-Caveat Lector- Whites fear race backlash after South African poll By Christina Lamb in Johannesburg http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ ISSUE 1465 Sunday 30 May 1999 WHEN Sydney Mufamadi, South Africa's safety and security minister, moved into 13 Andrew Murray Street in one of Johannesburg's leafier suburbs, the white residents were pleased with their first black neighbour. "We thought, 'That's nice,' " said Denise Martin at number 16, believing that the minister's presence - plus a 24-hour police guard - would protect them from the city's crime wave. Two years later, 10 of the 30 houses in the street have been the target of armed robbers. Residents have protested publicly that the government is not doing enough to protect them in a land where a serious crime takes place every 17 seconds. Mr Mufamadi has responded by denouncing his complaining neighbours as "racist". The exchange underlines the fact that race still clouds every issue as South Africans head for the polls on Wednesday for their second fully democratic general election. Last week Mrs Martin and her husband, Don, became the street's latest victims. Guests arriving for dinner were robbed at gunpoint by three men as the electronic gate to the house opened. Mrs Martin, 53, realised what was happening when she heard the barking of her two boxer dogs, a breed chosen because some African men apparently believe that their bite causes impotence. "They don't bark like that at whites," she said. As she called a private security firm, the thieves fled with her guests' watches, wallets and mobile telephones. She said: "It's unbelievable that this can happen three doors away from the police minister. Does the new South Africa mean living behind barricades?" While crime has soared in the post-apartheid era, other changes are also apparent. At Johannesburg airport, where once the only black faces were porters and cleaners, smiling black customs officials have replaced stern-faced Afrikaners. The car park, which offers a window-repair service for those vehicles broken into, contains the expensive cars of numerous black executives. However, sitting on Mrs Martin's patio - drinking tea served by a black maid as black gardeners clip bushes and sprinkle the perfectly manicured lawn - is like stepping back into the old world of apartheid. Mrs Martin points out that there are now black pupils at her daughters' private school, and insists that things have changed for the country's 4.5 million whites. She said: "One realises how suppressed blacks were. The fact that they can do things they couldn't before gives one a sense of contentment. But white people haven't exactly been given their wealth on a platter - we've worked for it." Since the landmark 1994 election, average white income has fallen in real terms, while a small group of blacks has taken the opportunity of government incentives and become rich. However, the vast majority of South Africa's 31.5 million blacks remain poor. The only whites they come into contact with are those whose homes they clean. Even the sporting world remains segregated, with whites favouring cricket and rugby and blacks sticking to soccer. Last week the government set up a commission on netball, with the aim of making the sport more representative. Tim du Plessis, the associate editor of City Press, a black Sunday newspaper in Johannesburg, is an Afrikaner who for the first time in his life has a black boss. He insisted that he liked working in a mainly black office, but admitted that he has never invited any of them home or been to their houses. He said: "We have learnt to live with each other but not to like each other." With opinion polls predicting that the African National Congress will surpass the 62.5 per cent support it received in 1994 and win a two-thirds majority - enabling it to change the constitution - many whites now fear a new kind of racism, with them as the victims. The African National Congress leader Thabo Mbeki, 56, who is set to become Nelson Mandela's successor as president, remains something of an enigma. He is reputed to be autocratic. The dapper pipe-smoker has effectively run the country for the past two years and has been ruthless in dispatching rivals. While a streak of authoritarianism may well be necessary to tackle a crime rate that has doubled in four years, Mr Mbeki's talk of an "African renaissance" worries the white community. Posters all over Johannesburg give warning that "Mugabe has two-thirds". This suggests that Mr Mbeki might become as dictatorial and anti-white as President Robert Mugabe of neighbouring Zimbabwe. South Africa's parliament has already passed an employment law ordering companies with more than 50 workers to mirror the racial composition of the country - 77 per cent black, 11 per cent white, nine per cent coloured (mixed race) and three per cent Indian. John Kane-Berman, chief executive of the privately funded Institute of Race Relations, complained: "In 70 years of existence, as a liberal institution during the worst years of apartheid, we were never compelled to send anyone an ethnic breakdown of our staff." He added: "The ANC assumes there is widespread racism in the private sector, but that's not true. The problem is shortage of supply of skilled black labour because of the skewed education system of the past. It's not fair to make young white