Nelson Mandela

[TomViolenz]

Jacob Zuma is our very own version of Silvio Berlusconi. Smart, greedy, slippery, and utterly shameless. He's not going to change.

But it's a significant event, particularly so close to the 2014 elections. I think the ANC is nervous. They are going fight dirty in the next few months, I think

Do they have the election locked up for them because most black people vote for them out of gratitude, or is the black vote more flexible than that?!

[Galt]

How many blacks do you think voted for Romney?

[re:dream]

I don't recall Romney running over here

@ Tom - yes, there is no question that the ANC will win. They have the franchise on being 'the party of freedom'; and anyone who opposes them is easily seen as someone who wants to go back to Apartheid times.

The question is by how much. ANC wants a two-thirds majority so that they can change the constitution. This would be pretty disastrous, since they have become pretty corrupt in the last 20 years.

Over the last couple of decades two trends have been evident

- fewer and fewer people are voting at all
- while the proportion of citizens choosing ANC are going down, the ANC voters are a bigger and bigger proportion of those who do vote.

So in the last election, while fewer than 50% actually voted ANC, they damn near made a 66% vote.

This year they face some challenges though. The massacre at Marikana, and revelations about Zuma's ongoing corruption have damaged them. The so-called 'radical' Julius Malema has been kicked out of the ANC and has formed his own party, which will pull away a lot of very poor and marginalized voters. And the black middle class in the cities will be more inclined to vote for the Democratic Alliance (DA) and some other 'middle class' splinter parties. They may very well lose two more provinces in the regional elections.

So signs are that they are gearing up for a really nasty election. Already there is a lot of xenophobic mobilization against immigrants / visitors from other African countries.

Madiba's death is throwing all of this into focus; there is quite a bit of national soul searching, where did we go wrong, etc etc.

The funeral in Qunu this weekend will be quite an important event for 'the nation'.

[Galt]

Where do YOU (singular) think you (plural) went wrong?

[re:dream]

Where do YOU (singular) think you (plural) went wrong?

Aside from neglecting to follow proper revolutionary marxist principles, you mean?

Lots of little things went wrong.

Well in the realm of actual policy choices we could have differently, I would say the biggest single mistake we made is that institutional arrangements we chose for parliament were all wrong.

We chose a strong form of PR. People vote for parties, not parliamentarians.

This was partly done to assuage white / minority fears. There was a strong perception among white South Africans that we needed to avoid Westminster-style 'winner takes all' elections. PR would ensure that there would be some sort of parliamentary representation for minorities.

But if you have strong PR of that nature, you don't have backbenchers. You don't have local parliamentarians who are accountable to their constituencies.

What matters is not your personal popularity with the voters, but your place on the party list. The people who hold the reins are the power brokers inside parties. The whips.


So what we have is an effective one-party state which, instead of being accountable to the voters, is entirely inwardly focused. What matters is where you stand in the intra-party structures.

And the internecine rivalry and wrangling inside the party is tied to the ability to dispense patronage, so it becomes mired in corruption.

So the ANC has turned very swiftly from a party of fairly naive idealists who thought that God was on their side to a party of corrupt idealists who think that God is on their side.

On top of it, the ANC's populist political traditions - its belief that it is the real representative of 'the people' means you get a situation in which Parliament becomes increasingly irrelevant. Policy is made inside the party, which tries to place its appatchiks in key civil service positions. But because of the intra-party politics, incompetence in key positions is not punished.


So it goes

[re:dream]

What I meant is that they have successfully appropriated that franchise and use it effectively to fight elections. (My point is about the electoral unassailability of the ANC).

There are plenty of other parties contesting the 'revolutionary' credentials of the ANC ( the PAC, AZAPO, the Workers Socialist Party, the Democratic Socialist Movement, etc) but they tend to be marginal. The most successful of them have at most one or two seats in parliament, and many did not even win one seat.

