How much longer must we live with this rotting fish?
Years ago, I became a foreign correspondent in Africa because the apartheid government withdrew my official Press card. And thus I became limited in what I could report in my own country.
Not that I had written anything that wasn’t honest or accurate. But it was critical of the policies of separate development, the segregation of people because of their colour.
Thus I was surprised when the same government approved my application for dual citizenship, allowing me to get a British passport to travel freely in Africa.
I knew the sub-continent well. For a year, I had worked on a newpaper in Zimbabwe, when it was Rhodesia. Later, I had reported on UDI from Zambia’s perspective. I had covered the independence celebrations in the three former British protectorates – Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. I had travelled extensively in Namibia, then South-West Africa, and Mozambique.
All that exposure to social normality I had enjoyed. It was refreshing to escape South Africa’s stultifying politics, to be where people behaved naturally, where attitudes were not directed by race or prejudice.
In 1975, independence came to Portugal’s African provinces, Angola and Mozambique. When would what seemed inevitable, democracy, happen in South Africa? Not in my lifetime, I thought. As confirmation, the apartheid government sent the army into Angola, at the behest of the CIA, to try to ward off communism. And when the South African forces were in a position to occupy Luanda, the capital, the CIA asked it to withdraw.
Then, in 1990, came the great “Rainbow Nation” transition. President F W de Klerk – under considerable economic pressure from world sanctions – unbanned the African National Congress and freed Nelson Mandela. I was in Lusaka when ANC leaders began returning from exile. In four years, they would be in charge of South Africa. With the party was a member of the anti-apartheid movement who had been close to them for several years. I asked him what sort of government he thought they would make. “They are good people,” he said. “But right now they couldn’t run a bath, let alone a government. They’ve got some quick learning to do.” The man explained, “The ANC has never really prepared itself for this. Before sanctions seriously began to bite two years ago, many members had come to believe that change would not happen while they were alive.” Evidence of that unreadiness (and immaturity) came early. The ANC accepted responsibility for a vast apartheid-era debt, which should have been cancelled. Instead, the new government approached the International Monetary Fund for a huge loan. It announced there would be free health care for children under six and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers. And a raft of social grants.
One effect of that has been to clog queues at hospitals and clinics with youngsters and mothers suffering from minor ailments, while chronic patients are delayed or even denied treatment. Another is much more serious and even tragic. Teenage girls, many still at school, have become pregnant in order to get the grants on offer. And hundreds of those have abandoned their babies because they lacked the will or the proper funds to carry on as mothers.
Introducing these grants may have been a naive mistake but they have become an area for corruption ever since. Old age pensions continue to be claimed long after the death of the original recipient. Many thousands of rands in social security funds have been embezzled by officials down the line. The incompetence of civil servants has been another major problem in the twenty years of democracy. A recent independent report showed that less than 20 per cent of municipalities were properly managing the funds allocated to them. Hence all the protests over the non-delivery of services.
Mismanagement is rife at provincial level too, particularly in the education departments. Witness the scandal in Limpopo a few years ago where hundreds of pupils had to go without school books for most of a year because a consignment had simply been dumped in the veld by the company contracted to deliver them, but not paid.
Well, if an official is intent on feathering his own nest, he is very likely to be derelict in his duties. And the chronicle of neglect grows almost daily.
The Electricity Supply Commission’s lack of preparation for the future, which resulted in regular power cuts, did huge damage to commerce and industry. The dyke seems to be plugged, but how effectively?
And now we have critical water shortages. The drought is to blame for much of that. But in twenty years the ANC government hasn’t built a single new dam. Worse, some of the biggest municipalities haven’t kept existing dams and reservoirs in proper repair. So, for example, supplies are available from Lesotho’s Highlands Water Scheme to alleviate some problems. But the pumps that would carry that water to the reservoirs need replacing.
It is all a tragic state of affairs for the millions of us who had such high hopes for our country in 1990 and beyond. But cynics would say that is the nature of rainbows. They are a trick of the light and they don’t last. And there is no gold at the end of them.
South Africa’s own gold, for so many years the mainstay of our economy, now accounts for a few percent of the Gross Domestic Product. And that economy looks less stable with every budget. It does not help that university students are now clamouring for a free education, worthy though their campaign may be.
If all the money lost to graft, lavished on unnecessary grants and benefits, could somehow be recovered, we would be in a better position to meet such demands when they arise. It would also help if our glorious leader would pay back the R246 millon squandered on what he calls “just a house”.
Jacob Zuma admitted this month that he puts the interests of the ANC ahead of the interests of the country. If he was honest, he would have gone further and admitted that he puts the interests of Jacob Zuma ahead of both.
