Cyril’s Folly or the Great Land Theft Caper
The new ANC President, Cyril Ramaphosa seems determined to outdo the previous incumbent in every measurable way.
Ex President Zuma managed to record the biggest national loss of wealth ever when he fired and hired three Finance Ministers within a week. The resulting loss of wealth was in the region of R500 Billion. Stock markets and the Rand crashed, taking down property values and confidence levels to new lows.
The really sad part was, in contrast to President Zuma’s other scams and captures, no-one made any money out of this, apart from the possible forward dealing by those with pre-knowledge of the catastrophic personnel changes.
With the country still reeling from this almost fatal blow, the ANC finally managed to rid itself of the sticky-fingered Zuma and replace him with the suave, silver-tongued chap who had negotiated the Constitution in such bad faith a quarter century previously.
What was sold to South Africa and the world as the World’s Best Constitution of a Rainbow Hue has now become only a stepping-stone to another revolution that wasn't mentioned at the time. The moment Cyril gained power, he chucked the idea of a universally just dispensation out of the hut window and reverted to the Communist inspired and written Freedom Charter, that had been binned during the constitutional negotiations.
South Africans found that under the capitalist suit and waistcoat lurked the tattered leopard-skin of a half-arsed African Communist Big Man just waiting to drag the country further into the gutter with policies that have ruined every single country in which they have been tried.
Property Confiscation, Land Theft or to give it a more respectable sounding name, Expropriation without Compensation has been proposed as a Constitutional “Amendment”, ignoring the fact that the inviolability of property rights is what the constitution was built upon and relies on it for all the other rights enshrined in it.
The mere proposal of this despicable U-turn on all that was good in the constitution has enabled Mr. Ramaphosa to easily exceed Mr. Zuma’s record of wealth destruction.
The South African property sector that was valued at R5,8 Trillion has taken a mugging because of this stupidity of at least 30% in the agricultural sector and 10-15% in the commercial and housing sectors.
The true figures have yet to emerge because sales are either not being made or are not even attempted under these dire and uncertain conditions.
The loss to the nation can at this stage be very conservatively calculated at 10% of the sector which translates to R580 000 000 000, beating the previous record held by the Nkandla Champ by R80 Billion, a very valiant effort considering the record was only just over a year old.
Worse still, by devaluing land and the property that stands on it, MR, Ramaphosa has wiped out a big portion of the life savings of ordinary people. He has done this having gained nothing for the landless, himself, his party, the banks or the citizens of this country. Everyone loses with this stupid self-destructive ambition, and he hasn't even enshrined it in law yet.
The thing that most puzzles Europeans is the apparent blind foolishness that seems to infect almost all African leaders in following policies that are proven to fail wherever they are used.
All sorts of variations of the same recipe have been tried. From Julius Nyerere’s catastrophic ujamaa African Socialism of a Special Kind that destroyed the agricultural livelihood of Tanzania to the more orthodox Communism of dos Santos’ Angola and Robert Mugabe’s bastardized peoples-dictatorship. All seized the land in the peoples name and misallocated it to friends who had no intention of using it productively. Samora Machel’s Mozambique had the distinction of becoming the worlds poorest country because of land theft from the previous owners. Machel, realizing too late what a catastrophic and misguided idiot he had been even cautioned a newly released Mandela to “Look after your whites, or you will end up just like us.”
So why perpetuate these failures? What is in it for the rulers selling these mad ideas to their gullible and eternally optimistic countrymen?
The answer is in the numbers. While the leaders know that land theft will destroy the economy, they also know that they are either rich enough not to be bothered by this personally, or that they can become rich enough through cronyism even while the country drowns in debt and inflation.
The leaders also know that there is no stronger formula that can ensure exceptionally long periods of rule for themselves.
Can anyone argue with the numbers? Mugabe ruled for 30 years, dos Santos 38 years, Nyerere 21 years, Castro 52 years, Mao Zedong 33 years.
Where in a normal democracy that rules without land theft will any leader get a chance to rule for so many years?
All polls in South Africa show that the people are unconcerned about land ownership. Everyone wants jobs so that they can buy land for themselves if they so wish. Jobs are what the people want. Seized land is what the politicians want. Politicians know that you can rule forever if you have the power of land allocation, but more important, land confiscation and eviction of those who are against you.
Many critics of the ANC shout out that the party is making a huge error with advocating land theft. The ANC on the other hand see it as a foolproof way to hang onto power even while the people begin to hate the corruption with which the ruling party enriches themselves while the people starve.
The sure sign that land theft is intended for reasons of power over the people is that the politicians do not in fact intend to give it to the people, but they want the state to own it ; and those politicians intend to represent the state forever.
The ANC does not see the wellbeing of the people as a positive factor in their ongoing rule. In fact, they see it as a sure path to the short rule that most democratic rulers are forced into. In African eyes, that is no success at all.