There are also some 'social movements' with broad informal support (Abahlali BaseMonjolo etc) but they don't contest elections, often are very regionally based, and many if not most of their supporters reliably vote ANC.

I for one have long thought that South Africa needs a credible party challenging the ANC from the left. None of them have made much of an impact. It will be interesting to see how WASP do in the elections, but I will be surprised if they win even one seat. My guess is that Malema's Economic Freedom Front (supposedly radical, but actually pretty xenophobic, think Mugabe meets Mussolini ) will do much better at capitalizing on post-Marikana disaffection.

Anyway, but I don't really want to debate left South African politics in this thread

[Galt]

[Marxist spam]

All of what you're posting would be interesting, were it not Marxist spam.

[TomViolenz]

I don't recall Romney running over here

@ Tom - yes, there is no question that the ANC will win. They have the franchise on being 'the party of freedom'; and anyone who opposes them is easily seen as someone who wants to go back to Apartheid times.

The question is by how much. ANC wants a two-thirds majority so that they can change the constitution. This would be pretty disastrous, since they have become pretty corrupt in the last 20 years.

Over the last couple of decades two trends have been evident

- fewer and fewer people are voting at all
- while the proportion of citizens choosing ANC are going down, the ANC voters are a bigger and bigger proportion of those who do vote.

So in the last election, while fewer than 50% actually voted ANC, they damn near made a 66% vote.

This year they face some challenges though. The massacre at Marikana, and revelations about Zuma's ongoing corruption have damaged them. The so-called 'radical' Julius Malema has been kicked out of the ANC and has formed his own party, which will pull away a lot of very poor and marginalized voters. And the black middle class in the cities will be more inclined to vote for the Democratic Alliance (DA) and some other 'middle class' splinter parties. They may very well lose two more provinces in the regional elections.

So signs are that they are gearing up for a really nasty election. Already there is a lot of xenophobic mobilization against immigrants / visitors from other African countries.

Madiba's death is throwing all of this into focus; there is quite a bit of national soul searching, where did we go wrong, etc etc.

The funeral in Qunu this weekend will be quite an important event for 'the nation'.

Thank you for your explanation!

[re:dream]

Yup, interesting times. The old alliances are fragmenting. It is not clear what will emerge.

But this part of it is not all over yet. Cape Town more or less at a standstill today as we prepare for our commemoration in the Green Point stadium. True to form, we are having a concert, not a political rally.

Then all eyes on Qunu for this weekend. It is something of a 'perfect storm'.

Mandela's funeral is taking place on 15 December, the day before our Day of Reconciliation. A very symbolic time. 16 December is the date of the commemoration of the battle of Blood River, one of the gorier encounters in our colonial race war. We renamed the day but it remains intensely symbolic.

Qunu is tiny, with no infrastructure, and there is a lot of concern about what will happen if hundreds of thousands of people descend on the place over the weekend.

On top of which it is the start of the factories' and builders' holiday. It is the weekend in which black working class South Africans return home to the countryside from the city. So on top of the funeral, we are going to have tens of millions and millions of people on the road in hundreds of thousands of ramshackle minibus taxis, a good proportion of them on that very same winding, potholed N 2 on the road to Mthatha. It's going to be pretty intense

[re:dream]

[Marxist spam]

All of what you're posting would be interesting, were it not Marxist spam.

Well, Funk sort of tangentially linked it to Mandela's legacy, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt. At least he is not posting photoshop images of dubious taste and even more dubious humour

But if we wanna talk South African politics, I suggest we do it on another thread.

[re:dream]

http://mg.co.za/article/2013-12-09-fore ... nu-funeral

Foreign heads of state and dignitaries will not be stopped from attending former president Nelson Mandela's funeral in Qunu, but are advised not to, Minister in the Presidency Collins Chabane said on Monday.

