Despite the R2.4bn (Swazi emalangeni is equal to the rand) loan from the South African government to its cash-strapped neighbour, Swaziland is sinking deeper into debt.
While the money is yet to be given to Swaziland (the first instalment will be paid at the end of August), various institutions and organisations disagree on what government should do with the money.
Most of the Swaziland government’s business creditors feel the money should be used to pay them, while others believe it should go towards the country’s education institutions.
The country’s only university and public schools have closed because of a lack of funds.
By the end of May government owed independent businesses R1.4 bn.
Businesses feel their debt should be paid first, once government receives the first instalment of about R800m. South African Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan said the loan will be released in three instalments, at the end of August, October and February 2012.
“A lot of companies are closing down because government has not paid them,” said Hezekiel Mabuza, vice-president of the Federation of the Swaziland Business Community (FESBC).
“We hope government will use the loan from South Africa to pay us, otherwise more businesses will close down.”
FESBC has a membership of 500 small and medium businesses, and so far over 50 have closed down because government has failed to pay them for supplied goods and services.
“What’s worse, we can’t get stock on credit from South African suppliers because we have outstanding debts,” said Mabuza.
The country’s cash flow problems started in 2010 when Swaziland received 60% less of what it used to get from the Southern African Customs Union.
The regional customs union used to contribute more than half of Swaziland’s national budget, but the revenue dropped after the global economic meltdown.
But the country’s education sector has also suffered a severe blow because of the lack of funds. The reopening of the University of Swaziland (Uniswa), the country’s only university, has been put on hold because government does not have adequate funds for scholarships, which are awarded to all students who get accepted to the university.
According to Uniswa registrar, Sipho Vilakati, the institution’s budget for this academic year is R241m.
Government has not paid a cent towards the institution so far and the university, which was supposed to reopen on August 8, after the holidays, is yet to begin lectures.
“The date for the start of lectures this academic year is yet to be decided by the university senate,” said Vilakati.
Staff salaries have not been paid in recent months because of the lack of adequate funds.
Public schools also had to close prematurely on August 5 because government has not paid fees for orphans and vulnerable children and for ordinary pupils under the Free Primary Education Programme (FPEP).
Out of the R148.5m owed for orphans and vulnerable children, government was only able to pay schools R37.7m.
For the FPEP, which caters for Grades 1 to 3 in all public schools, government owes schools an estimated R47.7m.
Government is also yet to pay the Examinations Council R3.7m for exam fees for orphans and vulnerable children.
“Unless we get the money to run schools, there is no way we’ll reopen for the third term,” said president of the Swaziland Principals’ Association, Charles Bennett.
Education is not the only sector affected by the economic crisis.
People living with HIV-Aids feel the money should be directed to the health sector, particularly to ensure the country has adequate supplies of ARVs and services of HIV-positive people, such as home-based care.
“Government has repeatedly said the health sector will be prioritised, yet we see it crumbling because there are no drugs in hospitals and boycotts by staff have become the order of the day,” said president of the Swaziland National Network of People Living with HIV-Aids, Vusi Nxumalo.
In July people living with HIV-Aids took to the streets after the country’s buffer stock of ARVs fell below the prescribed three-month supply.
Since the loan was announced on August 3, the Swazi government has remained silent on how the money will be used.
Instead, Prime Minister Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini commended King Mswati III for obtaining the loan, further fuelling fury among progressives who had called on South Africa to withhold the loan to force Swaziland to democratise.
The southern African country is ruled by the monarchy and political parties are not allowed to contest power.
“It goes to show how undemocratic some governments that appear to be democratic on the surface can be,” said Institute of Democracy in Africa programme manager Thembinkosi Dlamini, referring to South Africa.
Also furious about this loan is the Congress of South African Trade Unions whose spokesperson Patrick Craven said workers were disappointed at the vague conditions attached to the loan.
Annually, the Swazi government hosts the Smart Partnership Dialogue where the king and citizens from different sectors of society discuss development issues.
However, political parties are excluded from these discussions.
The conditions by the South African government included broadening the dialogue to include all stakeholders and citizens guided by the Joint Bilateral Commissions for Co-operation agreement, which promotes democracy and the respect of universal human rights.
“So long as there are no strict conditions to compel King Mswati’s regime to concede democratic reforms and to share the country’s wealth among the people, the loan will simply be used to maintain the status quo,” said Craven.
And without the conditions for regime change attached to any loan, Swaziland will continue asking South Africa for more money, said secretary-general of the Swaziland Federation of Labour, Vincent Ncongwane.
“Without fixing the loopholes, this loan is not going to help us,” said Ncongwane.
Swaziland approached South Africa for the loan after the African Development Bank refused to award Swaziland a R1.2bn loan because the country failed to meet the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommendations.
The IMF advised the Swazi government to reduce public servants’ salaries by 4.5% and politicians’ salaries by 10% to save government R240m. However, salaries remain untouched after trade unions opposed the move. The IMF will return to the country at a date yet to be confirmed to further assess the fiscal situation.
Mantoe Phakathi is a senior journalist based in Swaziland. This article first appeared on the IPS News website
http://www.thenewage.co.za/blogdetail.aspx?mid=186&blog_id=1095
Crime is Crime Corruption is Corruption Murder is Murder Rape is Rape Facts are Facts
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
‘Protection pact’ Signed Between Afrikaner Resistance Movements
By: De Wet Potgieter
Three major white rightwing organisations have signed a co-operation pact that includes joint paramilitary training for their members.
The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), the Suidlanders and the Commando Corps say their intention is protect their people “once the black revolution starts”.
Col Franz Jooste, executive director of the Commando Corps, confirmed to The New Age yesterday that he and Steyn von Ronge (AWB) and Gustav Muller (Suidlanders) agreed on the pact when they met two Saturdays ago in the historic homestead of a former Boer general on a farm in the Free State.
The “Saamstaanverdrag” (pact to stand together) would be signed in Pretoria today, he said. “We have agreed to stand together on several levels of joint operations, but the most important one is to coordinate our security strategy to protect our own people once the black revolution starts.”
The “crisis of farm murders” had played a major role in the decision for the three organisations to embark on a joint strategy of paramilitary training.
In a recent exclusive report, The New Age revealed that young white South Africans were taking part in secret military training exercises on farms across the country, where they are taught to defend themselves against “crime and bloodshed”.
Over weekends and during school holidays, about 1000 young whites go into the bush for boot camps, where border war veterans train them in parade ground drill, handling of firearms and self-defence.
“It is a matter of survival for our people,” said Jooste, who was one of the instructors who trained murdered AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche’s elite Ystergarde (Iron Guard) unit during the 1980s.
The Commando Corps has also embarked on a major recruitment campaign to revive the old commando system. “This will be a security network spanning all of South Africa, but it will only be for whites,” Jooste said.
“We do not want to attack anybody and do not want to threaten anybody. We only want to protect our own people and our own land; therefore, we have decided to reform the commandos again.”
Follow-up interviews:
In a follow-up interview, I asked Col Jooste for his thoughts on how viable the pact is.
Interaction and Conflict
There was still something else that bothered me, that I felt needed to addressed – Nobody bothered to ask the question whether the possibility – that conflict may follow as a result of interaction between the alliance, and the ANC police force or the Community Police Forum – may exist
I took the question to Col Jooste and he responded as follows:
Storm Clouds Gathering
How long will we still be able to enjoy the benefits of a ‘functional government’ when many writers are already referring to South Africa as a ‘failing’ or a ‘failed state’? Politicsweb -Documenting South Africa`s decline. It is well documented how this government is failing its citizens in various ways and across almost all government departments. Service delivery protests are a common sight and hundreds of people have already lost their lives because of police action and in police custody.
The list of government failures is extensive and makes for depressive reading. Everyday we are confronted with horror stories in the national media of miss-management, fraud, corruption and failure to deliver on election promises.
In addition to this downward spiral, we have to face the possibility that this regime ( instead of changing their policies and cleaning up their act) would rather blame minorities in trying to hide their failures and, are now actively seeking ways to punish them. One example, is the ludicrous suggestion by the arch bishop Desmond Tutu that the government should promulgate extortion laws to steal ‘White’ wealth – typical of a ‘thug’ government, aka dictatorship.
It is also beginning to look as though our government has decided to adopt Robert Mugabe’s strategies of ‘ethnic cleansing’, to rid South Africa of its White minority.
Mike Smith, in his excellent commentary here, points to the blatant attempt of the ANC to recreate conditions of forced expropriation ala Zimbabwe style – not by using legal ‘ways-and-means’, but by creating a ‘government sponsored youth militia’ to engage in activities of intimidation, terrorism and murder to liberate the land from the previous oppressor.
According to Smith, (Tuesday, August 2, 2011, The shocking Parallels between Mugabe’s ”NYS Green Bombers” and Zuma’s NARYSEC youth brigade)
The stage is set …..
South Africans are readying themselves for action.
Alliances have been formed, protection agreements signed – everywhere, youngsters are subject to military styled training to defend lives or initiate change.
Nobody is mentioning the possibility that these ‘para-military forces’ or ‘militias’ are bound to run into one another at some point.
Nobody wants to think about the result of this possible interaction.
Nobody dares to mention that the stage is set for major conflict based on ‘incompatible ideologies’ and ‘ethnicity’.
How will we react in our unity to the challenge, when the ANC’s own youth militia will act like this – and, there’s every indication that they will act like Mugabe’s youth brigade :
But I will not fear the future, because I know my People and I know their resolve, their brave fighting spirit, their will to survive.
The Suidlanders could not be reached for comment at the time of publication
http://afrikanerjournal.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/protection-pact-signed-between-afrikaner-resistance-movements/
Training Camp 1 - Photo: Kommando Korps (with permission)
Three major white rightwing organisations have signed a co-operation pact that includes joint paramilitary training for their members.
The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), the Suidlanders and the Commando Corps say their intention is protect their people “once the black revolution starts”.
Col Franz Jooste, executive director of the Commando Corps, confirmed to The New Age yesterday that he and Steyn von Ronge (AWB) and Gustav Muller (Suidlanders) agreed on the pact when they met two Saturdays ago in the historic homestead of a former Boer general on a farm in the Free State.
