Seriously, 2020 has just been a monstrous balls-up of a year.
As someone that is never negative, I've been finding myself almost expecting bad news recently. A totally unfamiliar mental atmosphere for me to navigate.
Let's hope summer brings plenty of rain, good harvest and end to this Covid madness.
It looks like we are through the worst of it as far as C19 is concerned. Our active numbers are dropping...but the economy...we can but hope...
Strangely, it's been a good year financially.
Just everything else that seems to be falling apart.
Then there's also the underlying disappointment of delayed plans to evacuate SA haha. Guess 2021 Will have to be the year :/
You know Plum, you are probably a lot younger than most here.
We today, perhaps the younger people here and those in their middle age will have no idea what real adversity is.
I have in my deceased family, a father that faced a world war in the early 40 ‘s when he was 18 years old and volunteered and was wounded in the desert and lost many friends and fellow soldiers and airmen. I also had grand relatives in WW!, some survived but went through the trenches in France and one who was a captain in Dardanelle’s in Turkey survived and was decorated for bravery and achievement.
That’s not my achievement it’s theirs but however I’m human and proud of it.
We really have no clue what real toughness is. It was not only the men but the women who suffered the anxiety of not knowing that their sweetheart was still alive and not knowing whether they would come home or not and if a “vegetable”.
To me the Covid 19 was unfortunate and my feelings go out to those who lost someone dear to them (I was affected) but the political scandal and panic and unnecessary over-reaction has caused far more damage to many more…starvation, loss of businesses and degrading poverty to those who are victims.
It’s really cowardice and the inability to be bold enough to make tough decisions.
That’s the problem with Liberals…they are over sensitive, unrealistic and soft and are more concerned to be people pleasers. They need strokes or votes from the gullible and panicked. Politicians have deceived, lied and manipulated the populace, especially in Africa where the people are backward and badly brought up in a declining society. Yes it applies everywhere but we have been backward in our way of culture for quite a long time.
"Politicians have deceived, lied and manipulated the populace, especially in Africa where the people are backward and badly brought up in a declining society"
While in Russia the opposition is poisoned.
That's true Seb.
I guess everyone has their own idea of adversity.
We can all talk about tough times etc but it'd be foolish for me to compare my struggles with those of people in WW1 or 2, blacks during apartheid or even other countries in the world today where people are still slaves, tortured or oppressed.
You won't find me making such comparisons.
My point was more that everything and everyone just seems so negative. And I've almost stopped having conversations with people because I tend to invariably be left unable to make a positive impact on them and feel down myself afterwards.
The poisoning of individual political opponents in Russia pales in comparison with the cesspool South African politics has become.
Political murders are rife and kept rather quiet...but if one start looking at the numbers...
There are numerous articles on the subject, but like farm murders, the government mostly ignore the issue.
"Why political killings have taken hold -- again -- in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal
Gavin Evans, Birkbeck, University of London
August 10, 2020 3.00pm SAST
A kind of civil war erupted in South Africa in the 1980s, and ran into the first half of the 1990s. The country was going through convulsions as the fight against apartheid gathered steam and the state reacted with increasing vehemence and violence.
The violence spread into many corners of South Africa. It also manifested itself in rivalries between organisation such as the Inkatha Freedom Party, then a Zulu-nationalist party that had reached accommodation with the apartheid military, with its base in what was then known as Natal, now KwaZulu-Natal, and the then banned African National Congress (ANC), and its internal wing, the United Democratic Front.
The violence between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC started in Kwa-Zulu Natal and then spread through to the black residential areas of Johannesburg and Vereeniging, which lies about 60 km south of Johannesburg. It also spread to other parts of the country.
Within a decade an estimated 20,000 people had been murdered in this battle for supremacy, most in the four years between 1990 and 1994.
The arrival of democracy in 1994 marked the beginning of the end of this era. The political killings tailed off and by the close of the millennium they had fizzled out, with the ANC taking over from Inkatha as the dominant party in the KwaZulu-Natal, drawing Inkatha strongmen into its fold, including some of its most notorious killers.
But this political peace was short-lived. A new form of political violence broke out, again centred in KwaZulu-Natal, getting into its stride after Jacob Zuma became president in 2009.
This time it was not between parties and their warlords, and it had nothing to do with ideology and policy. Instead, it had everything to do with money.
According to researcher Mary De Haas’, around 90 municipal councillors, political party officials and senior municipal officials, have been murdered in KwaZulu-Natal since 2015. Most of the deceased were affiliated to the ANC, the party that governs both the province and the country.
