Political hypocrisy in SA: Elites preach socialism, live capitalism – Andrew Kenny - Biznews

South African politics often sees a striking disconnect between politicians’ personal lives and their proclaimed policies. From Floyd Shivambu’s luxurious lifestyle despite his radical rhetoric, to the ANC and EFF elites advocating racial quotas for others while seeking the best for themselves, hypocrisy runs deep. This trend mirrors global communist behaviour: privilege for the elite, suffering for the working class. Amid tribal loyalties and racial voting, integrity and effective governance remain rare but vital aspirations.

Andrew Kenny

Floyd Shivambu, who had been caught doing 182 km/hr in his Range Rover and who has received millions of rand from the VBS bank, which he used to buy luxuries for himself and make improvements to his mansion, has recently left the EFF, where he was Deputy Commander to Julius Malema, who owns two Range Rovers, a Mercedes C63 AMG, a Mercedes Benz Viano minibus and a mansion in Hyde Park, to join the MK Party led by Jacob Zuma, whose son, Duduzane killed a woman, Phumzile Dube, in Sandton when his Porsche 911 Turbo crashed into a taxi in which she was a passenger.

The “Radical Voice” of the EFF says it is “for the Poor and the Working Class”. MK’s manifesto says it is “The People’s Mandate”.

Should the personal behaviour of politicians be linked to their official policies for other people? Should what politicians think is good for other people be the same as what they think is good for themselves? In both cases, it isn’t. The personal behaviour of leading politicians is completely at odds with their official policies. Politicians want completely different things for other people from what they want for themselves. I shall give examples.

Sometimes personal behaviour has nothing to do with statements a person might make or convictions she might publicly hold. For example, if a church leader proclaims from the pulpit, “I believe in the sanctity of marriage”, it is relevant for someone to shout, “Oh, but you’re having an affair with the bank manager’s wife!” But if a mathematician proclaims to his university, “I believe that in a right-angled triangle the square on the side of the hypotenuse is the same as the sum of the squares on the other two sides”, it is irrelevant for someone to shout, “Oh, but you’re having an affair with the bank manager’s wife!”

Certain bad personal behaviour by a politician might have nothing to do with his political duties. Sexual indiscretions by a minister of fishing or a finance minister wouldn’t bother me in the slightest (I mean mutually agreed adult sexual encounters, not sexual harassment). But if a politician’s personal behaviour contradicts completely the policies he wants to impose on other people, it does bother me. It doesn’t seem to bother too many people, though. Most people seem to regard politics as a sort of pantomime: everybody knows that the Dame is actually a man but everybody just goes along with it, just joins the game. Similarly it seems, everybody knows that politicians who denounce capitalism and praise the working classes actually love capitalist goodies and despise the working classes, but just goes along with the game. This is probably why people in South Africa vote in such big numbers for Julius Malema (even if his vote is dropping) and Jacob Zuma.

Horrible mistake
Floyd Shivambu, while he was in the EFF, spent a lot of time, especially in parliament, shouting down Jacob Zuma, then president, chanting “Pay back the money!”, accusing him of state capture and monstrous corruption. He has now discovered that it was all a horrible mistake, perhaps a wicked plot by White Monopoly Capital and other imperialist agencies and local traitors. Actually Jacob Zuma is a truly delightful chap, as pure as driven snow. State capture was “nonsense or rubbish”. “Not even one person today can come with proof that Zuma took a single cent from the state for his own personal benefit out of the so-called nonsense of state capture.” Shivambu did not mention the Gupta brothers, so I wonder if they are actually maligned progressive revolutionaries or part of the counter-revolutionary stratagem to implicate Zuma. We shall see (or perhaps not).

Listening to Shivambu’s fantastic drivel, I wondered what he really stood for, for other people and for himself – what he and his like have ever stood for. But I knew, because all of them, in the ANC, the SACP, the EFF, MK and others, whether they are loud and fiery, such as Julius Malema, or pompous and condescending, such as Naledi Pandor, are all highly elitist, wanting special favours and privileges for themselves, and brutal neglect for the rest of the people, especially the working classes, whom they despise. Here are some examples.

Affirmative action and demographic representation. All of these political leaders believe in racial affirmative action, that is, appointment where race rather than merit is part or all of the selection criteria. Demographic representivity, enforced in law by the Employment Equity Act of 1998, says that at every level of employment throughout the economy the racial ratios of the people employed should strive to be the same as the racial ratios in the population at large. 93% of the population is now black, so 93% of engineers, doctors, teachers, managers, brick layers and road-sweepers should be black. If they achieve such ratios they are “transformed”. The elite believes this for the services other people receive but never in the services they receive themselves directly. Legal services that other people receive should be from affirmative action lawyers; legal services that the elite receive directly (for example, a defence lawyer for Jacob Zuma) should come from the most skilled and successful lawyers regardless of their race. If a working class black girl needs a special operation, it should come from a black surgeon, preferably female, who suffered under apartheid. If the black daughter of the elite needs the same operation, the surgeon should be chosen strictly on merit and reputation, regardless of race, and if he happens to be a white man who benefited from apartheid, so be it. But the worst example is education.