The “Saamstaanverdrag” (pact to stand together) would be signed in Pretoria today, he said. “We have agreed to stand together on several levels of joint operations, but the most important one is to coordinate our security strategy to protect our own people once the black revolution starts.”
Training Camp 1 - Photo: Kommando Korps (with permission2
The “crisis of farm murders” had played a major role in the decision for the three organisations to embark on a joint strategy of paramilitary training.
In a recent exclusive report, The New Age revealed that young white South Africans were taking part in secret military training exercises on farms across the country, where they are taught to defend themselves against “crime and bloodshed”.
Over weekends and during school holidays, about 1000 young whites go into the bush for boot camps, where border war veterans train them in parade ground drill, handling of firearms and self-defence.
“It is a matter of survival for our people,” said Jooste, who was one of the instructors who trained murdered AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche’s elite Ystergarde (Iron Guard) unit during the 1980s.
Training Camp 3 - Photo: Kommando Korps (with permission)
The Commando Corps has also embarked on a major recruitment campaign to revive the old commando system. “This will be a security network spanning all of South Africa, but it will only be for whites,” Jooste said.
“We do not want to attack anybody and do not want to threaten anybody. We only want to protect our own people and our own land; therefore, we have decided to reform the commandos again.”
Follow-up interviews:
In a follow-up interview, I asked Col Jooste for his thoughts on how viable the pact is.
Jooste: “Well we’ve signed the agreement this afternoon and we are positive that it will work. For the first time, in a very long time the three organizations will be working together on security matters.”It does seem from the above as though Afrikaners and most persons from ethnic European descent, are beginning to see the value of a united front to resist the ANC regime.
I asked him whether they will consider working together with other community or private groups. He says that they don’t have any problem to work together, but emphasized that their organization is geared towards protecting its members, in contrast to other groups that aim to protect the community as a whole, like the Community Police Forum.
Interaction and Conflict
There was still something else that bothered me, that I felt needed to addressed – Nobody bothered to ask the question whether the possibility – that conflict may follow as a result of interaction between the alliance, and the ANC police force or the Community Police Forum – may exist
I took the question to Col Jooste and he responded as follows:
“Look we do have a working relationship with the Police, our commando in Rustenburg has a very good relationship with the local CPF – indeed most of our commando’s all over the country are working closely with them and the police”In response to the same inquiry, a member of the CPF command structure, had this to say when asked how the situation should be dealt with, if members from multiple organizations responds to the same incident:
Training Camp 4 - Photo: Kommando Korps (with permission)
” At the end of the day”… “everyone must extract themselves from the scene” … ( excluding emergency personnel and the Police) … “to allow the police to do their work”.It seems a s though every thing is falling in place for a massive onslaught against crime in our country as portrayed by the willingness by all parties to make this work. There is however one other major problem.
“We still live in a democracy…” (with a functional government) …”where the courts and police go hand in hand” …. (to protect society and secure justice). The CPF’s role is, to secure the scene until the police arrive to take control”.
Storm Clouds Gathering
How long will we still be able to enjoy the benefits of a ‘functional government’ when many writers are already referring to South Africa as a ‘failing’ or a ‘failed state’? Politicsweb -Documenting South Africa`s decline. It is well documented how this government is failing its citizens in various ways and across almost all government departments. Service delivery protests are a common sight and hundreds of people have already lost their lives because of police action and in police custody.
The list of government failures is extensive and makes for depressive reading. Everyday we are confronted with horror stories in the national media of miss-management, fraud, corruption and failure to deliver on election promises.
In addition to this downward spiral, we have to face the possibility that this regime ( instead of changing their policies and cleaning up their act) would rather blame minorities in trying to hide their failures and, are now actively seeking ways to punish them. One example, is the ludicrous suggestion by the arch bishop Desmond Tutu that the government should promulgate extortion laws to steal ‘White’ wealth – typical of a ‘thug’ government, aka dictatorship.
It is also beginning to look as though our government has decided to adopt Robert Mugabe’s strategies of ‘ethnic cleansing’, to rid South Africa of its White minority.
Mugabe's Youth
Mike Smith, in his excellent commentary here, points to the blatant attempt of the ANC to recreate conditions of forced expropriation ala Zimbabwe style – not by using legal ‘ways-and-means’, but by creating a ‘government sponsored youth militia’ to engage in activities of intimidation, terrorism and murder to liberate the land from the previous oppressor.
According to Smith, (Tuesday, August 2, 2011, The shocking Parallels between Mugabe’s ”NYS Green Bombers” and Zuma’s NARYSEC youth brigade)
“These youths (in Zimbabwe) were guilty of murder, torture, rape, voter intimidation, destruction of property, attacks on businesses, disruption of opposition MDC rallies and ultimately invasions of white owned farms, killing farmers and their families and chasing them off their land.
Just like Mugabe founded the National Youth Services to aid with “Land Reform” in rural areas, the ANC founded the National Rural Youth Service Corps (NARYSEC) under the guidance of the Ministry of Rural Development and the Ministry of Defense.”
This youth militia (8000 of them), will be trained at two military bases at… “Saldanha and Bloemfontein (De Brug).”
Narysec 1 - The ANC's Youth Corps
The stage is set …..
South Africans are readying themselves for action.
Alliances have been formed, protection agreements signed – everywhere, youngsters are subject to military styled training to defend lives or initiate change.
Nobody is mentioning the possibility that these ‘para-military forces’ or ‘militias’ are bound to run into one another at some point.
Nobody wants to think about the result of this possible interaction.
Nobody dares to mention that the stage is set for major conflict based on ‘incompatible ideologies’ and ‘ethnicity’.
How will we react in our unity to the challenge, when the ANC’s own youth militia will act like this – and, there’s every indication that they will act like Mugabe’s youth brigade :
….. They (will)…”have an ambivalent relationship with law enforcing agencies including the army and police. On the whole, the youth militia…” (will)…” have impunity,…” (will) often work(-ing ) under the direction of war veterans and alongside government agencies in their illegal activities. They are…” (will)…” seldom (be) arrested or prevented from breaking the law.”Now is the time to rise above our circumstances, our petty differences and realize that this stage had been set many years ago – nay, ….many decades ago, and it is the descendents of those brave Afrikaner pioneers that will have to show their worth and battle for their very existence….
But I will not fear the future, because I know my People and I know their resolve, their brave fighting spirit, their will to survive.
The Suidlanders could not be reached for comment at the time of publication
http://afrikanerjournal.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/protection-pact-signed-between-afrikaner-resistance-movements/
Zuma worst South African president ever
19 August, 2011
He seems to have done great damage to South Africa inasmuch as we are not looked on favourably by the rest of the world because South Africa has become another corrupt nation.
I live in London and cringe sometimes when Zuma's name is brought up as he really has no standing in politics. Further his closeness to the ANC Youth League means that he cannot control them as they do not respect him.
Who does in any event. It is really time to look around to ensure that a new President with an excellent reputation and standing who has the right qualifications to become President (i.e. can speak and understand English!) and with a firm hand to ensure that he is above all the rubbish the ANCYL dish out, is put in place.
Without a strong president South Africa will become like Zimbabwe - full of corruption, nothing else. Please let us take the right road this time.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2011/08/19/zuma-worst-south-african-president-ever-ilive
I read with interest your article on Jacob Zuma and congratulate you on an excellent article. This man is the worst kind of person ever to sit as President of South Africa.
He has shown no leadership whatsoever and it seems his knowledge of the English language is very sparse.
I live in London and cringe sometimes when Zuma's name is brought up as he really has no standing in politics. Further his closeness to the ANC Youth League means that he cannot control them as they do not respect him.
Who does in any event. It is really time to look around to ensure that a new President with an excellent reputation and standing who has the right qualifications to become President (i.e. can speak and understand English!) and with a firm hand to ensure that he is above all the rubbish the ANCYL dish out, is put in place.
Without a strong president South Africa will become like Zimbabwe - full of corruption, nothing else. Please let us take the right road this time.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2011/08/19/zuma-worst-south-african-president-ever-ilive
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Premier’s house costs taxpayers R25m
August 18 2011
Gauteng premier Nomvula Mokonyane
Imagine having more than R500 000 a year to spend on “deep cleaning” your house, keeping the pool running and fancying up the garden.
Forget about the recession. If you don’t like it, change it.
Re-do the main bedroom, the en-suite bathroom and the dressing room. Add in the kitchen, laundry, a bit of repainting, another cupboard, some new furniture… Oh yes, how about another TV and some new bedding… Oops, the bill just went over R1 million…
Never mind there is more to do… How about R40 000 for an unregistered security business?
That is what taxpayers are coughing up for the Gauteng premier’s official residence in Bryanston. And the MEC for Infrastructure Development’s answers to questions in the Gauteng legislature this month reveal that even more was spent on the premier’s official residence.
This brings the known cost of work on the house to at least R13.5m and, adding in the R11.5m purchase price of the house in 2004, makes the cost to taxpayers – so far – at least R25m.
On Wednesday, the Premier’s Office referred to more expenditure.
The questions to the Infrastructure Development MEC were the latest in a series on spending on the house posed by DA MPL Jack Bloom.
“It looks even more fishy than before,” Bloom told The Star about discrepancies raised between the replies. “I’ve already referred the whole issue of refurbishment to the public protector. It all looked fishy. I’ll refer this as well.”
The recent questions were about the cost of maintenance contracts for the house since 2008.
The reply, by MEC Bheki Nkosi, listed work done this year as “replacing security lights”.
The only contractor hired for this year that he referred to was Sonke Plantscapers at a cost of R137 620. The department did not respond to The Star’s requests for clarity on whether that money was spent just on replacing the lights.
Nkosi’s reply said that Keliana Services was paid R547 000 in 2008 (work that year included “deep cleaning of the house, garden service, swimming pool and smaller maintenance”), and R2.7m over 2009 and 2010 (refurbishment of main bedroom, en suite bathroom, kitchen, laundry, dressing room, curtains, bedding and furniture, painting of internal walls, removing old kitchen, supply of TV, and additional cupboard and couches).
In a reply in September last year, then MEC Faith Mazibuko, lists the same 2009/10 refurbishment work, but at the lower price of R2.072m. Mazibuko’s list of contractors for this work does not include Keliana, and Nkosi’s reply does not refer to any of the contractors listed by Mazibuko.