The South African investigative journalist Greg Arde provides an impressively researched and well-written account of scores of political assassinations in the province in his book, War Party: How the ANC’s Political Killings are Breaking South Africa.
Some of the victims of the killings were honest councillors and officials who had sought to expose corruption over tenders, kickbacks, budgets and fund allocation. Others were rivals, competing for access to power and the goodies it could buy.
Political assassinations
Arde shows how a culture of settling problems by physically eliminating the source has emerged from a toxic brew. This includes the history of political violence in the area with politicians accustomed to killing, and a ready source of assassins from within the violent minibus taxi industry, often emerging from hostels that house black migrant workers.
Regions and municipalities all over the country are plagued by corruption, at huge cost to the residents they are supposed to serve. Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape, for example, has become a basket case, and is not immune to political killings. But none can match the continual spree of assassinations that characterise local and regional politics in KZN, which escalated during Jacob Zuma’s years in power.
Zuma replaced Thabo Mbeki as leader of the governing ANC in December 2007, and went on to become the president of the country in May 2009. The eThekwini Municipality, the biggest in Kwa-Zulu Natal, served as the key political base for Zuma’s rise to the presidency of the ANC.
His reign was characterised by high levels of corruption, ending in February 2018 when he was recalled by the ANC.
It is tempting to blame the violence on the grand corruption programme. In other words, to see the culture of corruption as something that starts at the top and filters down. But Arde’s book offers a different perspective, suggesting corruption also percolates from the bottom up.
No action
In 2016, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government appointed the advocate MTK Moerane to investigate killings in the province from 2011. He concluded in a report delivered to the government in 2018 that corruption was the backbone of South African politics, “and that’s the cause of the violence”.
No action was taken on the report which has simply gathered dust, as Arde shows. And the killings continued.
One of those who gave evidence to the inquiry was Professor Paulus Zulu. His explanation started with the contentious point that some local councillors wouldn’t qualify for jobs as labourers based on skill levels. Once elected they adjusted their lifestyles and clung to their jobs, ensuring, without scruple, that nothing would prejudice their new livelihoods. This often meant eliminating opposition, with competition most fierce at the bottom of the pyramid. He said (quoted in Arde’s book, page 70)
One either has the job or nothing at all. In the absence of qualifications, negative competition in the form of violence is the perfect recipe.
Arde is not afraid to go where the evidence leads. For example, he names the former eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede who is on trial for massive corruption.
He shows how ANC branches and the councils they run have been taken over by criminal groups. This is often closely tied to the lawless taxi industry, which is the subject of several chapters. Again, Arde is not shy to name names.
What Arde does so well is to use the narrative from case studies framed around short biographies of the killers and their victims. In this way he reveals how the corruption and violence play out. Patterns emerge as he pieces these accounts together.
His prose is eloquent and exciting, and the stories he tells are based on exhaustive research. The result is a well-structured book that is never less than shocking. The horror it exposes makes for uncomfortable reading.
There are some gaps. For example, an account of how Zuma’s state capture project both encouraged and drew from the local level corruption in Kwa-Zulu Natal is missing. Also, the author makes no attempt to give a statistical breakdown of the violence, or to offer clear political prescriptions for solving it.
Pessimistic outlook
The picture Arde presents so compellingly does not invite an optimistic prognosis. There is an obvious danger of the current corruption-based violence spreading to other provinces.
Arde notes at the end of the book that the ANC has become a “war party”, one that helped liberate South Africa from the tyranny of apartheid but is now consumed by avarice.
Every day some of its members in power surely get up inspired to improve the lives of the poor and to commit themselves to such honest endeavour… But evidence shows that others, arguably a growing number, are getting up with murderous intent, prepared to kill one another in their quest for power or to satisfy their greed."
Plum I wish you the best.
But I would add that no time is better than the present.
Goodluck.
I love my country, but it seems that most of the people in my country hate me for what they've been told my ancestors did to theirs...I'm part of a ever decreasing hated minority...I don't want to leave my WP and my Boland, but it will probably be better for everyone if I and my family do...
This country will be poorer without me and my "ilk"....it's time "they" find out.
AJ,
We'll be entering via an entrepreneur visa and don't have too many issues getting into Canada.
It's more that Covid slowed the winding down of things on this end. Both my partner and I saw massive bumps in revenue this year as our businesses are "Covid friendly". We decided to keep striking while the iron is hot and then shift once the rand recovers a bit more.
I actually cannot wait to start doing business there. You know...where people answer phones, suppliers know their products, deliveries actually arrive and the power isn't off every second day.
I'd much rather be a small fish in a big pond than a big one in the incompetent mess that is SA.
Note: I type this while the power is off due to loaD sheddinG.