graduates pay for this legacy." However, while whites can, and do, leave the country - last year was the fifth in a row with net emigration - poor blacks have no such option. Instead of the 2.5 million jobs promised by Mr Mandela in 1994, about 100,000 have been lost, and 42 per cent of adult black males are jobless. The ANC has brought clean water supplies to 3 million people and electricity to 2 million. But about 20 and 37 per cent of the population, respectively, are still without these facilities. Free medical care is now provided to pregnant women and children under six. But of the million homes promised by the government, only about 250,000 have been built. As a result, a number of black voters are turning away from the ANC and planning to vote for the largely white Democratic Party which could well oust the National Party as the official opposition. One of the Democrats' most unlikely recruits lives in a squatter camp at Orlando East, part of Soweto, near Johannesburg. Mongameli Maroqa, 34, is the grandson of Walter Sisulu, Mr Mandela's great friend and mentor, who spent 25 years in jail with him. Mr Maroqa said he was ashamed to let visitors into his shack, made of corrugated iron and hoarding. He covered his face with his hands and showed me the one room he shares with his pregnant wife and five children. The only light is a candle, the only book a Bible and the only decoration a yellow and white crocheted toilet-roll holder. On the shelves, the only items, apart from a few pans, are a handful of potatoes and onions, a packet of washing powder and a tube of toothpaste. A curtain sections off a sleeping area. "Look at how we live," said Mr Maroqa, who makes about £50 a month from carpentry. "Where are the houses, water and electricity the ANC promised? If you think I'm going to believe that Thabo Mbeki will change my life - forget it." Outside his home, Mr Mandela's face and the ANC logo have been painted out on a banner boasting a "better life for all". Mr Mandela's moral stature puts him beyond criticism for most South Africans, grateful that the transition to black rule went so smoothly. This time around, the elections have none of the tension of 1994 and no one is stockpiling food and ammunition. However, as one Western diplomat pointed out: "Mbeki will have to deliver to blacks without realising the fears of whites if South Africa is to continue on a peaceful path." http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html?1201011 Mbeki's £5m plan to outshine Mandela by R W Johnson Johannesburg WITH victory assured for Thabo Mbeki's African National Congress in the South African general election on Wednesday, ambitious plans are afoot to make his inauguration as president on Soweto Day (June 16) an even bigger occasion than that of Nelson Mandela five years ago. It will be difficult, for that was an emotional world event in which figures as diverse as Fidel Castro, the Cuban president, and Hillary Clinton found themselves in minor supporting roles. But £5.5m has been set aside for an event that includes an invitation to 130 world leaders to attend a jet and helicopter flypast, a giant banquet and cultural events featuring everything from rock bands to traditional Zulu dancers. The ambition behind the hype expresses Mbeki's problem only too clearly: he stands in the shadow of a universally loved and admired icon, an impossible act to follow. His wish that his own celebrations should be bigger than Mandela's is matched by his determination that the ANC should win two-thirds of the vote, improving on the 62.7% won by his predecessor. The problem is not just that Mandela is a hero who defied his jailers for 27 years, but that his is such a warm and transparently open spirit. Everyone knows that Mbeki, not Mandela, has really run the country for the past five years. He chairs the cabinet and on several occasions has vetoed initiatives emanating from Mandela's office. But he remains a remote and little-known man. A recent biography failed to turn up any real personal friends or even - despite his having been a famous "ladies' man" - any old girlfriends willing to reveal his private side. Vote-catchers: Winnie Madikizela Mandela whips up popular support in the town of Flagstaff Photograph: Juda Ngwenya Pipe-smoking Mbeki has campaigned dutifully in the ANC's regulation informal uniform of T-shirt and baseball cap, but has always looked far happier in one of his immaculate suits. The stars of the hustings have been Tony Leon, the feisty young Democratic party leader whose "fight back" theme has swept his party to the brink of being the official opposition; and Winnie Mandela, the former wife of the outgoing president. She has the populist appeal Mbeki lacks and has used it tirelessly on his behalf, rolling up to rallies in a huge white Mercedes (with the devil's registration number, 666), but able none the less to remember the names of some of the poorest of the poor as they press adoringly around her. Mbeki will clearly owe her a good deal at the campaign's end: perhaps even the post of deputy president. The International Institute of Strategic Studies has suggested that "Mbeki will run the South African government in a manner which resembles that of other African leaders. That is to say, he will personalise it. He will probably rule more according to whim." This may be a little unfair. Mbeki is