Keliana is understood to be Keliana Management Company, and between Nkosi and the Premier’s Office, they gave three incorrect versions of the name.
“Note that Keliana Management Services is not the only company that provided services in that house; various service providers were used. Security contractor Lengwati is yet another service provider that rendered services this year for roughly R40 000,” said Xoli Mngambi, spokesman for Premier Nomvula Mokonyane.
The Star could not find a security company called Lengwati registered with the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority – a mandatory requirement.
But The Star did find one Lengwati business – an electrical business – with a valid registration listed on the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission database.
Mokonyane’s office dismissed The Star’s queries.
“I’d like to remind you that in the year 2008, Nomvula Mokonyane was not the premier of the Gauteng province. Therefore, your assertion that the spending was done during a ‘recession’ surely does not apply to Mokonyane.
“Secondly, the Department of Infrastructure Development is responsible for the maintenance of any government property in the province,” said Mngambi.
Although Mokonyane was not premier when the house was bought, the ANC has run the province since 1994. South Africa went into a recession in May 2009, weeks after Mokonyane took over as premier, and more than R2m was spent on the house under her administration.
Don't blame whites for failures of the ANC
17 August 2011
On Friday, the Cape Argus (12 August) carried, yet again, one of Archbishop Tutu's inane rants that white people be subjected to a wealth tax. Why would he say this when white people already bear the brunt of most taxation in South Africa?
Secondly, he said that had this been imposed at the time of the Truth Commission, it would have made a difference, which itself is an admission that the TRC failed with reparations, which if the truth be told, was never its priority. The Commissioners closed the TRC with a whopping severance package which, given their mission and failure to achieve it, was a scandalous way to end the TRC.
The TRC ranks as one of the world's best efforts at reconciliation, when in fact it failed spectacularly to achieve social justice, compensation and reconciliation. It was nothing but a show trial promising absolution to those who confess while exposing the pain and indignity black people suffered at the hands of the apartheid regime.
Today apartheid has been defeated, yet the ANC government fails to take responsibility for its failure to improve education, for reducing poverty, for creating jobs, for effective service delivery, and for crime prevention. Tutu's rant is tantamount to blaming white people for the failure of this government.
As usual, the Cape Argus continually gives the Arch headlines when on page three a much more worrying report should have received prominence. In the report, Premier Helen Zille reveals that more than 50 percent of primary school children at South Peninsula tested positive for drugs.
This is the tip of the iceberg and points to a country that has failed its youth, resulting in fatherless households, gross youth unemployment, high rates of criminality, and an education system that is one of the worst in the world. The levels of drug abuse at schools are shocking and account for the low levels of education reached by coloured kids on the Cape Flats.
If SA ranks 130th out of 139 countries regarding our education system, then people like Tutu who keeps receiving international awards should focus his gaze where it matters and should stop singling out white people as the problem in this country, and Israel as the problem in the world.
For eleven years Impumelelo has been awarding innovative projects that improve the quality of life of the poor. Hundreds of white people who have been ejected from the system through racism and affirmative action have reinvented themselves and are doing the most amazing work in the non-profit and NGO sectors. They run income-generation projects, they command vast armies of volunteers who tackle the HIV/AIDS and TB pandemics, and they are responsible for vast pockets of social development that the ANC government should be doing.
I can give facts and figures to prove it, not least to point to white business men and women who put money into the education of black youth unlike the majority of the black elite who enjoy their ill-gotten wealth with rank consumerism.
Impumelelo shows equally, that ordinary black people run an incredible range of development projects in both urban and rural settings, especially in areas where government has failed and do nothing. But this is mostly in the NGO sector. Tutu, wrongly, keeps on targeting white South Africa, when black business does very little to contribute to the growth and development of this country.
To demand a wealth tax from whites, firstly is racist. Secondly it is irresponsible, when Julius Malema allegedly received a R51 million tender through nefarious means. To demand a wealth tax from white people when the ANC government gives R2.5 billion of South African taxes to King Mswati 111, dictator and polygamist, beggars belief.
To demand a wealth tax from whites when the recent Mail & Guardian reveals that President Jacob Zuma's son-in-law, Lonwabo Sambudla, is allegedly involved in a R1 billion tender for new government office space, is obscene. The ruling elite continues to profit from taxpayers' money with ruthless and unashamed greed.
The time has come for Archbishop Tutu to recognise SA for what it is and how he as a leader, together with those who claim the anti-apartheid moral high ground, have failed to create a democracy that cannot provide the most basic of socio-economic rights to black people.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page72308?oid=251207&sn=Marketingweb+detail&pid=90389
Rhoda Kadalie says Desmond Tutu's wealth tax call is racist and irresponsible
Tutu Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!
On Friday, the Cape Argus (12 August) carried, yet again, one of Archbishop Tutu's inane rants that white people be subjected to a wealth tax. Why would he say this when white people already bear the brunt of most taxation in South Africa?
Secondly, he said that had this been imposed at the time of the Truth Commission, it would have made a difference, which itself is an admission that the TRC failed with reparations, which if the truth be told, was never its priority. The Commissioners closed the TRC with a whopping severance package which, given their mission and failure to achieve it, was a scandalous way to end the TRC.
The TRC ranks as one of the world's best efforts at reconciliation, when in fact it failed spectacularly to achieve social justice, compensation and reconciliation. It was nothing but a show trial promising absolution to those who confess while exposing the pain and indignity black people suffered at the hands of the apartheid regime.
Today apartheid has been defeated, yet the ANC government fails to take responsibility for its failure to improve education, for reducing poverty, for creating jobs, for effective service delivery, and for crime prevention. Tutu's rant is tantamount to blaming white people for the failure of this government.
As usual, the Cape Argus continually gives the Arch headlines when on page three a much more worrying report should have received prominence. In the report, Premier Helen Zille reveals that more than 50 percent of primary school children at South Peninsula tested positive for drugs.
This is the tip of the iceberg and points to a country that has failed its youth, resulting in fatherless households, gross youth unemployment, high rates of criminality, and an education system that is one of the worst in the world. The levels of drug abuse at schools are shocking and account for the low levels of education reached by coloured kids on the Cape Flats.
If SA ranks 130th out of 139 countries regarding our education system, then people like Tutu who keeps receiving international awards should focus his gaze where it matters and should stop singling out white people as the problem in this country, and Israel as the problem in the world.
For eleven years Impumelelo has been awarding innovative projects that improve the quality of life of the poor. Hundreds of white people who have been ejected from the system through racism and affirmative action have reinvented themselves and are doing the most amazing work in the non-profit and NGO sectors. They run income-generation projects, they command vast armies of volunteers who tackle the HIV/AIDS and TB pandemics, and they are responsible for vast pockets of social development that the ANC government should be doing.
I can give facts and figures to prove it, not least to point to white business men and women who put money into the education of black youth unlike the majority of the black elite who enjoy their ill-gotten wealth with rank consumerism.
Impumelelo shows equally, that ordinary black people run an incredible range of development projects in both urban and rural settings, especially in areas where government has failed and do nothing. But this is mostly in the NGO sector. Tutu, wrongly, keeps on targeting white South Africa, when black business does very little to contribute to the growth and development of this country.
To demand a wealth tax from whites, firstly is racist. Secondly it is irresponsible, when Julius Malema allegedly received a R51 million tender through nefarious means. To demand a wealth tax from white people when the ANC government gives R2.5 billion of South African taxes to King Mswati 111, dictator and polygamist, beggars belief.
To demand a wealth tax from whites when the recent Mail & Guardian reveals that President Jacob Zuma's son-in-law, Lonwabo Sambudla, is allegedly involved in a R1 billion tender for new government office space, is obscene. The ruling elite continues to profit from taxpayers' money with ruthless and unashamed greed.
The time has come for Archbishop Tutu to recognise SA for what it is and how he as a leader, together with those who claim the anti-apartheid moral high ground, have failed to create a democracy that cannot provide the most basic of socio-economic rights to black people.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page72308?oid=251207&sn=Marketingweb+detail&pid=90389
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
The ANC and the Soviets
The lasting legacy: The ANC's Soviet connection
If the close relations that existed between the ANC and the Soviet Union during the decades of the struggle against apartheid are mentioned now, it mostly happens at appropriate official occasions: embassy receptions or national holidays or speeches during state visits.
It was very different back then. Garth Strachan, a communist and an MK veteran said in one his interviews: "Although it has become popular not to admit this now, at the time-at least in the circles where I moved and up to the mid or late 1980s-the reality was that in ANC... there was a kind of pro-Soviet hysteria". [1]
"Hysteria" may be too strong a word, but there is hardly any doubt that there was a lot of admiration for the Soviet Union - its achievements, its ideology and its policy - both among the ANC leadership and the rank and file cadres in exile. Songs were sung and poetry composed about the Soviet people.
Support was expressed for Soviet initiatives and policy moves. Messages of appreciation and gratitude were read at various Soviet gatherings where ANC and SACP delegations were invariably present. Lenin was a household name among the leadership of both organisations, and the experience of the CPSU was thoroughly and passionately studied and discussed.
For the ANC and SACP leadership - just as for the leadership of many other communist and national liberation organisations all over the world - the Soviet Union was the embodiment of progress and justice, the bright future of humanity.
Jeremy Cronin, the deputy general secretary of the SACP, wrote in connection with the recent celebration of the 90th anniversary of the SACP: "In the 20th century we were not alone... We had a sense of being a part of shaping world history. Individually, many of us might not survive, but, so it seemed, we were on the side of history in the struggle for a better future...". [2]
Although Cronin had some reservations about "communists in power", for many parties on the left, the SACP and the ANC among them, it was the USSR that created the feeling that they "were not alone". The USSR was at the head of the struggle for a better future, and its experience was perceived as a clear pointer to such a future and as a measure of the correctness of South Africa's liberation movement route to it.
For the older generation of the SACP and the ANC leadership and cadres the Soviet Union was a model for a future South Africa - the South Africa after the ANC's victory.
Without exception, all memoirs or books published by the ANC and SACP leaders in the last two decades stress that the Soviet Communist Party never dictated a particular political line to the ANC or to the SACP. This was, obviously, true, at least in the 1960s-1980s (the situation was different in the late 1920s and 1930s). There was no need to dictate: the CPSU, the SACP and the ANC were all led by like-minded people, and their vision of the world and of their course in it were extremely close.
