via Khaya Dlanga: Take your 20 years of democracy and suck it! Mail & Guardian 06 NOV 2013 by Khaya Dlanga
[ZimSit note: Save this essential report on SA by Colin Coleman for Goldman Sachs dd 4 November 2013 — one day Zim politicos might get a grasp, take a full breath and stride optimistically into Zim’s future]
How is it possible that South Africa is a better place now than in 1994, asks a disgruntled South African expatriate.
Why won’t you just bloody die, South Africa! First of all, you decided to have free elections for everyone. I was convinced that you were all going to butcher each other. Of course I was smart and left the country just before the election. Imagine my disappointment when I saw that you were all standing in lines together – black and white. Well, there was no killing but a peaceful voting process in 1994. I was convinced that the pretense wouldn’t last. I mean, how could it? We had been killing each other for years.
One of the biggest shocks for me was when you hosted the rugby World Cup in South Africa in 1995. I watched from my adopted country while missing the fact that I wasn’t watching while braaing with my friends. When the Boks played the All Blacks in the final I was sure that there would be race riots afterwards because I knew that blacks didn’t like rugby or the Springboks. But at the end of the match, the Springboks won and I saw pictures of blacks and whites HUGGING and KISSING on the streets! Celebrating together! TOGETHER! That would never have happened in the old South Africa! I was so disappointed at what kind of sissies and softies my former countrymen had become.
When I see good news coming out of South Africa, I’m pretty sure you guys make it up to hide the fact that you are actually struggling. I’m also pretty sure the soccer World Cup was staged to cover up the atrocities that were happening there. When we left, we had no doubt that that country was going down in flames. In fact, we were rooting for it to go down in flames. Blacks and whites were going to kill each other and those naïve whites who had decided to stay would have deserved what they got, too.
It is so painful to see that this damn country hasn’t regressed like many of us believed. It sucks big time because we can’t even admit it to ourselves that things are going well. We trawl the internet everyday for bad news to prove to ourselves that we made the right decision by leaving those ANC communists and that sell-out FW de Klerk. In fact, I still have friends in South Africa who make it their mission to send me all these bad news about the country. (I wonder if they are doing that to make sure that I never come back. Maybe they hate me, I never did think about that.)
When I left that godforsaken country, I didn’t think things would be getting better instead of worse. I came across something on the internet called Two Decades of Freedom, What South Africa is Doing With it, And What Now Needs To Be Done, by Goldman Sachs. I was convinced that since they are an entity from the West they would be very balanced in their view. By balanced, I mean talk about everything that is wrong with that country. But no, they had to write a glowing review of the last 20 years and say that things are actually better than they were during apartheid. Is that possible?
They say that the ANC government has done well – can you imagine that! They claim that access to electricity has improved to 85%. And – wait for this – they also say that during apartheid in the years between 1980 and 1994, South Africa’s gross domestic product grew at an average annual rate of 1.4%, while between 1994 and 2007 it averaged at 3.6% and brought inflation down to 6.3%. They say that South Africa grew from an economy of $80-billion to $400-billion since 1994. That means the economy more than tripled in that time. It basically grew faster than a lot of countries in Europe. Who would have thought?
Do bear with me while I go through the phases of grief. I started with denial, then anger. I think I am going to move all the way to acceptance at some point and admit that South Africa is actually better off now than it was during apartheid. When I have accepted it, I might go back. But in the meantime, I will keep trawling the internet for bad news about South Africa to make myself feel better.
I’m still hoping to wake up tomorrow morning to find that that the Goldman Sachs report was just a dream. I mean, it’s just not possible that South Africa is a better place now than in 1994. I think I will ask the Afrikaans Weerstandsbeweging to compile a more objective report.
COMMENTS
What about Zimbabwe? The country is run by people with doctorial degrees and professorships. Can you disect Zimbabwe for us? A country of educated nothings who can read and write well. Now they also can read and write Chinese. But they can’t and have never built anything.
Zuma built the highways and then went to the people to say “see what I have done, now lets all play our part…” In Zimbabwe, they took the loans from everywhere and built nothing except a pagoda for the dear leader, built for “free” by China and a third grade “highway” to dear leader’s homestaead. Meanwhile, nearby at Murombedzi “Growthpoint” young ladies provide services of the posterea and that is “growth!” NXAAAAA!!
There is no country which is GOD forsaken,,,,,,,,,…
Plenty of Biblical countries that were ‘God Forsaken’, read the Book,
Sodom and Gamora, Canaan, Egypt were all forsaken until they repented. Some never did, and Zimbabwe is God Forsaken while Mugarbage lives. Zambia and South Africa have plenty rain north and south and lush crops, Zimbabwe in the middle, zilch! God is not happy with ZANU-PF, like Sodom and Gamora!
Robert Mugabe’s regime likes to talk about breaking the back of Zimbabwe’s opposition.Zimbabwe’s farms are ruined, its economy has evaporated, and its people starve.The catering arrangements for the ruling party’s annual shindig only reinforces the sense of grand delusion pervading the top ranks of Zimbabwe’s regime amid the catastrophe they have brought upon their country.Driving Zanu-PF’s hysterical self-deception is the party’s loss of popular support.But Mugabe remains defiant. He believes violence is the solution.
While the President, Robert Mugabe, cradles his well-fed belly, he offers little comfort to the nation, reminding us in speeches and interviews that like most of the problems faced by Zimbabwe; hunger is a result of actions sanctioned by others. Mugabe has crippled Zimbabwe, reducing most of its people to beggars or barterers and black marketers. The ultimate irony is that, whether by accident or design, it has taken 33 years for them to prove the racist detractors correct when they prophesied that the incoming Zanu-PF government would be incapable of governing the country. “It makes absolute nonsense… that most of our arable land is still in the hands of our erstwhile colonisers,” he declares. Harvests plummet and Zimbabwe has to rely on food imports and aid supplies. Seven million people are in starvation.