punctilious and a workaholic who likes to write his own speeches, weaving in quotations from Keats and the romantics. What does seem clear is that Mbeki will operate an imperial presidency. Indeed, he complains that the presidential office under Mandela is "very weak", with only 60 staff. Under Mbeki, the deputy president's office has had many times as many staffers and advisers as the president's. One unit for co-ordinating government work centred in that office has grown from five to 130 people. The reconstruction and development plan intended to be the ANC's central thrust in its first term of office has its headquarters in Mbeki's office. So does the government information service, whose boss, Joel Netshitenze, is regarded as the key Marxist intellectual in Mbeki's circle. Mbeki has promised that he "will have better capacity in the presidency for co-ordination, policy intervention and ensuring that things agreed on are actually done", which comes as near as he dares to saying that Mandela has not really done his job. He will depend heavily on the Pahad brothers, Muslim Asians and, like Mbeki, long-time Communist party members. They were contemporaries of his at Sussex University 35 years ago. Aziz Pahad, nominally the deputy foreign minister, has in reality run foreign policy for Mbeki. His brother, Essop, heads Mbeki's office and has, in effect, functioned as the tsar of domestic policy. Another leading figure is the Rev Frank Chikane, who gave up the chairmanship of the South African Council of Churches to work in Mbeki's office. Last year Mbeki put him forward for the premiership of Gauteng, one of the country's richest provinces, which includes Pretoria and Johannesburg, only for this to be defeated by a grassroots revolt. Mbeki's response has been to ensure that the ANC president - himself - will have the right to name all the provincial premiers, effectively abolishing federalism at a stroke, and to sack Gauteng's premier, replacing him with Sam Shilowa, the former boss of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and a leading communist. Whites worry that Mbeki, with his constant appeals to Africanism, his tough affirmative action policies and repeated promises to "speed up transformation" will in effect be anti-white. He seems dismayed by the charge, insisting that his concern is with the poor and only coincidentally with the black majority who constitute most of the poor. Mbeki's pledge of building more houses than Mandela did depends on the performance of the economy - "about which I'm pretty confident", he says. But the storm clouds are gathering, and the economy is contracting as both the gold price and the rand fall. Breaking out of such stagnation will depend on an acceleration of pro-market policies that Mbeki's trade union and communist allies are bound to resist. "All of us will have to work quite hard," is all Mbeki will say. South Africa's social fabric, torn by rampant crime and huge unemployment figures, is under severe strain, and the future president's much-trumpeted "African renaissance" seems a distant dream. It will be on Mbeki's watch, however, that the fate of the country's democratic transition will be settled. Failure here would cause most foreigners to write off all of Africa - and thus all Africans - as a hopeless cause. To avert such a judgment, all Africans have to hope desperately that Mbeki does not fail. ISSUE 1465 Sunday 30 May 1999 Dread and jubilation are replaced by gloom . . . and stability By Andrew Kenny Mandela takes Gaddafi cash for election war chest SOUTH AFRICA is a country divided into two notions - a public notion and a private notion. The division cuts across all races and attitudes. The views you see on television or read in newspapers are so different from those you hear in bars and factories that you would think they were of different countries. The public view is full of optimism and self-congratulation: South Africa, thanks to the heroic efforts of the ANC, has been delivered from the evil of apartheid into a progressive democracy which, despite a few problems along the way (all caused by apartheid), will lead to a better life for all. The private view is full of gloom and cynicism: we are going down the drain like the rest of Africa. At the centre of this disjunction is a refusal to come to terms with our past and especially the glaring contradiction about apartheid. On the one hand, apartheid was the greatest crime in the history of the world and every problem now must be blamed on it. On the other, after 40 years of apartheid, South Africa had the strongest economy in Africa and all other African countries looked to it for salvation. This is the paradox that dares not speak its name in the new South Africa. It dares not speak in public, that is. Around bars and braais (barbecues) it speaks with a ribald voice. In Africa the first election at independence is simply a celebration at escaping white rule. It is the second election that determines the political future - invariably towards one-party rule. Our first election was five years ago when the ANC came to power and Nelson Mandela became president. Two weeks before it the air was thick with jubilation and dread. There was talk of civil war. In the event, the election was peaceful. Two weeks before this second election the mood is resigned and listless. There is no dread and no