by corruption and theft from both the state and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The term “state capture” was coined by the mainstream media to describe the process whereby a small clique of mainly Indians and Zulus from Kwazulu-Natal, including ex-president Jacob Zuma, controlled key ministries and utilities such as the electricity utility Eskom and the railway company Transnet. Such control led to endemic corruption and looting never before seen in South Africa.

Under normal circumstances, the ANC regime “can do no wrong” in the eyes of the West. Because, as we know, without Scandinavian money, (East) German terrorist bombs and Canadian and British propaganda, the quasi-Marxist gang of misfits and criminals that made up the movement would never have come within an inch of power in South Africa.

However, the scale of the graft over the last decade or more has been so vast that some of the major Western powers even issued a memorandum last year advising their protégé to cool it a bit on state-sponsored greed. The existence of such a critical missive was only made public this year with fanfare in the local Sunday Times. “World powers warn SA to act on graft,” the weekly proclaimed on its front page.

The official response of the ANC regime was to accuse the very powers whose largesse had brought it into power of “imperialist interference in South Africa’s affairs”.

“The ANC has noted with deep concern the interference by the Western imperialist forces like the USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland into the affairs of South Africa. South Africa is a sovereign state and has always respected the laws of these imperialist countries,” the party said in an official statement. “The ANC condemns this dramatic holier-than-thou stance of these former colonisers and we would not like to relate to them on the history of master-slave relations.”

Lindiwe Sisulu, South Africa’s minister of foreign affairs, whose department is abbreviated DIRCO (department of international relations and cooperation), also berated the Western countries for “not following correct diplomatic channels” when it came to voicing concern about the Ebola-like outbreak of corruption fever in the country. In a display of supreme arrogance, she summoned the ambassadors of the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland to her office in Pretoria where they grovelled at her feet, judging from tweets and responses after the meeting.

The German ambassador, Martin Schäfer, tweeted an official response afterwards in which it appeared that it was all a big mistake and that the five Western powers saw absolutely no governance problems in South Africa.

Here is the Joint Statement by the Embassies of Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the US on our meeting at DIRCO this morning.@DIRCO_ZA@SundayTimesZA@dailymaverick pic.twitter.com/CN7WKic3LV

— Martin Schäfer (@AmbSchaefer) February 4, 2019

It smacked pathetically of white guilt. While the “diplomatic incident” was playing itself out in the leafy suburbs of Pretoria where most embassies are situated, South Africans were gasping in horror every day as the so-called Zondo Commission ground on, enumerating still further corruption scandals, including the company Bosasa which bribed a well-known ANC “businesswoman”, Dudu Miyeni, with a new Louis Vuitton handbag stuffed with lucre, R300 000 (about $21 000) in cash.

The former CEO of Bosasa, an Italian-South African named Angelo Agrizzi explained how he had to pay cash bribes to about 80 people every month for Bosasa to keep its government contracts.

Although the Bosasa bribes ran into the millions of rands, they almost paled into insignificance next to the wholesale looting going on at Transnet and Eskom, which amounted to billions. The corruption at Eskom revolved around the Guptas, a family of Indian businessmen that hail from Saharanpur, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India. At the height of their powers under the Zuma presidency, they could have ministers appointed in government, as well as directors and CEOs of the hapless state-owned enterprises.

Even the New York Times carried an article slightly critical of ANC corruption, which must have been a first. (See In Gupta Brothers’ Rise and Fall, the Tale of a Sullied A.N.C.)

Yet as immigrants the Guptas only exploited the pre-existing corruption of the ANC itself, financed, aided and abetted by the EU Left. Europe and Canada, as well as the US Democrats, have given the ANC a “licence to loot” which was also the title of a book written by journalist Stefan Hofstatter and published last year by Penguin South Africa. In it he weaves the tale of state corruption in South Africa, which is both staggering in its breadth and too pervasive to cure without complete regime change.

Judging from the obsequious hand-wringing of so-called “Western diplomats” in the face of graft that compares to the heyday of Idi Amin’s Uganda or Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s Central African Republic, the European Left and its darling ANC share the same values of corruption, cronyism and extravagance at taxpayers’ expense.

ANC rule in South Africa has become a complete farce, augmented by the blue-light brigades with screaming sirens of VIPs in German luxury vehicles that regularly push other motorists off the road here. In fact, a friend of mine was thrown into prison for 24 hours because he did not get out of the way quickly enough when our president needed the whole motorway for himself in afternoon peak traffic.

To top it all, the ANC regime has just announced that it will now start enforcing its racist anti-white laws in a draconian manner, with huge fines imposed on private companies who continue to employ whites in excess of their demographic representation within the total population.

The first companies to get rid of all whites were the SOEs, as well as government departments. The ANC — and Western governments — must be so proud of their “achievements” in setting new world records for corruption at those institutions that they have decided that private companies too, should start bribing and looting all assets in sight.