4 August 2020 — Tricontinental
An Anti-Eviction Campaign activist gazes at the construction site of the Delft transit camp, a ‘temporary relocation area’ for people evicted from shacks closer to the city. March 2009.
Kerry Ryan Chance
20 December 2017
Monday night’s internal African National Congress (ANC) presidential election of Cyril Ramaphosa – with a razor-thin 51% majority of nearly 4800 delegates – displaced but did not resolve a fight between two bitterly-opposed factions. On the one hand are powerful elements friendly to so-called “White Monopoly Capital,” and on the other are outgoing ANC president Jacob Zuma’s allies led by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his ex-wife and former African Union chairperson. The latter faction includes corrupt state “tenderpreneur” syndicates, especially the notorious Gupta brothers, and is hence typically nicknamed “Zupta.” (Zuma is still scheduled to serve as national president until mid-2019.)
5 October 2017 — Pambazuka News
Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and super-consultant Iraj Abedian, two solid bourgeouis representatives, have made an unusually passionate case against what is sometimes termed White Monopoly Capital. Th[i]s surprising breakthrough indicates that corporate-state degeneracy is now so extreme, that the truth will out.
Last week a conceptual barrier carefully constructed by elites since 2015 was suddenly cracked at the University of the Witwatersrand Great Hall by two of South Africa’s leading economic personalities: Pravin Gordhan, who served as a pro-business Finance Minister for seven years until being fired in March, and super-consultant Iraj Abedian, who in 1996 had co-authored the country’s post-apartheid homegrown structural adjustment programme. Two more solid bourgeois representatives would be hard to find.
10 October 2016 — Youtube
The Giant is Falling takes us through the big political events of recent years that signify the dying days of the ANC in South Africa. Locating the moment when things fell apart as the Marikana Massacre, the film charts the various ways people have collectively responded to the ANC’s failure to deliver on its promises. From the end of the ANC’s special relationship with the trade unions, to the #FeesMustFall student movement, to the more recent crushing electoral losses at the polls for the party of liberation, the film picks at the festering sore of inequality that is making the current status quo untenable.
6 May 2014 — WSWS
Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu has added his voice to a campaign championed by senior members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to get the electorate to vote against the party in the May 7 general election.
9 May 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Thanks are due to an odd man, the brutally frank Zambian vice-president Guy Scott who last week pronounced, “I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States”. Thanks are also due to South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma for forcing a long-overdue debate, just as the World Economic Forum Africa summit opens in Cape Town: is Pretoria a destructive sub-imperialist power? Continue reading
10 January 2013 — The Real News Network
Patrick Bond: Platinum miners strike inspires workers across <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>South <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>Africa; Billionaire mine owner becomes deputy head of ANC
Bio
Patrick Bond is the Director of the Center for Civil Society and Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>South <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>Africa. Bond is the author and editor of the recently released books, Politics of <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>Climate Justice and Durban’s <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>Climate Gamble. (inc. transcript) Watch full multipart Platinum Miners and Class Struggle in South Africa Continue reading
20 December 2012 — Links International journal of Socialist Renewal
Lover of fast cars, vintage wine, trout fishing and game farming and the second richest black businessperson in South Africa (global financial publication Forbes puts his wealth at $675 million or £416 million), Cyril Ramaphosa (left) celebrates his election as deputy president of the ANC with South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. Ramaphosa demanded that police break the Marikana mineworkers’ strike; police massacred 34 mineworkers and wounded 78 others.
By Patrick Bond
5 December 2012 — SACSIS
Picture <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>credit: <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>Jacob Zuma courtesy <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>World Economic Forum
He advanced to the council-table:
and, “Please your honours,” said he,
“I’m able, by means of a secret charm,
to draw all creatures living beneath the sun,
that creep, or swim, or fly, or run,
after me so as you never saw!
and I chiefly use my charm
on creatures that do people harm,
~ Robert Browning – ‘The Pied Piper: A Child’s Story’ (1842)
28 August, 2012 — RT
South African police are facing accusations of mass murder after autopsies on the victims of a bloody crackdown at Marikana platinum mine, showed that miners were shot in the back. Meanwhile, new violence has broken out at the location.
2 July 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in a telephone conversation on Saturday with South African President Jacob Zuma agreed to meet to discuss peace efforts in Libya, the Kremlin press service said.
6 August, 2010 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Shortly before Pretoria’s presidential power change from Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma two years ago, the South African state announced its War on Poverty. What news from the front, in the immediate wake of World Cup host duties that showed observers how very pleasant life is for the rich and middle class here?
We don’t know, because the War on Poverty is one of the most clandestine operations in South African history, with status reports kept confidential by a floundering army in rapid retreat from the poor, who are estimated at half the society.
Initially the War on Poverty appeared as a major national project. Early hubris characterised the war, as happens in most, with victory claimed even before Mbeki officially launched it in his February 2008 State of the Nation speech.
22 December, 2009 — Climate and Capitalism
Uncivil society will have to take up the slack and apply direct pressure, starting with the slogan ‘leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole and the tarsand in the land!’
