ANC’s hypocrisy: Sacrificing the poor while pretending to be moral - Biznews
Andrew Kenny
The ANC is sacrificing other people for immoral ends, while claiming to be sacrificing itself for moral ends.
Throughout the horrible, confused mess of ANC incompetence and corruption, there are two consistent themes: deep contempt for ordinary black people, and deep hatred for the West. The last few weeks have seen the ANC and its fellow travellers (EFF etc) reaching new lows of hypocrisy, deliberately jeopardising South Africa’s economy and the livelihoods of poor black people on the altar of these malignant causes, and all the time posing as brave moral crusaders. In fact, they are cowardly and immoral, even to the extent of ignoring, or even condoning, genocide against black people on our own continent of Africa.
The ANC has taken international court action against Israel, but not against the Sudan, which is committing genocide against its black population; nor against China, which brutally persecutes more than a million of its Muslim Uyghurs and occupies Tibet; nor against the Russian-supported Assad regime in Syria for the savage persecution of Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp. So it obviously does not care about the suffering of Muslims, Palestinians or black Africans. It only cares about the wrongs of Israel. And this is because it hates the West and sees Israel as a bastion of the West in the Middle East.
The ANC’s response to the rather ignorant but not altogether misplaced criticisms of President Trump and South African-born Elon Musk are revealing. Trump was right to condemn the ANC’s Expropriation Act, which will allow the state to seize without compensation any property it wants, fully in accordance with its socialist ideology and its National Democratic Revolution. Julius Malema, staggeringly rich, loaded with capitalist luxuries, sees this clearly and is delighted with it. But Trump and Musk are wrong to say that the Act was designed to harm white Afrikaners. The main victims of the Act, the main victims of most of the ANC’s horrible laws, are poor blacks, who, generally, are not allowed to own private property, without which there can be no prosperity. Afrikaners are certainly threatened by the ANC, but not nearly as badly as working-class blacks. But let me start with the Afrikaners.
Farmers in South Africa are a vulnerable group, subject to a higher percentage of murders than the population as a whole. White and black farmers, and black and white farm workers are victims of murder, but Afrikaners comprise the biggest group of murder victims. The motives of the murderers are not understood, although they are definitely not just theft. Men, women and children, including toddlers and very old people, have been systematically raped, tortured (often slowly), chopped up and mutilated. According to SAPS, between 1996/7 and 2016/17, over 1,700 people were murdered on the farms. On Human Rights Day, Julius Malema once again chanted “Kill the Farmer! Kill the Boer!” to a huge, enthusiastic crowd, who just loved it. The song had previously found not to be hate speech by a South African court. AfriForum appealed to the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, to have this decision overturned, and to make it hate speech. Concourt turned down the appeal this week.
To understand Afrikaner fears, I suggest you consider this Concourt decision, look carefully in the statistics and descriptions of these gruesome murders and, above all, take note of President Ramaphosa’s statement in the USA on 26 September 2018 that, “There are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa.” “No Farm Murders” | Cyril Ramaphosa | South Africa (2018) – YouTube. He has not retracted that statement, so obviously this is what he wants you to believe. If I were a farmer in South Africa, I’d emigrate. But the Afrikaners are a lot braver and more patriotic than I am.
Foreigners should notice that the highest court in the land does not believe that “Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer!” is hate speech, while a lower court found that some silly estate agent, Penny Sparrow, was found guilty of hate speech when she compared black beachgoers with monkeys dropping litter, with absolutely no incitement for anyone to attack them. They should also notice that the South African President said there were no farm murders, at a time when his police had reported 1,700 of them. They might begin to wonder about South Africa’s justice system and its political leadership. I have a feeling that Trump and Musk might wonder too, and in this case with justification.
Because of Trump’s perceptions, right and wrong, of the ANC’s crimes against its citizens and its support of the USA’s enemies, he has withdrawn US aid to South Africa and might well end the special trade advantages South Africa enjoys under AGOA, particularly in her exports of cars and other manufactured goods. This has provoked a diplomatic reaction, or rather an undiplomatic reaction, from our ambassador in the US, Ebrahim Rasool. He launched a public tirade of incoherent, self-indulgent, racist nonsense against the US, deliberately putting at risk all the US’s favours to the people of South Africa. He was expelled from the US. He was greeted as a hero by a large crowd when he returned to Cape Town. He obviously thought he was a hero too. A hero who bravely sacrifices the livelihoods of black African car workers for his own racist ego? Rasool, himself, will not suffer at all from his actions. Poor blacks will.