If you look at Zimbabwe, it used to be one of the wealthiest countries on the content and bad governance has led to an economic disaster.Interests of ALL people have to be served first. The former Rhodesia, once a paradise, has been transformed into a scene of devastation.I urge all Zimbabweans, from all parties not to blink while we loose the sovereignty of our nation as well as our minerals.The promise of liberation gave way to the corruption of power and then the collapse of the economy.Yet Mr Mugabe’s rhetoric had persuaded many Zimbabweans that he was personally honest, lived on a modest salary and was uninterested in wealth.
In August 2003, suspicions that he had in fact been enriching himself were confirmed when my story in The Daily Telegraph revealed that builders were putting the finishing touches to his new £6 million residence, the largest ever built in either Rhodesia or Zimbabwe. With 25 bedrooms, spas and a swimming pool, its roof clad with blue glazed tiles from Shanghai, it was as luxurious as any to be built in the post-colonial Africa of corrupt “big men” – and was three times the size of the president’s official residence. Its cost far exceeded his earnings since he came to power. In fact, Mr Mugabe had quietly taken control of four of Zimbabwe’s most profitable white-owned farms. They were secretly managed by state employees with all the profits going to him, his second wife, Grace, and their close relatives. Many believe that Mrs Mugabe’s shopping addiction has contributed to his increasingly greedy rule.
His charm could work its spell at first because Mr Mugabe was unknown to most Zimbabweans in 1980, thanks to Rhodesia’s press censorship. They hadn’t heard of the vicious fights within the ranks of his Zanu-PF party during its exile in Mozambique. The antagonism between Mr Mugabe and his former wartime allies in the late Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu was also little understood. Few realised that during the liberation war Mr Mugabe had jailed scores of youthful militants in horrendous conditions in Mozambique. And he could put on a good show of being a moderate. While still in Marxist Mozambique, Mr Mugabe met a visiting US Congressman who had come to get his measure to brief the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The evaluation, made public only recently after a freedom of information request, is revealing.
@ bossmyass
Do you have a link to Kissinger’s report?
Good afternoon. For which exactly report are you talking about ?
http://cultbustersgalactica.yuku.com/topic/455/ZIMBABWE-DICTATORSHIP-NATIONAL-CULT-Robert-Mugabe-Di#.Un5_VNg-dCg
Mugarbage is responsible for the past 33 years of ruinous rule,he has destroyed the country as a whole,he needs to be prosecuted anyway or how.
Mugabe will not die in his sleep
He is immortal. He will never die.
I’ve witnessed the monstrosities that my government has committed. I see starving children begging for food on the street and know that they, like thousands of others, have lost everything to the tyrannical hatred of a power grabbing group of people, cheating their way through elections and burning down whatever stood in their way, including the homes and lives of children.
What I hate most about my home is the hatred and disunity between people, particularly the segregation between whites, blacks, coloureds, Indians and the rest. I find the fact that people hate one another just because of the colour of the other’s skin absolutely disgusting and incredibly tragic. When it comes down to it, we’ve all suffered in one way or another under Mugabe’s regime. Whether you’re a white farmer, an Indian company owner, a black shopkeeper or a coloured teacher, we’ve all been affected to a lesser or greater degree.Zanu PF’s tactic to divide and conquer has succeeded. Racism is everywhere, it’s not just the older generation of black Zimbabweans who still feel bitter about British colonisation, nor is it just the white farmers who have lost their land and not only the company owners whose once thriving businesses are now collapsed, or have been taken over by the current “leaders”; racism resides everywhere.Before you judge a person because of the colour of their skin or what their ancestors did, think about the absurdity of these prejudices and realise how crazy it is to dislike someone due to their DNA. Rather get to know others first and educate yourself and the people around you on the need for unity in a nation, especially one like our own, which has continually struggled under a divisive dictatorship.Why do we torture people we have known all our lives and begin to call them the sell-outs, enemies, or terrorists? Why do we become fanatical about political ideas we hardly understand? The answer to all these questions is what we call internalised oppression (racism). Internalised oppression is so powerful that it turns us into monsters and we often get surprised after we have acted that we could do what we did.
There are numerous examples of how we have caused ourselves unnecessary pain, injury and suffering because we now believe some of the things used by our former oppressors are better than our own. All manner of self-invalidation, self-doubt, isolation, fear, feeling of powerlessness and despair are signs of internalised oppression.We know that every hurt or mistreatment, if not discharged (healed) will create a distress pattern [some form of rigid destructive or ineffective feeling and behaviour] in the victim of this mistreatment. This distress pattern, when restimulated, will tend to push the victim through a re-enactment of the original distress experiences, either with someone else in the victim role or, when this is not possible, with the original victim being the object of his/her distress pattern.
Robert Mugabe initially falsely “adopted ‘socialism’” but this pattern could not successfully accommodate his internalised oppression. He was helped by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to come in the open. So, from c1990 he openly practised capitalism. He created individuals [army commanders, members of parliament and a limited group of elite academics] to act as his assistants, just like the colonial governments. Through them, he plundered the country’s resources and sent the wealth to Europe and America. Never in the history of Zimbabwe have so many people been openly gunned down by their elected leader .Never have people’s homes been touched by fellow ‘comrades’. Never have people been thrown in jail without food until they starve to death. Never have people been captured and forced to mine minerals for army commanders. The stories of inhuman treatment of people by the Mugabe Government can only be better told by those that suffered them.
All you guys just don’t get dry-witted satire, do you? Mr. Dlanga, this is funny stuff.