The ANC's armed struggle and the USSR
But the SACP's and ANC's "uncritical" attitude to the Soviet Union [3] is not explicable solely in terms of the belief of the leadership of these organisations in the historical role and mission of the USSR. Close ties between them were hardly surprising if one takes into consideration the scale and role of Soviet assistance to both organisations in exile. Soviet support came in many forms and shapes. Perhaps the most important for the future of the ANC was the support that the Soviets gave to its armed struggle.
For three decades, from 1961 till 1991, the USSR supplied Umkhonto we Sizwe with arms, ammunition and equipment and gave military training to its cadres and leadership. No other country rendered such support to the ANC. A few other socialist countries, particularly the GDR, also contributed, but even in this case the scale was simply incomparable.
In 1969 the government of Tanzania ordered the ANC to vacate its military camp in the country. This followed the Lusaka Manifesto passed by the Organisation of African Unity which demanded that South Africa's liberation movements desist from armed struggle. In practice this would have meant the liquidation of Umkhonto. But the Soviets evacuated the whole Umkhonto contingent to the USSR and maintained and trained it there for three years.
Umkhonto cadres started to return back, to Africa, only in 1972. The USSR came to the rescue of Umkhonto again in the late 1970s when, after the Soweto uprising, many young South Africans started to leave the country in order to take up arms and fight. The ANC had simply no facilities to accommodate these new cadres, feed them and provide them even with bare necessities. First aid - equipment, food, clothes and then arms - came from the USSR, delivered by Soviet planes to Angola.
One can argue about the quality and effectiveness of Soviet military training: the opinions of veterans in this regard differ. There is hardly any doubt that the goal of defeating the apartheid regime militarily remained elusive for Umkhonto. And yet its very existence, as well as all its operations, even the failed ones, played a crucial role in the history of the ANC. This "armed propaganda" was indispensable: it helped to maintain the image of the ANC as the only South African liberation organisation that was carrying the torch of a real, serious, struggle against apartheid.
There was simply no other home for the young men and women of the Soweto generation when they left the country in order to get training and fight. And there was no other party to turn to for inspiration, direction and assistance for the next generation which led mass democratic movement in the 1980s.
Without Umkhonto the ANC in exile would have been a very different organisation, and without the USSR there would have been no Umkhonto to speak of - perhaps none at all.
Political and Other Assistance
But even more important than its support for the ANC's armed struggle was the role of the USSR in creating and maintaining the international anti-apartheid movement. Essop Pahad, minister in the presidency during Thabo Mbeki's term, rightly stressed that "the Soviet Union was also critical in building mass anti-apartheid movement... Through international organizations, such as the Afro-Asian Peace and Solidarity Committee, [4] through the World Peace Council, through the International Union of Students, through the World Federation of Democratic Youth, women's organisations. It was quite clear that the Soviet Union played a large part in keeping these organizations alive. So, whilst we recognize the military support, we must never forget the political support that we received consistently from the Soviet Union, and then the other socialist countries, which, I think, played a very big role in enabling us to develop this very broad, very powerful anti-apartheid solidarity movement throughout the world. ...Of course, there were other things... But it was these two elements that really were absolutely critical". [5]
The most important organisation that Pahad did not mention in this connection was the United Nations. The USSR did not play a large part in keeping it alive, but it played a very important role in introducing resolutions against colonialism and apartheid. Suffice it to say that every year from 1963 to 1989 the USSR proposed resolutions for sanctions against South Africa in the Security Council. Some were passed, some were not. But the process itself helped to create an atmosphere of intolerance towards the apartheid regime.
The CPSU also supported the ANC and the SACP financially. Compared to the donations that the ANC received from Scandinavian counties, the Soviet contributions were small. They were also smaller than donations that the Soviet Union allocated to some West European and Asian communist parties, though South Africa was important enough for the combined donation to the ANC and SACP to put it, in some years, in 7th and 9th place among about 70 to 80 recipients.
But irrespective of the scale of this support, Soviet financial assistance was very important in two respects. First, it began in 1960, when no other country or international organisation was willing to render such support. In the early 1960s Soviet financial assistance was a make-or-break matter for both the SACP and the ANC in exile.
Second, according to Vladimir Shubin, for many years a key contact of the ANC and the SACP at the Central Committee of the CPSU and a specialist in the history of Soviet ties with these organisations, "as a matter of mutual trust the SACP and other friendly parties have never been asked to account for these donations". [6] This meant that they could be used in whichever way the leadership saw fit. The purposes of Western financial assistance, on the other hand, were usually strictly defined, leaving very little room for manoeuvre. And no Western country gave any support to the SACP, or to Umkhonto.
The USSR supplied the ANC with food, and with non-military equipment and goods. It provided air tickets for leaders or representatives of the ANC and SACP to enable them to attend various international events. It invited them to its hospitals and sanatoriums "for rest and treatment" and provided venues for some of the parties' meetings. It gave scholarships to ANC students - as did many other countries, though Soviet aid came earlier. Uniquely, the Soviets provided the ANC with huge numbers of false documents and in some cases helped to change the appearance of Umkhonto operatives.
Taken together, all this meant that for three decades the Soviet Union provided the ANC and the SACP with a safety net which could not, of course, protect their cadres from the hardship and dangers of exile and struggle, but helped both organisations to survive and triumph. In the late 1980s and early 1990s this safety net started to sag, but military assistance continued unabated.
And, despite a perception which was (and still is) widely spread among ANC cadres that Mikhail Gorbachev was a "sell-out", his perestroika played a huge role in the "unblocking" of the Angolan conflict, and in Namibia's achievement of independence. There is hardly any doubt that changes in the Soviet Union also played a large role in bringing the South African negotiated settlement closer too.
Soviet influence?
The collapse of the Soviet Union was an enormous blow for South Africa's liberation movement. Cronin wrote: "At the very moment when we were poised, locally, to make the democratic break through for which generations had sacrificed, the Soviet legacy which had inspired us seemed to be lying beneath the rubble of the Berlin Wall. History wasn't necessarily on our side after all." [7]
It was only at that stage that the flow of arms, advice and assistance from Moscow finally stopped. By then South Africa's negotiated settlement was well under way. The ANC was getting support from every corner and quarter of the world and, most importantly, it had huge leverage during the negotiations due to the mass following it had gained at home. It could easily do without the Soviet safety network then. But even so it had to be careful about how it played its hand in the new political situation.
For a long time South Africa's relations with the new Russia remained cool. Even now, when both countries are members of the BRICS club and often share common positions in the international arena, these relations are just a pale shadow of what the ties between the ANC and the USSR used to be. But such long friendships do not disappear without a trace.
Shubin, who was, in 2006, awarded the order of Grand Companions of O.R. Tambo by the South African Government for his "excellent contribution to the struggle against apartheid and colonialism in Southern Africa", wrote: "the relationship between the USSR and South Africa, especially with the ANC and its allies, had a profound though contradictory influence on developments in South Africa... One has to admit that certain aspects of Soviet society such as leader-worship, dogmatism, lack of broad discussions before taking crucial decisions, limitations in inner-party democracy were not the best features to emulate. But even if some borrowing of these characteristics did take place, the influence was negligible and was undoubtedly outweighed by the positive effects of co-operation with Moscow". Shubin is convinced that the greatest Soviet contribution "to the elimination of apartheid was not the material assistance... but the encouragement of non-racialism in the ANC". [8]
One could think of other "Soviet" traits in the ANC's political behaviour today - its distaste for an independent media and judiciary, its idea that it is destined to rule until the end of time ("until Jesus comes back"), its intolerance of opposition, its instinctive attraction to centralization and its urge to control, its patronage system and the resulting endemic corruption. But there is no way to prove or disprove whether the ANC's long attachment to the USSR had anything to do with such tendencies.
Many governments around the world developed such traits quite independently of any Soviet connection and went much further along this route - Zimbabwe, to name just one. But decades of admiration for the Soviet system could not but play a role in entrenching these trends.
As for non-racialism, true, during the struggle the ANC often stressed that it was fighting against the apartheid system, not against white South Africans, and Julius Malema would probably have shared the fate of the "gang of eight" expelled from the ANC in 1975, purportedly for their "Africanist" views. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.
However, one key aspect of South Africa's political dispensation today is without doubt a part of the Soviet legacy: the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and the way this ideology has been interpreted and implemented by the ANC and its allies.
The early roots of the NDR
The origins of the NDR date back to Lenin's theory of the national liberation movement, which was first formulated in his Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) [9] in 1920. The main idea of the Theses was that Soviet Russia and anti-colonial movements were natural allies against imperialism, despite the fact that such movements could only be bourgeois ("bourgeois-democratic") by nature.
At the Congress itself the term "national-revolutionary movements" was substituted for "bourgeois-democratic" to stress that only those national movements that were "truly revolutionary", i.e. prepared to allow "us" (communists) "to educate and organize the peasantry and the broad exploited masses in the spirit of revolution", could be the allies of Soviet Russia. Led by the international Communist movement, even the most "backward" colonial peoples, i.e. those that had not reached the capitalist stage of development, could move straight to building socialism, avoiding the evils of capitalist exploitation.
The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the predecessor of the SACP, joined the Comintern in 1921, but it was only in 1927 that this international organisation got directly involved in South African affairs. After several meetings with the CPSA's representative, the Comintern adopted a new line for the party. The CPSA had to work towards "an independent native South African Republic as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' republic with full rights for all races, black, coloured and white." [10]
This formula was far from clear (for example, it did not explain the class nature of the "independent native republic"), but the Comintern imposed it on the party, despite fierce opposition within its ranks. In 1935 the Comintern cancelled the slogan of the "independent native republic" as abruptly and as harshly as it had introduced it, but the idea of a link between national liberation and socialism through a two-stage revolution remained intact both in its documents and in the minds of its followers in South Africa.
