ENOUGH IS NEVER ENOUGH!

This prescient phrase was used in a recent speech in England by Mr. Roy Bennett, former Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) member of the Zimbabwe parliament, who now lives in South Africa (see here).

Bennett was one of three white parliamentarians elected in the Zimbabwe 2000 election, despite the intimidation and terror unleashed against MDC voters by supporters of Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF. During the campaign, Bennett's wife who was five months pregnant was physically abused by ZANU thugs on their farm and subsequently lost her baby boy.

Bennett served eight months of a 15-month prison term in the notorious Chikurubi Prison. On his release he declared that "the inhumanity with which prisoners are treated and their total lack of recourse to any representation or justice combined with the filth and stench of daily life is something I will never forget."  He went into exile in South Africa .

In 2009 he returned to Zimbabwe when MDC head Morgan Tsvangirai designated Bennett as Deputy Minister of Agriculture in the newly-formed government of national unity. A month later, Bennett was arrested and charged with treason. When a magistrate ordered Bennett to be released, the magistrate himself was arrested.  In May 2010, Bennett was acquitted of all charges, but on the same day fresh charges were brought against him. After warrants of arrest were issued for Bennett, he fled to South Africa where he has been living ever since.

Bennett's May 2012 address at Rhodes House, Oxford highlighted Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's increasing use of ethnicity and race to disguise "brutal and material objectives", and one cannot help wondering whether South Africa 's ANC would ever utilize the same tactics if it were confronted with the possibility of losing power. (It is not unrealistic to think along these lines, given the terror, intimidation, murder and violence with which the ANC fought its way to power in South Africa .)

Bennett traces the consolidation of control over the state apparatus by Mugabe since his election. "Mugabe and his lieutenants have deliberately, cynically and strategically acquired and defended power, and have used propaganda to disguise their purposes. Zanu-PF cadres have been cunning and calculating, to a degree of detail that would astonish many outsiders."

AN INTELLECT FROM HELL

Bennett declares that "as an intellect from hell, Mugabe is outstanding. And he is not alone".  (This perception that, besides being incompetent, the ANC is obtuse and backward,  is off course. It takes a special type of cunning to contrive the schemes used by the ANC, its "tenderpreneur" pals and others in key positions to steal the billions they have taken from the South African economy since they have been in power (estimated at R30 billion a year).  One example is R11 million taken from the SA Revenue Service by a syndicate of employees, led by a former messenger in the department who, according to current  trial documents, ‘devised a scheme to generate undue income tax refunds and had recruited others to assist in the daily operations of the scheme'.)

THE POWER SYNDROME

Holding on to power is the ANC leadership's aim, and nothing will get in their way, not South Africa's poor, not popular disgust, not broken roads, decreasing food production or any other dysfunction which should, in a normal country, give them pause.

Bennett says Mugabe's "primary agenda has always been the pursuit of wealth and power. The Big Lie is found in the contradictions between rhetoric and reality. Mugabe turned on the whites after 20 years of moderate government", and he did this when a loss of power loomed electorally. The race card was played par excellence. "This year there are few white farms left. The enemy has become less and less visible", says Bennett. "So the mirrors and smokescreens become more and more absurd. The latest is the drive towards ‘indigenization'. Having freed the land from the colonialists, it is time, we are told, to free the remainder of the economy from the clutches of white capital and return it to the real Zimbabweans".

It seems SA President Jacob Zuma has read the same script. To be re-elected as ANC head at the party  conference in December 2012 in Manguang,  he is appealing to this same basic race resentment which beats in the hearts of many of his colleagues who have had 18 years to deliver "a better life for all", and have failed miserably.

We are now faced with calls for the South African version of Zimbabwe 's "indigenization - land and farm expropriation was punted from floor at the recent ANC conference at Midrand, Gauteng . While denials that this would ever happen were swift from some sectors of the ruling party, the first chapters of the anti-white, anti-farmer novel have been written:  agreement on the scrapping of the willing-buyer, willing-seller notion was roundly endorsed by the conference. White men who ‘control the economy' are responsible for the country's poverty, and the blame game is in full swing. (It never appears to occur to the ANC that 350 years ago, there was no South African economy, and that today's modern, sophisticated South Africa  is in no way due to the initiative, creativity and skills of the ANC or their antecedents.)

GREED

Greed was an important sub-theme of Zimbabwe 's land invasions, with many of the best farms going to Zanu-PF functionaries, says Bennett. Mugabe's propaganda is still populist, but no one is listening. The talk now hides, very barely, sheer gluttony and rampant avarice. It is a disease, an addiction unhinged and uncontrollable. Many of Mugabe's acolytes have become unimaginably rich. But in Zimbabwe , says Bennett,  " enough is never enough. Mining companies are squeezed for shares. Others are bounced from their claims once they have paid upfront. There are endless victims, prepared to "play the game" in order to survive. These perpetrators - black and white - connive, steal, smuggle and murder together, shifting the country's resources out the back door and trampling the people underfoot."

Bennett reveals the players in the new, greedy, free-for-all Zimbabwe - international brigands, smugglers and profiteers. The country's Central Intelligence Organisation cooperates closely with Russian Intelligence for mutual commercial interests. Hong Kong businessmen vie with Middle East moguls to strip the country clean.

Bennett says that now " South Africa is ripe for the Zanu-PF variety of national liberation, and racist propaganda will work a treat. Already there is dialogue between the demagogues in Zimbabwe and South Africa . Zanu-PF's anti-white, anti-imperialist and pro-poor rantings obscure the deification of greed in Zimbabwe . People may not be persuaded to vote for Mugabe's party but they can be coerced into doing so. It's a routine that Zanu-PF knows only too well." Thus is democracy in Southern Africa!

It all sounds very familiar - we see this on our own doorstep. The writing is on the wall, some say. But all is not lost - there exists a "balance of forces" in South Africa that did not exist in Zimbabwe . Four and a half million whites are not going anywhere. More than one million Indians and four and a half million Coloured people are not going either. These groups - and millions of disaffected Africans -  have put too much toil into South Africa and the parasitic ANC is not going to get the land and possessions of those who have worked hard to attain them.

The ANC's numbers mean little when the ANC cannot produce the food to feed its supporters. A kleptocracy has nothing to offer except words and promises. The ANC's political power is useless without the country's commercial farmers, the skilled people who run South Africa and those who pay the taxes. This is the real power - it doesn't lie in the conference halls of Manguang.

Millions of South Africans have now come to realize that enough is never enough with the ANC, and lines will be drawn. Many ANC supporters now realize that the promises have come to nothing. It is, as Roy Bennett so succinctly describes, simply smoke and mirrors. The ANC can do nothing if there is no food on the table, if the banks don't function, if millions wander the streets looking for work. South Africa 's "balance of forces" will keep the good ship afloat, and we will see who prevails.

Most of the top ten countries in the 2012 Failed State Index are in Africa . Eight more African countries are within the top 20 states. Of the 33 countries on "Alert" status, a further 20 are in Africa .  The African track record is not good, and the ANC is no different.  If they get their way, we could be on our way to joining the club. We cannot allow that to happen. Those who have the power to save South Africa will do so, and the ANC will earn the ignominious demise it so richly deserves. Nothing lasts forever, even the ANC.

This article first appeared in the International Bulletin of TAU SA

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