(I see Rasool went to Livingstone High School. I taught there in 1971, when he was 11 years old. He might have been there while I was, but I didn’t teach him. It was an excellent school, with excellent teachers, Christian, Muslim and atheist – communist – all getting along splendidly, all fighting apartheid at the same time as teaching diligently.)
Far worse than Rasool is Dr Naledi Pandor, whose recent speech against the US and Israel was probably the most bigoted and dishonest that I’ve ever heard. She is profoundly immoral. Not once, in this speech about human rights and crimes against humanity, did she ever mention the genocide in Sudan, which has led to a terrible civil war that the United Nations calls the “the world’s largest and most devastating humanitarian crisis”. It now affects 25 million people (half the population of Sudan). Hundreds of thousands of black people have been deliberately slaughtered by Arab Muslims. Millions are starving. Pandor says nothing. She accuses the US of being “complicit in genocide” when she herself is far more complicit in the genocide in Sudan.
In 2015, Omar al-Bashir, then President of Sudan, visited South Africa. He had presided over the slaughter of an estimated 300,000 black Africans in the Darfur region. He was warmly greeted by the ANC, in which Pandor was a senior minister. The International Criminal Court asked South Africa to arrest him. Naturally, the ANC did no such thing. In January 2024, when Pandor was Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohamed Dagalo visited President Ramaphosa at his official residence in Pretoria. Dagalo was then leading the renewed genocide against black people. Ramaphosa welcomed him with a friendly grin. Pandor said nothing (or nothing I heard in public).
The Sudan, which had been populated with black Africans, was invaded and occupied in the early 16th Century by Arabs, who came from Arabia. They treated the blacks as slaves. The Muslim (Arab, Iranian and Turkic) slave trade ran from the 7th Century to the 21st; the Christian (European) one from the 15th to the 19th. Many Arab Muslims in North Africa still regard blacks as slaves (I’ve seen this first-hand) and this is obviously the case in Sudan. But now slavery has been replaced with genocide. What is very difficult to understand is why black leaders, such as Pandor, are quite happy to see ordinary black people so abused by Arab leaders.
In her speech, Pandor seemed to suggest that South Africa should cut ties with the US and strengthen them with China. China’s horrible persecution of her Muslims and her occupation of Tibet are just fine with Dr Pandor. The US buys manufactured goods from South Africa. China buys no manufactured good from us but only raw materials. So perhaps Pandor would like us to shut down our motor car factories and buy cheaper ones from China. The same with our steel. In fact, we could shut down all of our manufacturing and industry, sack their workers, buy these high value goods from China and just sell her our coal and other ores. Pandor, like Rasool but on a grander scale, is quite prepared to sacrifice the well-being of black workers to her haughty, superior, racist ego. Naturally, like Malema and Rasool, she herself will not suffer at all from the misfortunes she is visiting on poor black people.
(When Willie Madisha did his famous “Hwong! Hwong! Hwong” imitation of Pandor in Parliament, I notice it seemed to get a lot of laughs from the ANC side, suggesting that some of them might be sick to death of the way she looks down her nose at them.)
I had no idea of the enormous extent of US aid to South Africa, especially in the fields of medicine. PEPFAR provided enormous funds for the fight against HIV/AIDS, and UCT’s wonderful Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine and its focus on HIV and TB research. Maybe that’s why the ANC hates the US so much, it can’t bear her benevolence. Apparently, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to replace all this aid, which means South Africans will die. I wish Trump would rethink this. Decent South Africans don’t deserve to die for the sins of our horrid leaders.
I should make it clear that I hold no prejudice against Islam and Arabs. I owe my life to Arabs in Algeria, who rescued me from my idiocy when I was stranded and alone in the middle of the Sahara desert. (I cringe with shame when I think of my stupidity.) They were very kind. I have appeared now and then on Radio Islam and found the interviewers and presenters the most liberal, fair and intelligent I have ever come across. I had Muslim friends at Livingstone. At a bank, when I see one teller is Muslim and the other is not, I’m inclined to choose the Muslim. (I have the same prejudice in favour of Jews.) I appreciate the huge contribution that Islamic scholars made to the European renaissance by rediscovering and translating the learning of Greece and Rome. But sections of the Muslim world have gone astray, for reasons I don’t understand, resulting in the dictatorships of modern Iran and Saudi Arabia, genocide in Sudan, and Jihadist terrorists, destroyers and death-culters around the world. They betray Islam.
[Photo: President Cyril Ramaphosa welcoming Mohamed Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Fources and former head of the Janjaweed, who has been accused of committing genocide against black African Sudanese resulting in what the UN has described of the world’s current worst humanitarian crisis]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal
This article was first published on the Daily Friend.