It was to have a lasting effect on the nature of the ideological debate within the party and the ANC. Its historical importance is fully realised by South African communists today. Dominic Tweedie, the host of the SACP's "Communist University" blog, writes: "It is possible to make out a clear list of texts from the 1920s, approximately one per decade, and to demonstrate that the argument built up through these texts has determined South Africa's history... This list could start with the Comintern's "Black Republic Resolution of 1928". [11]
The Soviet theory of the NDR
After the Second World War, when one colony after another gained independence, the Soviet leadership came to the conclusion that the anti-colonial movement as a whole, irrespective of its character in each country, could become an important ally of the Soviet Union in its struggle against imperialism, particularly in the context of the unfolding Cold War. It was against this background that Lenin's ideas were developed into the theory of the National Democratic Revolution.
The NDR first appeared in the Soviet political vocabulary in the late 1950s. According to Karen N. Brutents, one of its authors and, in the 1970-1980s, a deputy head of the Central Committee's Foreign Department, it was put forward by the CPSU and "widely accepted" by the international Communist movement. [12]
Brutents explained that: "the introduction by the Communist parties... of the category of "national democratic revolution" into their militant political vocabulary, and... the use of its socio-economic and political content... for elaborating strategy and tactics resulted from... the new features of national liberation revolutions in our day... These revolutions which lead to the elimination of colonial and semi-colonial oppression are also latent with anti-capitalist tendency... When [their] leadership comes from political forces representing the interests of the proletariat, these revolutions... grow directly into socialist revolutions. When leadership comes from non-proletarian democratic forces... these revolutions produce, alongside important anti-imperialist and anti-feudal changes, anti-capitalist transformations, paving the way for transition to socialist reconstruction... The national democratic tendency of development in the revolution can gain the upper hand either at the first or at the second phase of the revolution". [13]
So, according to the theory, the NDR, if correctly implemented, could only have one outcome, socialism, which could either emerge directly from a radical anti-colonial revolution, or develop after it through a radical transformation during a transitional period.
Soviet theoreticians worked out scores of measures to be undertaken during such a transitional period. The nationalisation of "imperialist monopolies and trans-national corporations", as well as the property of "internal reaction", the "strengthening of the state sector - the economic basis of socialist orientation", the implementation of "progressive agricultural reforms", nationalisation of "feudal" landed property, encouraging of "co-operative movements in the rural areas", using both public and private sectors of the economy "in the interests of the development of the productive forces", the introduction of "state planning and other institutions of a socialist economy" were all high on the list of priorities. [14]
All these Soviet theoretical works and official documents stressed the importance of the "leading role of the proletariat" and of the cooperation with socialist countries during the transitional period. [15] None mentioned any need for checks and balances, any role for the Opposition (except hampering progressive reforms), or any restraint at all on the power of the central government.
All attempts to follow these recipes in the Third World context ended in disaster. Each time there was a different reason for failure: a war, an imperialist aggression, a drought, an internal reaction, a military coup, an ethnic conflict, this or that reform was not followed through, etc. But despite this entire lack of success, enthusiasm for what seemed to be a short cut to happiness and prosperity persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. For many in the Third World the USSR's achievements were a testimony to the fact that miracles were within reach, and each new convert to the project was greeted with new hopes: this time the conditions were right; this time the recipe would work. It never did.
The authors of a book on relations between the ANC and the GDR wrote: "Of all national liberation movements the political leadership of the GDR had always considered the South African one particularly important. From the viewpoint of Marxist-Leninist ideology and revolutionary theory they perceived South Africa as the country in sub-Saharan Africa which, because of its level of development, offered the greatest potential for fundamental changes in the direction of socialism.
The ongoing process of social differentiation, in particular the emergence of a comparatively strong industrial proletariat, was seen, in the light of Marxist-Leninist theory, to provide the conditions for a national democratic revolution and for a subsequent revolutionary transition to socialism". [16]
And, indeed, the concept of the NDR became the basis of ideological elaborations by the SACP and then the ANC from the early 1960s right up until the present day.
The NDR's road to South Africa
The NDR first made its official appearance in South Africa in the 1962 Programme of the South African Communist Party. The programme declared that South Africa was a colony, although of a "special kind" and proclaimed that the national democratic revolution was the party's "immediate and foremost task".
Its main content was the national liberation of the African people". Achieving it would be "the essential condition and the key for future advance to the supreme aim of the Communist Party: the establishment of a socialist South Africa, laying the foundations of a classless, communist society." [17]
The document stated that the ANC was a national-liberation organisation and pledged the SACP's "unqualified support for the Freedom Charter" which it considered to be "suitable as a general statement of the aims of a state of national democracy". The Charter, the document ran, "necessarily and realistically calls for profound economic changes: drastic agrarian reform to restore the land to the people; widespread nationalisation of key industries... which will answer the pressing and immediate needs of the people and lay the indispensable basis for the advance of our country along non-capitalist lines to a communist and socialist future". [18]
The 1962 programme was a stark departure from SACP's previous documents. To begin with, no previous programme had treated South Africa as a colony, but rather as a common society in need of political equality and social justice. Many statements and the general analysis in the 1962 programme were either direct quotes or verbatim renditions of the documents of the Meeting of 81 Communist and Workers' Parties which took place in Moscow in 1960 and which entrenched new Soviet approaches to the national liberation movement.
It was in 1960 that the SACP, after a long interval, re-established its direct relations with the Soviet communist party. In that year South African communists visited Moscow twice, met representatives of the Soviet leadership and, among other things, actively participated in the Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties and even in its editing commission. Joe Matthews, one of South Africa's delegates, said that he and Michael Harmel spent months in the USSR, discussing theoretical issues with representatives of other communist parties.
In 1961 South African an SACP delegation visited Moscow again, and this time the conclusion of their theoretical discussions with the Central Committee of the CPSU was that the ideas of the 1960 Conference of Communist and Workers' Parties, including the NDR, should be applied to the South African situation. According to Shubin, the 1962 SACP's programme itself was at some stage discussed with Moscow. [19]
The NDR was officially adopted by the ANC at its Morogoro conference in 1969 - the first one in exile. The conference passed a resolution, in fact, a programme, Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, which opened with the following words: "The struggle of the oppressed people of South Africa is taking place within an international context of transition to the Socialist system, of the breakdown of the colonial system as a result of national liberation and socialist revolutions... We in South Africa are part of the zone in which national liberation is the chief content of the struggle." [20]
This document was also a departure from ANC's previous programmes. One can argue whether or not the Freedom Charter, with its call for nationalisation of the mines and land and for establishing state regulation of the rest of the economy is a socialist document. But it is indisputable that it too treated South Africa as a common society, not as a colony, and that its goal was full political equality and social justice, not colonial liberation.
The ideas and language of the Morogoro Strategy and Tactics were very close to those of the SACP's 1962 programme. But there was an important difference. The Morogoro resolution spoke of achieving "a speedy progression from formal liberation to genuine and lasting emancipation" already during the national-democratic stage, which would be guaranteed by "a large and growing working class whose class consciousness complements national consciousness." [21]
Those who are familiar with Marxist terminology know that "genuine and lasting emancipation" could never be achieved under capitalism. It looks like the authors of this document had decided to merge the two stages of the revolution into one. This was, indeed, what was related to their Soviet colleagues. [22]
And this was exactly how many ANC cadres, even those who were not communists, saw it. Even Oliver Tambo spoke of socialism as a goal of South Africa's national liberation in his address to the 24th CPSU's congress in 1971, when he said that the ANC was leading the masses towards revolution for the overthrow of the fascist regime, the seizure of power and the building of a "socialist society". [23]
The Soviet theory of national democratic revolution with its socialist-orientated goals was transplanted virtually whole into the ANC's ideology and mass perceptions.
The legacy
In Russia the NDR theory died even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Already in the late 1970s Brutents wrote "devastating memoranda" about it to his superiors. [24] Georgiy Mirskiy, who worked under him, wrote in his memoirs later: "...Enormous time was spent on working out subtle nuances and definitions, such as "people's-democratic" and "national democratic" forces and parties, revolutionary democracy and people's democracy, etc. Now, re-reading the surviving drafts of these materials, I am amazed at how much time and energy was wasted on compiling these at best banal, and more often simply false texts, ...which bore no relevance to what was going on in Asia, Africa and Latin America! All our prognoses proved wrong, everything happened not as we thought it would... Reading all that, very few among the local Marxists could believe that our recommendations were correct (and if they followed them, it was to the detriment of their countries)... Whole institutes with huge staffs wasted a lot of money on a completely useless cause". [25]
But the legacy of the NDR lasts - perhaps nowhere in the world more obviously than in South Africa. The ANC did not seize power and thus had to settle on a much slower process of achieving the NDR's stated goals than it had hoped for. In the process some lost their ardour about it, perhaps remembering those who tried and failed to implement it before, or realising that without the Soviet assistance the NDR's socialist-orientated goals would be even more difficult to achieve. But the majority in the ANC are as passionate about it as ever before.
The debate about the NDR in South Africa has centred not on whether this ideology is correct, or, indeed, needed for fast development and job creation - both these notions are accepted as indisputable truths by the ANC and its allies - but rather on the pace of its implementation and on its concrete contents at every stage. These aspects of the NDR may be differently understood and interpreted by different groups within the ANC and among its partners - but its ultimate goals are as alluring as ever.
And whatever the arguments about details, it is ideology, not economic reality, that dictates much of the ANC's thinking and policy. This fixation with ideology at the expense of reality was one of the most important factors that killed the Soviet economy. Yet in South Africa the core of the Soviet legacy stands.
This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.
FOOTNOTES
[1] http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/strachan/?by-name=1
[2] Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 31/07/11.
[3] R. Kasrils. Armed and Dangerous. From Undercover Struggle to Freedom. Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004. P. 29-30, 150.
[4] The correct name of the organisation was the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation. Its Soviet branch was called the Soviet Solidarity Committee of Asian and African Countries, or Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee.
[5] I. Filatova. Interview with E. Pahad. 08/05/2000.
[6] V. Shubin. ANC. A View from Moscow. Cape Town: Mayibuye Books -UWC, 1999. P. 37.
[7] Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 31/07/11.
[8] V. Shubin. Op. cit. P. 400-401.
[9] An international communist organisation centred in Moscow (1919-1943). Member Communist parties (that is most Communist parties throughout the world) were considered branches of the Comintern and had to implement its directives.
[10] A. Davidson, I. Filatova, V. Gorodnov, S. Johns, eds. South Africa and the Communist International: a documentary history (1919-1939). London: Frank Cass, 2003. Vol. I. Document 66.