In Copenhagen, the world’s richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out.
Instead of halting the hedonism, Barack Obama and the Euro elites cracked open the mansion door to add a few nouveau riche guests: South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, China’s Jiabao Wen (reportedly the most obnoxious of the lot), Brazil’s Lula Inacio da Silva and India’s Manmohan Singh. By Saturday morning, still punch-drunk with power over the planet, these wild and crazy party animals had stumbled back onto their jets and headed home.
The rest of us now have a killer hangover, because on behalf mainly of white capitalists (who are having the most fun of all), the world’s rulers stuck the poor and future generations with vast clean-up charges – and worse: certain death for millions.
The 770 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere envisaged in the Copenhagen Accord signatories’ promised 15% emissions cuts from 1990 levels to 2020 – which in reality could be a 10% increase once carbon trading and offset loopholes are factored in – will cook the planet, say scientists, with nine out of ten African peasants losing their livelihood.
29 October, 2009
Unemployment and Debt Rises as a Made In The USA Crisis Goes Global
Johannesburg: There was lots of skepticism when I came to South Africa two years ago to show my film IN DEBT WE TRUST. While my critique of consumer debt resonated, the film’s forecast of a financial crisis didn’t. Their economy seemed to be doing well and it was hard to tell a society that tends to look inward that they would be affected by a financial crisis in America, l0,000 miles away.
Most believed it would pass them by.
It hasn’t. A year ago, the International Monetary fund warned that 200,000 people would be affected. People living on $2 a day might end up surviving on $1 or not surviving at all. These victims around the world are mostly not part of the US debate or our media coverage. The faces and stories of these victims are as conspicuous by their absence as have been stories of the one million families that had their homes foreclosed upon in the last quarter,
As if South Africa doesn’t have enough problems—the AIDS Pandemic, massive poverty, and simmering unrest, the Finance Minister yesterday discussed the impact that the global economic crisis is having. There’s been a loss of 500,000 jobs and a fall off of taxes and an increase in expenditures.
The projected deficit will soar with a shortfall doubling to 7.6% of GDP. The government has to cut costs that will mean a further cutback in social services at the very time of growing protests against service failures and neglect of the poor. South Africa will now be forced to go deeper into debt, to borrow more money
10 September, 2009 — Palestine Chronicle
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to express my dismay and disappointment with both your attendance at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies – a racist organization by any standards – as well as the content of your speech at that forum.
I am a naturalised South African of Palestinian origin. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, during which I earned a PhD from the University of Johannesburg and lectured at the-then Vista University in Soweto and Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg.
I would like to take issue with the manner in which you express your support for the two-state solution: “It is a solution that fulfils the aspirations of both parties for independent homelands through two states for two peoples, Israel and an independent, adjoining, and viable state of Palestine” (emphasis mine). Allow me, Mr. President, as a resident of Gaza, to express my shock with the fact that – only 8 months after the Gaza massacre, in which 1500 civilians, including 434 children, were brutally murdered – you still believe that there are two symmetrical sides. You even call it the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict!” Was that your belief in the 1970’s and 80’s; that there were “two-sides” to the South African “conflict”? Were there two equal parties, namely White and Black, with equal claim to the land and equal historical responsibility for the-then status quo? No doubt, this sounds like a bizarre interpretation of South African history and one which we Palestinians find equally astounding when applied to our history and our reality today.
15 June, 2009 – The Bullet – A Socialist Project e-bulletin No. 22
With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township ‘service delivery protests,’ rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa.
The big splits in the society are clearer now. Distracting internecine rivalries within the main left bloc – which saw off the main trade union federation’s president and the South African Communist Party (SACP) treasurer last year – have subsided. From 2005-09, the ruling party’s huge wedge between camps allied to Thabo Mbeki and to the new president, Jacob Zuma, cleaved the African National Congress (ANC) in two, but the latter’s troops have mostly flushed out the former’s from the state and party.
So the bigger story now is the deep-rooted economic crisis. Government fiddling at the margins with Keynesian policies is not having any discernable impact. A lower interest rate – down 4.5% from last year’s peak (to around 10% prime with around 8% inflation) – and a probable 5% state deficit/GDP ratio (last year’s was a 0.5% surplus) are not nearly enough tinkering to stave off a serious depression.
2 May, 2009 – Green Left
The 2009 South African general election turned out to be a landmark event for the African National Congress (ANC). The party faced some of its stiffest competition and still came out tops, despite a dismal 15-year delivery record.
In an ironic twist, the people whom the ANC has failed most (the poor) turned out en masse to keep it in power. But those for whom it’s been bending over backwards for (the elite) appear to have voted for the opposition.
The actions of both groups defy belief, but in a world where perception trumps reality, perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised that it is the estimation of the ANC’s perceived worth that seems to have motivated voters’ behaviour.
Despite being sold down the river by the elite politics of their party, the poor still see the ANC as their saviour.
The New Dark Age 