"Cry the Beloved Country" - Today we cry even harder

"Cry the Beloved Country"

(Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel written by Alan Paton first published in 1948, before passage of a series of laws institutionalizing the apartheid political system in South Africa.   The book is a social protest against the structures of the society that would later give rise to the ideology of apartheid.)  

Today we cry even harder

                                                                                                 Stes de Necker

How is it possible that thousands of foreign visitors, who visited South Africa a decade ago, are avoiding this country totally today?

How is it possible that so many foreign investors, who a decade ago, was still so excited to invest in South Africa, took their investments elsewhere.

How is it possible that peaceful marches and protest demonstrations can nowadays, within the space of minutes, degenerate into violence and mayhem.

Where did it all go so wrong.

According to the Auditor-General’s latest report, R25.7bn has been wasted. International ratings agencies have already given South Africa a junk status rating. The Treasury is running out of funds and soon it will become almost impossible to borrow money. 

Inbred anti-capitalism makes the  ANC hostile to any form of business. Instead of encouraging capital investment, both domestic and foreign, to create the jobs and tax revenue, they disregard it almost to the point of antagonism. They regard foreign investors as exploiters who are extorting our workers and taking the profits gleaned from our resources out of the country. And they regard domestic capitalists as apartheid collaborators and economic exploiters from the past.

Already, the interest we are paying on loans constitutes the largest expenditure item on our national budget. Without further borrowing, the Treasury will simply run out of money. That is when governments have to start abandoning development projects and cutting back on maintenance. 

And along that road is a point at which a government finds it doesn’t have enough money to pay salaries. That, as even the doziest sleepwalker must realise, is when real trouble starts.   

The government's controversial tender system is not assisting the matter either. It provides the opportunity for every friend and family member of the ruling elite to obtain extremely lucrative contracts, the vast majority of which are never carried out, or otherwise being performed so poorly that the work or service needs to be redone anyway.

For those who are not sufficiently blood related to the ruling elite, there is always the possibility of a lucrative position somewhere in the ANC's cadre deployment. Once you’re in that position, theft and corruption seems to follow naturally. 

Inequitable black economic empowerment, affirmative action and land reform were, and still is, the greatest evils in the ANC political culture.

South Africa is littered with failed economical development projects while millions of development funds ended up in the pockets of corrupt ANC leaders and supporters.

Once highly productive agricultural land lie uncultivated and unproductive today. The ruins and rusty implements and equipment of once thriving farming units, serve little more than forgotten tombstones of once vibrant and economically active farming communities.

Self-enrichment and personal interest is the order of the day. The inability of the government to take effective action at the stage when they were suppose to do it, caused this ill to proliferate to the point that one gets the impression that there exist the belief that, if you do not grab your share now, don’t cry the day when there is no longer anything left to grab!

The latest report by Transparency International sees South Africa top the list of countries where citizens believe the problem has got worse in the last year.

Over 80% of South Africans who were interviewed thought that corruption had increased over the last year. Ghana and Nigeria are some of the other worst-affected nations.

79% of South Africans surveyed also believe that not enough is being done to curb corruption. On the continent‚ the majority of Africans (58%) say that corruption has increased over the past year.

If there is one shining light to the survey it’s that 56% of South Africans surveyed believe that ordinary people can make a difference in the fight against corruption.

The survey found that 25% of respondents in SA believe that the most effective way for ordinary citizens to combat corruption is by reporting their experiences‚ followed by a further 22% who identified the refusal to pay bribes as an effective means to fight corruption.

With 43‚143 respondents, across 28 countries surveyed, people feel the police, business executives, government officials and the courts were all perceived as corrupt, with 75 million people estimated to have paid a bribe in the past year, AFP reports.

Between Pres. Jacob Zuma continuing pouring money into his Nkandla bunkers, Prasa’s pathetic locomotives acquisition, the much debated arms deal  and countless of other scandals, Zuma has succeeded in establishing a patronage administration of loyalists to protect himself from the implications of his involvement in the arms deal and Nkandla scandals. Now those loyalists are worrying about what will happen to them when Zuma’s term ends.

Ordinary South Africans aren’t exactly stoked about the state of affairs.“People are outraged, they see this huge spending as part of government corruption,” David Lewis, director of Corruption Watch, a local anti-graft organisation, told AFP.

Most, if not all, South Africa's problems are rooted in a corrupt, clueless and immoral ANC Government. The ANC has turnined its back on human rights and freedom by allying itself with the world’s most corrupt regimes.

The ANC has become an ideological hybrid, with a capitalist finance minister and Marxist-Leninist ministers of economic development and trade and industry. The result is gridlock. The administration cannot function as a unit with clear direction. So nothing is achieved. The country wallows in a trough of inertia while the problems mount.

Thae Anc's lack of perception is not confined to economics only: it is equally lacking in its inability to project a clear political course for the country.

As long as the minority ANC political elite remains in government, and in power, it is unlikely that any significant improvement in the prevailing conditions will occur in the near future.

Never before was the saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolute, so true as in the case of South Africa.