[11] DomzaNet. Communist University: http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University, 27/03/07.
[12] K. N. Brutents. National Liberation Revolutions Today. Some Questions of Theory. Part I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. P. 146-147.
[13] K. N. Brutents. Op. cit.. P. 148-149.
[14] For example, Afrika. Entsiklpedicheskii spravochnik (Africa. Encyclopaedia). Moscow: Nauka, 1987, vol. 2, p. 389.
[15] For example, Mezhdunarodnoie soveshchaniie kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii. Dokumenty i materialy. Moskva, 5-17 iiunia 1969 g. (The International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties. Documents and Materials. Moscow, 5-17 June, 1969). Moscow, 1969. P. 62-63.
[16] H. G. Schleicher, I. Schleicher. Special Flights: The GDR and Liberation Movements in Southern Africa. Harare: Sapes Books, 1998. P. 7.
[17] The Road to South African Freedom. Programme of the South African Communist Party. The African Communist. 1963, vol. 2, no. 2. P. 24, 26-27.
[18] The Road.., P. 62, 64.
[19] V. Shubin. Op. cit. P. 39-41; I. Filatova. Interview with Joe Matthews, 04/11/2004; I. Filatova. Conversation with V.G.Shubin, 06/09/08, Cape Town.
[20] Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, adopted by the Morogoro Conference of the ANC, Tanzaniа, 25 April - 1 May 1969. ANC official website: http://www.anc.org.za/.
[21] Strategy and Tactics of the ANC...
[22] The Soviet encyclopaedia Afrika noted that "according to African communists" "of all countries on the continent the transition to socialism directly through a socialist revolution, by-passing or shortening to the minimum the stage of the national democratic revolution and socialist orientation... is only possible in South Africa, where employed labour constitutes more than half of the economically active population.., and where the proletariat led by the SACP numbers more than 2 million. However, even here a transitional period is not excluded". Afrika. Entsiklpedicheskii spravochnik... P. 389.
[23] V. Shubin. Op. cit. P. 361.
[24] O.A. Westad. The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time. Cambridge University Press, 2005. P. 284-285.
[25] G. I. Mirskii. Zhizn v trekh epokhakh (Life in Three Eras). Moscow, 2001. P. 179-182.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=250154&sn=Detail&pid=71616
If the close relations that existed between the ANC and the Soviet Union during the decades of the struggle against apartheid are mentioned now, it mostly happens at appropriate official occasions: embassy receptions or national holidays or speeches during state visits.
It was very different back then. Garth Strachan, a communist and an MK veteran said in one his interviews: "Although it has become popular not to admit this now, at the time-at least in the circles where I moved and up to the mid or late 1980s-the reality was that in ANC... there was a kind of pro-Soviet hysteria". [1]
"Hysteria" may be too strong a word, but there is hardly any doubt that there was a lot of admiration for the Soviet Union - its achievements, its ideology and its policy - both among the ANC leadership and the rank and file cadres in exile. Songs were sung and poetry composed about the Soviet people.
Support was expressed for Soviet initiatives and policy moves. Messages of appreciation and gratitude were read at various Soviet gatherings where ANC and SACP delegations were invariably present. Lenin was a household name among the leadership of both organisations, and the experience of the CPSU was thoroughly and passionately studied and discussed.
For the ANC and SACP leadership - just as for the leadership of many other communist and national liberation organisations all over the world - the Soviet Union was the embodiment of progress and justice, the bright future of humanity.
Jeremy Cronin, the deputy general secretary of the SACP, wrote in connection with the recent celebration of the 90th anniversary of the SACP: "In the 20th century we were not alone... We had a sense of being a part of shaping world history. Individually, many of us might not survive, but, so it seemed, we were on the side of history in the struggle for a better future...". [2]
Although Cronin had some reservations about "communists in power", for many parties on the left, the SACP and the ANC among them, it was the USSR that created the feeling that they "were not alone". The USSR was at the head of the struggle for a better future, and its experience was perceived as a clear pointer to such a future and as a measure of the correctness of South Africa's liberation movement route to it.
For the older generation of the SACP and the ANC leadership and cadres the Soviet Union was a model for a future South Africa - the South Africa after the ANC's victory.
Without exception, all memoirs or books published by the ANC and SACP leaders in the last two decades stress that the Soviet Communist Party never dictated a particular political line to the ANC or to the SACP. This was, obviously, true, at least in the 1960s-1980s (the situation was different in the late 1920s and 1930s). There was no need to dictate: the CPSU, the SACP and the ANC were all led by like-minded people, and their vision of the world and of their course in it were extremely close.
The ANC's armed struggle and the USSR
But the SACP's and ANC's "uncritical" attitude to the Soviet Union [3] is not explicable solely in terms of the belief of the leadership of these organisations in the historical role and mission of the USSR. Close ties between them were hardly surprising if one takes into consideration the scale and role of Soviet assistance to both organisations in exile. Soviet support came in many forms and shapes. Perhaps the most important for the future of the ANC was the support that the Soviets gave to its armed struggle.
For three decades, from 1961 till 1991, the USSR supplied Umkhonto we Sizwe with arms, ammunition and equipment and gave military training to its cadres and leadership. No other country rendered such support to the ANC. A few other socialist countries, particularly the GDR, also contributed, but even in this case the scale was simply incomparable.
In 1969 the government of Tanzania ordered the ANC to vacate its military camp in the country. This followed the Lusaka Manifesto passed by the Organisation of African Unity which demanded that South Africa's liberation movements desist from armed struggle. In practice this would have meant the liquidation of Umkhonto. But the Soviets evacuated the whole Umkhonto contingent to the USSR and maintained and trained it there for three years.
Umkhonto cadres started to return back, to Africa, only in 1972. The USSR came to the rescue of Umkhonto again in the late 1970s when, after the Soweto uprising, many young South Africans started to leave the country in order to take up arms and fight. The ANC had simply no facilities to accommodate these new cadres, feed them and provide them even with bare necessities. First aid - equipment, food, clothes and then arms - came from the USSR, delivered by Soviet planes to Angola.
One can argue about the quality and effectiveness of Soviet military training: the opinions of veterans in this regard differ. There is hardly any doubt that the goal of defeating the apartheid regime militarily remained elusive for Umkhonto. And yet its very existence, as well as all its operations, even the failed ones, played a crucial role in the history of the ANC. This "armed propaganda" was indispensable: it helped to maintain the image of the ANC as the only South African liberation organisation that was carrying the torch of a real, serious, struggle against apartheid.
There was simply no other home for the young men and women of the Soweto generation when they left the country in order to get training and fight. And there was no other party to turn to for inspiration, direction and assistance for the next generation which led mass democratic movement in the 1980s.
Without Umkhonto the ANC in exile would have been a very different organisation, and without the USSR there would have been no Umkhonto to speak of - perhaps none at all.
Political and Other Assistance
But even more important than its support for the ANC's armed struggle was the role of the USSR in creating and maintaining the international anti-apartheid movement. Essop Pahad, minister in the presidency during Thabo Mbeki's term, rightly stressed that "the Soviet Union was also critical in building mass anti-apartheid movement... Through international organizations, such as the Afro-Asian Peace and Solidarity Committee, [4] through the World Peace Council, through the International Union of Students, through the World Federation of Democratic Youth, women's organisations. It was quite clear that the Soviet Union played a large part in keeping these organizations alive. So, whilst we recognize the military support, we must never forget the political support that we received consistently from the Soviet Union, and then the other socialist countries, which, I think, played a very big role in enabling us to develop this very broad, very powerful anti-apartheid solidarity movement throughout the world. ...Of course, there were other things... But it was these two elements that really were absolutely critical". [5]
The most important organisation that Pahad did not mention in this connection was the United Nations. The USSR did not play a large part in keeping it alive, but it played a very important role in introducing resolutions against colonialism and apartheid. Suffice it to say that every year from 1963 to 1989 the USSR proposed resolutions for sanctions against South Africa in the Security Council. Some were passed, some were not. But the process itself helped to create an atmosphere of intolerance towards the apartheid regime.
The CPSU also supported the ANC and the SACP financially. Compared to the donations that the ANC received from Scandinavian counties, the Soviet contributions were small. They were also smaller than donations that the Soviet Union allocated to some West European and Asian communist parties, though South Africa was important enough for the combined donation to the ANC and SACP to put it, in some years, in 7th and 9th place among about 70 to 80 recipients.
But irrespective of the scale of this support, Soviet financial assistance was very important in two respects. First, it began in 1960, when no other country or international organisation was willing to render such support. In the early 1960s Soviet financial assistance was a make-or-break matter for both the SACP and the ANC in exile.
Second, according to Vladimir Shubin, for many years a key contact of the ANC and the SACP at the Central Committee of the CPSU and a specialist in the history of Soviet ties with these organisations, "as a matter of mutual trust the SACP and other friendly parties have never been asked to account for these donations". [6] This meant that they could be used in whichever way the leadership saw fit. The purposes of Western financial assistance, on the other hand, were usually strictly defined, leaving very little room for manoeuvre. And no Western country gave any support to the SACP, or to Umkhonto.
The USSR supplied the ANC with food, and with non-military equipment and goods. It provided air tickets for leaders or representatives of the ANC and SACP to enable them to attend various international events. It invited them to its hospitals and sanatoriums "for rest and treatment" and provided venues for some of the parties' meetings. It gave scholarships to ANC students - as did many other countries, though Soviet aid came earlier. Uniquely, the Soviets provided the ANC with huge numbers of false documents and in some cases helped to change the appearance of Umkhonto operatives.
Taken together, all this meant that for three decades the Soviet Union provided the ANC and the SACP with a safety net which could not, of course, protect their cadres from the hardship and dangers of exile and struggle, but helped both organisations to survive and triumph. In the late 1980s and early 1990s this safety net started to sag, but military assistance continued unabated.
And, despite a perception which was (and still is) widely spread among ANC cadres that Mikhail Gorbachev was a "sell-out", his perestroika played a huge role in the "unblocking" of the Angolan conflict, and in Namibia's achievement of independence. There is hardly any doubt that changes in the Soviet Union also played a large role in bringing the South African negotiated settlement closer too.
Soviet influence?