Now he wants a four billion rand presidential jet capable of intercontinental flight, with a seating capacity of 30 and a conference room capable of holding eight. Why? Is he planning to hold secret party meetings at thirty thousand feet with his top incompetents while they hob-nob around the world?
Political commentator Justice Malala observed this week that “a fish rots from the head down”. That is certainly true in our case. But how much longer must South Africans live with this stench of corruption and avarice?
Boy whiz who found meaning in a bomb
Fifty years ago this month, Frederick John Harris planted a powerful bomb in the whites-only concourse of Johannesburg’s Park station which killed one elderly woman and injured 22 other commuters.
So 77-year-old Ethyl Rhys became the first civilian to die in the resistance campaign. And, nine months later, Harris himself became the only white man executed for political activities.
Chairman of Sanroc, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, John Harris telephoned the railway police to warn them the bomb was primed to detonate at rush hour that afternoon. He claimed the policeman he spoke to laughed and put the phone down.
But, ironically, it was a member of the railway police who was responsible for Harris’s arrest. Just before the bomb exploded, he had noticed a man frantically trying to start a small car near the station entrance. His offer of help seemed to send the man into a greater panic. Suspicious, the policeman made a note of the vehicle’s registration number.
At the time of the atrocity, the mood around South Africa was strangely muted. The Rivonia trialists had been sentenced exactly a month earlier, casting gloom over black opponents of apartheid.
The Spear of the Nation, Umkhonto weSizwe, was effectively blunted. Poqo, the military wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, had been crushed the previous year, mainly through police informers.
Encouraged by its Pogo tactics, the security police decided that infiltration was the way to go. Also in 1963, a group of frustrated liberals had established an underground organisation they called the African Resistance Movement (ARM). Most of the members were white – academics, lawyers and journalists.
And most of them were arrested in July, 1964, on the evidence of Gerhard Ludi, a police spy who infiltrated newspapers.
John Harris, a teacher, was also an ARM member. He came incensed when fellow members were arrested. He knew where the group kept the explosives it had used against soft targets like electricity pylons. And he had been taught how to make a bomb.
The force of that explosion rattled the windows of our newspaper office, six blocks away. Three of us rushed to the station.
The huge glassed edifice was filled with smoke. The damage was immense. A child’s toy handbag lay in a smear of blood. Police were spreading sawdust over what looked like a human hand.
The area around the bench under which the bomb had been placed was cordoned off. There the smell of burned flesh was even stronger. Several of the injured, including Ethyl Rhys’s grand-daughter, were being treated in the railway canteen.
Three ARM detainees were escorted in by security police. They appeared shocked and dishevelled. One had bruises on his face. Another was a balding, middle-aged man. A policeman asked him roughly, “Well, what do you think of it?”
“I’m just as horrified as you are,” the detainee replied. “I don’t know why you brought me here.” There was no doubt Harris’s action would add years to whatever sentence that man faced.
I had met John Harris as chairman of Sanroc. His appearance belied any link with athletics or, for that matter, murder and subversion. He had a large moon face on narrow shoulders. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy and was, in fact, well-known while a schoolboy. For years he took part in a national radio quiz show as a member of a team called the “Quiz Kids” and was one of the brightest.
During his trial, his defence team highlighted that achievement, as though it might make Harris less of a monster in the public eye. That defence, indeed, was not dissimilar to the defence in the Oscar Pistorious case: A terrible mistake. “I did not mean to shoot my girlfriend.” “I expected the police to defuse my bomb.”
The case, three months after his arrest, took place in the same building as the Rivonia Trial, but in Pretoria’s main Supreme Court.
High in the roof was a four-bladed fan, swinging precariously on a buckled shaft. That week, it hung like a sword of Damocles over John Harris as he sat in the witness box, sallow and red-eyed.
Harris was perched on a typist’s chair, but he might just as well have been stretched full-length on a psychiatrist’s couch.
Where Oscar Pistorious has endured a month of inspection in a mental hospital, Harris’s examination happened right there in court. From a table a few feet away, two state doctors watched him intently throughout his evidence. Across the courtroom, a third psychiatrist crouched over a foolscap pad, writing furiously.
For three days, they recorded and classified his moods, his response to the many questions, the way he gesticulated when he spoke.
Harris’s lawyer asked if he had cause to seek medical help before the day of the station explosion.
Harris nodded extravagantly. “Ja,” he said. “I went to see my doctor. That was in June. I was having headaches and not feeling well generally.”
But in answer to the next question, he said: “I’ve had memory lapses, but I’ve been entirely in my sound and sober senses.”