Education. The greatest betrayal of the black people of South Africa by the ANC is over education. Most children in South Africa, which means most black children, receive an appalling education, one of the worst in the world, worse than many poorer African countries, placing us last or closest to last in international comparisons on literacy (“reading for meaning”), maths and science. This is because of deliberate ANC policy, with which the EFF and MK agree completely. All of these African elites want working class black children to attend state schools where 93% or more of the teachers are black and where the teachers get appointment on race rather than merit. But they want their own children to attend private or Model-C schools where most of the teachers are white, chosen on merit. The elite wants “transformed” schools for other people’s children, untransformed schools for their own children. Again, Julius Malema and Dr Naledi Pandor have identical views on this. Both would be utterly horrified at sending their own children to schools where 93% of the teachers were affirmative action blacks. Both would be horrified at the idea of their own children sitting next to working class black children. Pandor, once Minister of Education, sent her own children to Bishops, Herschel and elitist Model-C schools. Malema has done the equivalent.

Health care. The elite want state hospitals for other people, private ones for themselves. Communist Party leaders must have private health care; their working class supporters must have state health care. The leaders of the ANC, EFF and MK use private medical aid schemes; they want their followers to wait for days, and sometimes die, in queues at dilapidated state hospitals. The NHI will reduce all health care in South Africa to the dreadful level of state hospitals in the Eastern Cape, while making fortunes for deployed cadres as hospital managers and BEE contractors as hospital suppliers. The black elite will do a Mugabe and fly overseas for private health care.

Transport. The elite want the masses to use public transport, such as the PRASA, which has been transformed, while themselves drive Mercedes, BMWs, Range Rovers, Porsches and so on. Indeed you get the feeling that the more expensive your car, the more “radical”, “left-wing”, “progressive” and “revolutionary” you are. If you drive the latest BMW you are pretty progressive, but if you drive the latest Porsche you are really progressive, really on ”the vanguard of the revolution”.

It must be said that while this behaviour of our revolutionary, leftist, progressive, BMW-driving, private school black elite has a certain African flavour, it is mostly consistent with international communist behaviour since communism was founded by Karl Marx in 1848. The one thing that all communists all over the world have in common is deep contempt for the working classes. Marx himself was bourgeois to his bones. He had never worked in a factory in his life, probably never even visited one, and certainly had no desire to visit one. He spent his life among bourgeois revolutionaries like himself. He preferred sitting on his bottom at the British Library reading factory reports to going to factories to see for himself. He lied about the reports (which showed growing improvements of workers’ conditions). He didn’t want to improve the lives of workers; he wanted a glorious, bloody, poetic revolution.

Brutal apparatus
In 1917, he got only a bourgeois coup in Russia, led by his most famous disciple, Vladimir Lenin. A true revolution earlier in the year had collapsed, and Lenin’s small bourgeois band seized the state in a bloodless coup. The bloodshed came soon after when Lenin set up his brutal apparatus of state terror, of widespread executions and torture, followed by famine and starvation. The working class suffered far more than it had done under the worst tzars. Industrial and agricultural production slumped. Workers and peasants died in huge numbers. Lenin relaxed his communism in 1922 and allowed a degree of capitalism in agriculture. Farm produce immediately improved and the workers could eat again. Stalin, with even greater powers of terror than Lenin, reverted to communism again on the farmlands. Millions died of starvation but Stalin said, correctly, this was necessary to “achieve socialism”. He was greatly applauded by professors and editors in the West, by people of “progressive” or “leftist” opinion.

Communism was tried again and again in many countries around the world. The results were always the same. The communist leaders, from Mao to Castro, were always bourgeois revolutionaries who regarded the working class with contempt; the people were always terrorised and impoverished; the economies always slumped; and progressive people around the world cheered for every one of them. The working classes always wanted to flee from communist countries to capitalist ones, and never the other way round. The first communist leaders, Lenin and Stalin, led austere lives, being only interested in power and glory, not riches. After them, the communist leaders usually lived lives of capitalist luxury, with Kim Jong Un in North Korea leading the way. Communists in Africa love the capitalist luxuries.

Although the SACP is afraid to face the electorate as a separate party, the EFF, which proclaims it has “drawn inspiration from the broad Marxist-Leninist tradition school of thought in their analysis of the state”, has won lots of votes in elections. Standing for the first time in 2014, it won 6.35% of the votes; in 2019, 10.8%; then in 2024, it dropped to 9.68%, but it nonetheless has been remarkably successful in winning votes. Why should so many people vote for a party offering disastrous Marxist policies that have always failed, especially for the working classes, who make up most of the South African population? Why should they vote for a party whose leaders show blatant, outrageous hypocrisy in their own personal behaviour?

Perfectly normal
Around the world, people seldom vote for policies. They seldom vote for class either. They vote for religion, race and tribe before anything else. MK’s election success in 2014 was in large part because of Zulu tribalism. This is perfectly normal around the world where tribal differences are significant. Floyd Shivambu is not Zulu and so might be able to broaden MK’s support. I doubt it though. Does this mean that the DA, which has proved over and over again that it has the best policies for improving the lives of everyone, is doomed never to get much more than 22% of the vote (its 2024 result) simply because of race? Political history suggests this might be the case. What can the DA do now? Just keep governing well where it is in power, stay honest and keep promoting good, effective, fair policies.

What can the rest of us do from the side lines? Just keep on pointing out the disgusting hypocrisy of so many of our leading politicians who want capitalist luxury and merit-based services for themselves, and communist misery and affirmative action services for everybody else. We mustn’t be shy about this. We must be as blatantly critical as they are blatantly hypocritical.

Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal

https://www.biznews.com/leadership/2024/11/25/political-hypocrisy-sa-andrew-kenny

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.