The collapse of the Soviet Union was an enormous blow for South Africa's liberation movement. Cronin wrote: "At the very moment when we were poised, locally, to make the democratic break through for which generations had sacrificed, the Soviet legacy which had inspired us seemed to be lying beneath the rubble of the Berlin Wall. History wasn't necessarily on our side after all." [7]
It was only at that stage that the flow of arms, advice and assistance from Moscow finally stopped. By then South Africa's negotiated settlement was well under way. The ANC was getting support from every corner and quarter of the world and, most importantly, it had huge leverage during the negotiations due to the mass following it had gained at home. It could easily do without the Soviet safety network then. But even so it had to be careful about how it played its hand in the new political situation.
For a long time South Africa's relations with the new Russia remained cool. Even now, when both countries are members of the BRICS club and often share common positions in the international arena, these relations are just a pale shadow of what the ties between the ANC and the USSR used to be. But such long friendships do not disappear without a trace.
Shubin, who was, in 2006, awarded the order of Grand Companions of O.R. Tambo by the South African Government for his "excellent contribution to the struggle against apartheid and colonialism in Southern Africa", wrote: "the relationship between the USSR and South Africa, especially with the ANC and its allies, had a profound though contradictory influence on developments in South Africa... One has to admit that certain aspects of Soviet society such as leader-worship, dogmatism, lack of broad discussions before taking crucial decisions, limitations in inner-party democracy were not the best features to emulate. But even if some borrowing of these characteristics did take place, the influence was negligible and was undoubtedly outweighed by the positive effects of co-operation with Moscow". Shubin is convinced that the greatest Soviet contribution "to the elimination of apartheid was not the material assistance... but the encouragement of non-racialism in the ANC". [8]
One could think of other "Soviet" traits in the ANC's political behaviour today - its distaste for an independent media and judiciary, its idea that it is destined to rule until the end of time ("until Jesus comes back"), its intolerance of opposition, its instinctive attraction to centralization and its urge to control, its patronage system and the resulting endemic corruption. But there is no way to prove or disprove whether the ANC's long attachment to the USSR had anything to do with such tendencies.
Many governments around the world developed such traits quite independently of any Soviet connection and went much further along this route - Zimbabwe, to name just one. But decades of admiration for the Soviet system could not but play a role in entrenching these trends.
As for non-racialism, true, during the struggle the ANC often stressed that it was fighting against the apartheid system, not against white South Africans, and Julius Malema would probably have shared the fate of the "gang of eight" expelled from the ANC in 1975, purportedly for their "Africanist" views. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.
However, one key aspect of South Africa's political dispensation today is without doubt a part of the Soviet legacy: the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and the way this ideology has been interpreted and implemented by the ANC and its allies.
The early roots of the NDR
The origins of the NDR date back to Lenin's theory of the national liberation movement, which was first formulated in his Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) [9] in 1920. The main idea of the Theses was that Soviet Russia and anti-colonial movements were natural allies against imperialism, despite the fact that such movements could only be bourgeois ("bourgeois-democratic") by nature.
At the Congress itself the term "national-revolutionary movements" was substituted for "bourgeois-democratic" to stress that only those national movements that were "truly revolutionary", i.e. prepared to allow "us" (communists) "to educate and organize the peasantry and the broad exploited masses in the spirit of revolution", could be the allies of Soviet Russia. Led by the international Communist movement, even the most "backward" colonial peoples, i.e. those that had not reached the capitalist stage of development, could move straight to building socialism, avoiding the evils of capitalist exploitation.
The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the predecessor of the SACP, joined the Comintern in 1921, but it was only in 1927 that this international organisation got directly involved in South African affairs. After several meetings with the CPSA's representative, the Comintern adopted a new line for the party. The CPSA had to work towards "an independent native South African Republic as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' republic with full rights for all races, black, coloured and white." [10]
This formula was far from clear (for example, it did not explain the class nature of the "independent native republic"), but the Comintern imposed it on the party, despite fierce opposition within its ranks. In 1935 the Comintern cancelled the slogan of the "independent native republic" as abruptly and as harshly as it had introduced it, but the idea of a link between national liberation and socialism through a two-stage revolution remained intact both in its documents and in the minds of its followers in South Africa.
It was to have a lasting effect on the nature of the ideological debate within the party and the ANC. Its historical importance is fully realised by South African communists today. Dominic Tweedie, the host of the SACP's "Communist University" blog, writes: "It is possible to make out a clear list of texts from the 1920s, approximately one per decade, and to demonstrate that the argument built up through these texts has determined South Africa's history... This list could start with the Comintern's "Black Republic Resolution of 1928". [11]
The Soviet theory of the NDR
After the Second World War, when one colony after another gained independence, the Soviet leadership came to the conclusion that the anti-colonial movement as a whole, irrespective of its character in each country, could become an important ally of the Soviet Union in its struggle against imperialism, particularly in the context of the unfolding Cold War. It was against this background that Lenin's ideas were developed into the theory of the National Democratic Revolution.
The NDR first appeared in the Soviet political vocabulary in the late 1950s. According to Karen N. Brutents, one of its authors and, in the 1970-1980s, a deputy head of the Central Committee's Foreign Department, it was put forward by the CPSU and "widely accepted" by the international Communist movement. [12]
Brutents explained that: "the introduction by the Communist parties... of the category of "national democratic revolution" into their militant political vocabulary, and... the use of its socio-economic and political content... for elaborating strategy and tactics resulted from... the new features of national liberation revolutions in our day... These revolutions which lead to the elimination of colonial and semi-colonial oppression are also latent with anti-capitalist tendency... When [their] leadership comes from political forces representing the interests of the proletariat, these revolutions... grow directly into socialist revolutions. When leadership comes from non-proletarian democratic forces... these revolutions produce, alongside important anti-imperialist and anti-feudal changes, anti-capitalist transformations, paving the way for transition to socialist reconstruction... The national democratic tendency of development in the revolution can gain the upper hand either at the first or at the second phase of the revolution". [13]
So, according to the theory, the NDR, if correctly implemented, could only have one outcome, socialism, which could either emerge directly from a radical anti-colonial revolution, or develop after it through a radical transformation during a transitional period.
Soviet theoreticians worked out scores of measures to be undertaken during such a transitional period. The nationalisation of "imperialist monopolies and trans-national corporations", as well as the property of "internal reaction", the "strengthening of the state sector - the economic basis of socialist orientation", the implementation of "progressive agricultural reforms", nationalisation of "feudal" landed property, encouraging of "co-operative movements in the rural areas", using both public and private sectors of the economy "in the interests of the development of the productive forces", the introduction of "state planning and other institutions of a socialist economy" were all high on the list of priorities. [14]
All these Soviet theoretical works and official documents stressed the importance of the "leading role of the proletariat" and of the cooperation with socialist countries during the transitional period. [15] None mentioned any need for checks and balances, any role for the Opposition (except hampering progressive reforms), or any restraint at all on the power of the central government.
All attempts to follow these recipes in the Third World context ended in disaster. Each time there was a different reason for failure: a war, an imperialist aggression, a drought, an internal reaction, a military coup, an ethnic conflict, this or that reform was not followed through, etc. But despite this entire lack of success, enthusiasm for what seemed to be a short cut to happiness and prosperity persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. For many in the Third World the USSR's achievements were a testimony to the fact that miracles were within reach, and each new convert to the project was greeted with new hopes: this time the conditions were right; this time the recipe would work. It never did.
The authors of a book on relations between the ANC and the GDR wrote: "Of all national liberation movements the political leadership of the GDR had always considered the South African one particularly important. From the viewpoint of Marxist-Leninist ideology and revolutionary theory they perceived South Africa as the country in sub-Saharan Africa which, because of its level of development, offered the greatest potential for fundamental changes in the direction of socialism.
The ongoing process of social differentiation, in particular the emergence of a comparatively strong industrial proletariat, was seen, in the light of Marxist-Leninist theory, to provide the conditions for a national democratic revolution and for a subsequent revolutionary transition to socialism". [16]
And, indeed, the concept of the NDR became the basis of ideological elaborations by the SACP and then the ANC from the early 1960s right up until the present day.
The NDR's road to South Africa
The NDR first made its official appearance in South Africa in the 1962 Programme of the South African Communist Party. The programme declared that South Africa was a colony, although of a "special kind" and proclaimed that the national democratic revolution was the party's "immediate and foremost task".
Its main content was the national liberation of the African people". Achieving it would be "the essential condition and the key for future advance to the supreme aim of the Communist Party: the establishment of a socialist South Africa, laying the foundations of a classless, communist society." [17]
The document stated that the ANC was a national-liberation organisation and pledged the SACP's "unqualified support for the Freedom Charter" which it considered to be "suitable as a general statement of the aims of a state of national democracy". The Charter, the document ran, "necessarily and realistically calls for profound economic changes: drastic agrarian reform to restore the land to the people; widespread nationalisation of key industries... which will answer the pressing and immediate needs of the people and lay the indispensable basis for the advance of our country along non-capitalist lines to a communist and socialist future". [18]
The 1962 programme was a stark departure from SACP's previous documents. To begin with, no previous programme had treated South Africa as a colony, but rather as a common society in need of political equality and social justice. Many statements and the general analysis in the 1962 programme were either direct quotes or verbatim renditions of the documents of the Meeting of 81 Communist and Workers' Parties which took place in Moscow in 1960 and which entrenched new Soviet approaches to the national liberation movement.
It was in 1960 that the SACP, after a long interval, re-established its direct relations with the Soviet communist party. In that year South African communists visited Moscow twice, met representatives of the Soviet leadership and, among other things, actively participated in the Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties and even in its editing commission. Joe Matthews, one of South Africa's delegates, said that he and Michael Harmel spent months in the USSR, discussing theoretical issues with representatives of other communist parties.