"Nobody will be prevented from attending ... , however, given the size and the scale of the operation and the size of the delegation and the limited infrastructure in the area, we advise [against it]," he told reporters in Johannesburg.

The venue in Qunu, in the Eastern Cape, where Mandela will be buried on Sunday could take only 5 000 people. Chabane said that because the site was in a rural area, the facilities in the area would not be able to accommodate the numbers.

He said foreign guests should "take that advice very seriously".

[TomViolenz]

The roots of the ANC leadership’s latter-day disenchantment with the constitution, and their growing exasperation with the parliamentary democracy itself, are to be found in the trampling of their own internal democracy.

Contrary to the propaganda of the old regime, the ANC leadership, despite its embrace of the SACP, was never infected by the ‘disease’ of communism. Mbeki, whose ideological outlook has falsely been portrayed as fundamentally at variance with that of Mandela’s, in stating such was merely echoing within earshot of the working class what Mandela had made crystal clear already back in 1956, within a year of the adoption of the Freedom Charter, and later at the Treason Trial in 1964.

He did not want the Freedom Charter to be confused with socialism. The Freedom Charter, he explained ‘…is by no means a blue-print for a socialist state. It calls for the redistribution, but not nationalisation, of land; it provides for nationalisation of mines, banks, and monopoly industry, because big monopolies are owned by one race only, and without such nationalisation racial domination would be perpetuated despite the spread of political power.

As we have pointed out before, the ANC’s support for nationalisation has never been as a step towards the abolition of capitalism, but to use the state to accelerate the development of a black capitalist class in much the same way as the Nats did for the development of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie. As Mandela explained in the Treason Trial: ‘The ANC’s [nationalisation] policy corresponds with the old policy of the present Nationalist Party which, for many years, had as part of its programme the nationalisation of the gold mines which, at that time, were controlled by foreign capital.’

http://www.socialistsouthafrica.co.za/i ... &Itemid=56

That was interesting. Thanks.

[Galt]

Aside from neglecting to follow proper revolutionary marxist principles, you mean?

Lots of little things went wrong.

Well in the realm of actual policy choices we could have differently, I would say the biggest single mistake we made is that institutional arrangements we chose for parliament were all wrong.

We chose a strong form of PR. People vote for parties, not parliamentarians.

This was partly done to assuage white / minority fears. There was a strong perception among white South Africans that we needed to avoid Westminster-style 'winner takes all' elections. PR would ensure that there would be some sort of parliamentary representation for minorities.

But if you have strong PR of that nature, you don't have backbenchers. You don't have local parliamentarians who are accountable to their constituencies.

What matters is not your personal popularity with the voters, but your place on the party list. The people who hold the reins are the power brokers inside parties. The whips.

So what we have is an effective one-party state which, instead of being accountable to the voters, is entirely inwardly focused. What matters is where you stand in the intra-party structures.

And the internecine rivalry and wrangling inside the party is tied to the ability to dispense patronage, so it becomes mired in corruption.

So the ANC has turned very swiftly from a party of fairly naive idealists who thought that God was on their side to a party of corrupt idealists who think that God is on their side.

On top of it, the ANC's populist political traditions - its belief that it is the real representative of 'the people' means you get a situation in which Parliament becomes increasingly irrelevant. Policy is made inside the party, which tries to place its appatchiks in key civil service positions. But because of the intra-party politics, incompetence in key positions is not punished.

So it goes

So, you've got a corrupt, over-centralised government, which in just 20 years turned a relatively prosperous country into yet another African stereotype.

If you want help emigrating to Europe, just say the magic words


EDIT: Just saw your invite to start a new thread. I'll let you do the honours.

[TomViolenz]

Funken, why don't you start that thread about SA politics then, so the Nelson Mandela memorial thread does not get derailed?!

[Galt]

[Marxist bullshit]

Perhaps you missed the Finn's suggestion to start a new thread to discus these points? Kindly remove your spamming from this RIP thread, you Marxist swine, you.