jubilation. There is no threat of civil disturbance; we have become gloomy and stable. The ANC government of the past five years has had two major achievements. The first has been the complete ending of any threat to the state from white nationalists. This is in large part due to the statesmanship of President Mandela. The second achievement has been financial stability. The man in charge of the economy, Trevor Manuel, is the most Thatcherite finance minister South Africa has ever had. The annual inflation rate has been brought down to under eight per cent and the economy sailed through the financial storms from the Far East last year. For the rest, ANC government has been a cruel disappointment. Before the last election it promised "jobs, peace and freedom". In fact, crime and unemployment have ravaged South Africa. In the past five years more than 100,000 people have been murdered. Last year more than 45,000 women were raped. Far from new jobs being created, there has been a loss of half a million jobs and unemployment now stands at over 30 per cent. Economic growth has been pitiful. Education has been the victim of various measures and examination results are now worse than five years ago. With a desperate national shortage of skills, there has been an exodus of skilled people, mainly white. The worst feature of the new South Africa is its horrible similarity with the old. The ANC shares with the National Party of apartheid an obsession with state control. In an ANC discussion document published in 1997, Joel Netshitenze, the party's chief ideologue, wrote: "Transformation entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement [the ANC coalition] over all the levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, and agencies such as the regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on." Such "transformation" is well under way. The ANC has appointed a party politician to take over the Reserve Bank, and party faithfuls are being put into top positions in all other state organs, including the South African Broadcasting Corporation. If the ANC wins two-thirds of the votes in this election, it will be able to alter the constitution to take over even more powers. South Africa will then be on the same road down which Robert Mugabe has taken Zimbabwe. The ANC also shares an obsession with the old Nationalist Party with racial ideology. Once again we are urged to become acutely race conscious and help the government achieve its racial masterplan, this time called "representivity". The ANC has passed the Employment Equity Bill, a piece of statutory racism worthy of the late Dr Verwoerd. Every employer of more than 50 people will have to do a racial audit of his workforce and classify his workers as African, Indian, Coloured or white. He must then draw up a plan to make the racial proportions at every level of his company the same as those of the country at large, under threat of heavy fines. All the old laughable, loathsome questions of apartheid come back. Is a Pakistani an "Indian"? How do you classify the child of a white mother and a Coloured father? In the old days, any free-market critic of the nationalised industries and central planning of apartheid was called a "communist". Today any liberal critic of the race discrimination of the ANC is called a "racist". Getting jobs and winning government contracts increasingly depends on being seen to have the correct views on race. Many of my white colleagues and acquaintances almost take it for granted that their children will emigrate from South Africa but they themselves will probably stay, taking little interest in politics, drinking beer as the sun sets over Africa. The Coloured workers I meet are more despondent but equally resigned. Africans, apparently, are more cheerful, although they have the least reason. As in Zimbabwe, the "transformation" policies of the ANC have produced a new elite of black plutocrats. Perhaps the black masses regard them as lottery ticket buyers regard lottery winners, hoping one day their own number will come up. In the eyes of the outside world, African countries go through three phases after white rule: euphoria, silence, destitution. There is cheering and speculation at the time of independence, then there is a long period when the country disappears from notice, and finally it reappears on the world's television screens in fleeting images of famine and beggary. How far South Africa is going I cannot say, but we have certainly completed the first phase. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000121378023306&rtmo=Q9pHx9HR&atmo=99999999 &pg=/et/99/5/30/wsaf30.html Mandela takes Gaddafi cash for election war chest By Christina Lamb and Inigo Gilmore in Johannesburg LIBYA'S Col Muammar Gaddafi has donated millions of pounds to a secret election war chest run by South Africa's President Nelson Mandela to enable the African National Congress to win this week's general election. The Libyan leader is the most controversial figure to emerge from a list of dictators, including President Mohamed Suharto of Indonesia, who have made huge donations to Mr Mandela's African National Congress during his various trips abroad. According to figures compiled by Greg Mills, of the South African Institute for DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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