In 1961 South African an SACP delegation visited Moscow again, and this time the conclusion of their theoretical discussions with the Central Committee of the CPSU was that the ideas of the 1960 Conference of Communist and Workers' Parties, including the NDR, should be applied to the South African situation. According to Shubin, the 1962 SACP's programme itself was at some stage discussed with Moscow. [19]
The NDR was officially adopted by the ANC at its Morogoro conference in 1969 - the first one in exile. The conference passed a resolution, in fact, a programme, Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, which opened with the following words: "The struggle of the oppressed people of South Africa is taking place within an international context of transition to the Socialist system, of the breakdown of the colonial system as a result of national liberation and socialist revolutions... We in South Africa are part of the zone in which national liberation is the chief content of the struggle." [20]
This document was also a departure from ANC's previous programmes. One can argue whether or not the Freedom Charter, with its call for nationalisation of the mines and land and for establishing state regulation of the rest of the economy is a socialist document. But it is indisputable that it too treated South Africa as a common society, not as a colony, and that its goal was full political equality and social justice, not colonial liberation.
The ideas and language of the Morogoro Strategy and Tactics were very close to those of the SACP's 1962 programme. But there was an important difference. The Morogoro resolution spoke of achieving "a speedy progression from formal liberation to genuine and lasting emancipation" already during the national-democratic stage, which would be guaranteed by "a large and growing working class whose class consciousness complements national consciousness." [21]
Those who are familiar with Marxist terminology know that "genuine and lasting emancipation" could never be achieved under capitalism. It looks like the authors of this document had decided to merge the two stages of the revolution into one. This was, indeed, what was related to their Soviet colleagues. [22]
And this was exactly how many ANC cadres, even those who were not communists, saw it. Even Oliver Tambo spoke of socialism as a goal of South Africa's national liberation in his address to the 24th CPSU's congress in 1971, when he said that the ANC was leading the masses towards revolution for the overthrow of the fascist regime, the seizure of power and the building of a "socialist society". [23]
The Soviet theory of national democratic revolution with its socialist-orientated goals was transplanted virtually whole into the ANC's ideology and mass perceptions.
The legacy
In Russia the NDR theory died even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Already in the late 1970s Brutents wrote "devastating memoranda" about it to his superiors. [24] Georgiy Mirskiy, who worked under him, wrote in his memoirs later: "...Enormous time was spent on working out subtle nuances and definitions, such as "people's-democratic" and "national democratic" forces and parties, revolutionary democracy and people's democracy, etc. Now, re-reading the surviving drafts of these materials, I am amazed at how much time and energy was wasted on compiling these at best banal, and more often simply false texts, ...which bore no relevance to what was going on in Asia, Africa and Latin America! All our prognoses proved wrong, everything happened not as we thought it would... Reading all that, very few among the local Marxists could believe that our recommendations were correct (and if they followed them, it was to the detriment of their countries)... Whole institutes with huge staffs wasted a lot of money on a completely useless cause". [25]
But the legacy of the NDR lasts - perhaps nowhere in the world more obviously than in South Africa. The ANC did not seize power and thus had to settle on a much slower process of achieving the NDR's stated goals than it had hoped for. In the process some lost their ardour about it, perhaps remembering those who tried and failed to implement it before, or realising that without the Soviet assistance the NDR's socialist-orientated goals would be even more difficult to achieve. But the majority in the ANC are as passionate about it as ever before.
The debate about the NDR in South Africa has centred not on whether this ideology is correct, or, indeed, needed for fast development and job creation - both these notions are accepted as indisputable truths by the ANC and its allies - but rather on the pace of its implementation and on its concrete contents at every stage. These aspects of the NDR may be differently understood and interpreted by different groups within the ANC and among its partners - but its ultimate goals are as alluring as ever.
And whatever the arguments about details, it is ideology, not economic reality, that dictates much of the ANC's thinking and policy. This fixation with ideology at the expense of reality was one of the most important factors that killed the Soviet economy. Yet in South Africa the core of the Soviet legacy stands.
This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.
FOOTNOTES
[1] http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/strachan/?by-name=1
[2] Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 31/07/11.
[3] R. Kasrils. Armed and Dangerous. From Undercover Struggle to Freedom. Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004. P. 29-30, 150.
[4] The correct name of the organisation was the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation. Its Soviet branch was called the Soviet Solidarity Committee of Asian and African Countries, or Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee.
[5] I. Filatova. Interview with E. Pahad. 08/05/2000.
[6] V. Shubin. ANC. A View from Moscow. Cape Town: Mayibuye Books -UWC, 1999. P. 37.
[7] Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 31/07/11.
[8] V. Shubin. Op. cit. P. 400-401.
[9] An international communist organisation centred in Moscow (1919-1943). Member Communist parties (that is most Communist parties throughout the world) were considered branches of the Comintern and had to implement its directives.
[10] A. Davidson, I. Filatova, V. Gorodnov, S. Johns, eds. South Africa and the Communist International: a documentary history (1919-1939). London: Frank Cass, 2003. Vol. I. Document 66.
[11] DomzaNet. Communist University: http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University, 27/03/07.
[12] K. N. Brutents. National Liberation Revolutions Today. Some Questions of Theory. Part I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. P. 146-147.
[13] K. N. Brutents. Op. cit.. P. 148-149.
[14] For example, Afrika. Entsiklpedicheskii spravochnik (Africa. Encyclopaedia). Moscow: Nauka, 1987, vol. 2, p. 389.
[15] For example, Mezhdunarodnoie soveshchaniie kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii. Dokumenty i materialy. Moskva, 5-17 iiunia 1969 g. (The International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties. Documents and Materials. Moscow, 5-17 June, 1969). Moscow, 1969. P. 62-63.
[16] H. G. Schleicher, I. Schleicher. Special Flights: The GDR and Liberation Movements in Southern Africa. Harare: Sapes Books, 1998. P. 7.
[17] The Road to South African Freedom. Programme of the South African Communist Party. The African Communist. 1963, vol. 2, no. 2. P. 24, 26-27.
[18] The Road.., P. 62, 64.
[19] V. Shubin. Op. cit. P. 39-41; I. Filatova. Interview with Joe Matthews, 04/11/2004; I. Filatova. Conversation with V.G.Shubin, 06/09/08, Cape Town.
[20] Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, adopted by the Morogoro Conference of the ANC, Tanzaniа, 25 April - 1 May 1969. ANC official website: http://www.anc.org.za/.
[21] Strategy and Tactics of the ANC...
[22] The Soviet encyclopaedia Afrika noted that "according to African communists" "of all countries on the continent the transition to socialism directly through a socialist revolution, by-passing or shortening to the minimum the stage of the national democratic revolution and socialist orientation... is only possible in South Africa, where employed labour constitutes more than half of the economically active population.., and where the proletariat led by the SACP numbers more than 2 million. However, even here a transitional period is not excluded". Afrika. Entsiklpedicheskii spravochnik... P. 389.
[23] V. Shubin. Op. cit. P. 361.
[24] O.A. Westad. The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time. Cambridge University Press, 2005. P. 284-285.
[25] G. I. Mirskii. Zhizn v trekh epokhakh (Life in Three Eras). Moscow, 2001. P. 179-182.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=250154&sn=Detail&pid=71616
When the tick gets bigger than the dog
03 August 2011
The weekly diet of government corruption dished up by the Sunday newspapers and the Mail & Guardian nauseates. For instance, the story of Transnet's CE, Siyabonga Gama's receipt of R10m, despite having been found guilty of irregularly awarding an R18.9m tender to a security company linked to former Minister Siphiwe Nyanda, should propel South Africans into action.
The Arms Deal is growing like an octopus, while Julius Malema's alleged access to tenders for self-enrichment continues to astound. There just is no end to the stealing of taxpayers' money meanwhile our President is silent about the culture of graft that has come to characterise his presidency.
The municipal elections have come and gone and there is still no sign of President Jacob Zuma taking any action against Sicelo Shiceka, Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs. Shiceka is said to have used his influence to ensure that a R32m tarred road was routed past a house he was building for his mother in the Eastern Cape while thousands of residents in the area do not even have dirt roads to reach their homes.
He is also alleged to have stayed at a string of luxury hotels at taxpayers' expense, like his colleague, Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa. Shiceka, whose claims to have a Master's degree have proven to be untrue, might justifiably say that both accusations should long ago have been levelled against other politicians who like him are guilty of the same misdemeanours but who get off scot free. For instance, according to a court case in the Pietermaritzburg's High Court in January 2010, the current Minister of Transport, Sbu Ndebele, had a road to his country residence in Natal tarred at a cost of R5.5m (an amount recorded in the 2004/5 budget for the province).
If newspaper reports and court documents are to be believed, the five kilometres of tarred road stopped shortly after Ndebele's property, reverting again to dirt road. The local newspaper, the Natal Witness, reported that local residents and farmers had questioned why the nearby and far busier Tugela Ferry-Keate's Drift road had not been tarred or maintained given the dangerous potholes on the road.
Corruption has become so endemic that Shiceka's profligate lifestyle seems more akin to that of a Trappist monk if his record is compared to the former ANC speaker in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature, Shaun Byneveldt, who like his colleague Ebrahim Rasool, was rewarded with an ambassadorship for his sins.
In September 2008 the Cape Argus reported that Byneveldt had travelled to 51 countries since taking up the speaker's position four years earlier and that he had taken family members on some of those trips. According to a source at the Cape Argus, "...Byneveldt was ‘forever travelling' and seemed to spend more time out of the country than at work." The newspaper asked him what benefit had accrued to the taxpayer from his many gravy-plane excursions. Byneveldt's reply, after a week, was arrogant and devoid of respect for the citizens who funded his lavish lifestyle:
"The Western Cape provincial parliament and the office of the speaker in particular hereby reserve the right to respond fully to all and/or any matter raised in your aforesaid email when adequate opportunity avails itself, save to place on record, at this juncture, that the information you rely on, in a variety of material respects, is correct."
This contemptuous abrogation of the ANC's solemn commitment in 1994 to break with our apartheid past and to govern in a transparent and accountable way is a cynical response to our constitutional right to know how our taxes are spent. Shiceka could justifiably ask: "Why pick on me when the ANC has given carte blanche to its legions of deployed parasites in the looting of the public purse?" He would have a point.
From the Land Bank, to South African Airways, to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and even Robben Island, billions of rand have gone down the drain. And with every stash of money misappropriated, some poor community is deprived of a school, a clinic, or a park.
No quote seems more apt than the comment made by Zimbabwean Economist, John Robertson: "We imagine corruption to be like a tick on a dog. There are some places in Africa where the tick is bigger than the dog."
When that happens, the dog in all probability will die!
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=249104&sn=Detail&pid=71619
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