He insisted: “There has never been any need for me to get a doctor’s opinion on my mental state. There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing.”
He was asked how he felt:
About the bomb: ”It was the main thing in my life . . . such a good idea, so beautiful . . .”
His emotions after placing the bomb: “I felt as if I was sitting in a glass ball . . . like an amoeba under a microscope. I’ve had the feeling of being part of the world before, but this time I felt a tremendous understanding of the world.”
Schooldays: “Right up to Standard 9 I was called the fat boy. Like the fat boy in the William books. I tried to get thin, but it didn’t work.”
Himself: “I’m lazy, selfish, inconsiderate . . . Sometimes I felt I wasn’t getting ahead. It worried me and I was taking a course on how to be more positive . . . “
Marriage: “I never really felt responsible. I don’t think even the arrival of the child gave me a feeling of responsibility . . . I had a happy relationship with my wife. I hope she was happy with me.”
The trial: “They (his attorneys) told me if I stuck to the truth, I wouldn’t be convicted of murder because I had not intended to kill anyone . . . (Wearily) Now I just want to get away from everything.”
The defence psychiatrist’s conclusion was that Harris had a fluctuating cyclothymic personality of manic depressive psychosis. He suffered from grandiose fantasies and delusions. He could not have acted otherwise on the day of the bombing.
The state psychiatrist dismissed that evidence. Harris was sane. He acted as any normal man would have.
Harris appealed against his sentence. When the appeal was turned down, his wife Ann made a plea for clemency to the then Minister of Justice, John Vorster.
I interviewed her in Pretoria. She was staying with the parents of Peter Hain, later to become a British Labour Party minister. She seemed entirely overtaken by events and torn between the foolishness of her husband’s action and the thought that people seemed not to believe it was all a horrible misunderstanding.
Their son, barely a year old, gurgled in a playpen, blissfully unaware of the drama that was to change his life.
In the early hours of the morning John Harris was hanged, I drove to Pretoria and walked through a labyrinth of warders’ cottages to the massive wooden door of the old jail where executions were still carried out.
I don’t know what I expected to see – what mood there might be to write about. Perhaps an official might emerge, afterwards, and nail a notice of execution to the door.
Someone did emerge, but out of the darkness next to me. It was the brother of a death cell warder, who proceeded to give me a graphic description of the process being carried out behind the jail walls.
The newspapers, my informant said, would claim (and they did) that Harris had sung freedom songs on the way to the gallows. But that was impossible, because he would be so heavily sedated he would almost have to be carried to the scaffold.
“And relatives of the whites,’ he added, “are asked to bring their bathing trunks.” It made less of a mess, you see.
Such callousness by the Prisons Department should have shocked me, but didn’t.
A judge’s registrar once told me of a case in Grahamstown where a young black man found guilty on a minor felony escaped while awaiting sentence, killing an orderly. He was later traced and found guilty of murder.
One the eve of the execution, a prisons official going through the man’s file discovered that his first sentence of six strokes had never been administered.
So they caned him in the afternoon and hanged him in the morning.
Sunday Times, July 20, 2014.
ANC is cutting off its nose . . .
Leader of the Freedom Front, Pieter Mulder, suggests Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation speech shows the ANC’s “gas is out of the bottle”. Certainly the man himself looks deflated. And ill.
And what activity has there been since that dull, repetitive speech? Not much.
Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan who, towards the end of his tenure did at least accept the need for an economy drive, has been energetic in his new job of cleaning up local governments. This last week, his department fired four Limpopo mayors and charged East London councillors who pocketed six million rands intended for Mandela memorial services.
But there is no indication yet how the Government plans to garner all the funds it would need for its development plan, including a whole new ministry with all those attendant officials. It’s interesting to note that the Nats could manage with 16 ministries. The ANC requires 35.
The Minister of Rural Development has come up with a ridiculous scheme by which farmers would give half their land to their workers. Even Julius “I want it all” Malema must know that is impossible.
One of Zuma’s stated aims during his second term is to see the creation of a million new jobs in the agricultural field. Financial experts shake their heads, citing the growing mechanisation in farming generally; a process that is likely to speed up if there are more strikes in the industry.
However, there is a way to at least make a start if only the ANC government would recognise it.
In the past 20 years, the State has appropriated white farms in all the provinces by the “willing seller” scheme. Other farms are on offer but somehow still awaiting payment by the Land Bank.
In its relatively short life, Israel has been able to transform the barren land it was allocated after World War II. To a large extent, it has achieved this through its kibbutz system. These communally run settlements, in which children are collectively reared, played a crucial role in the development of the country. In the process, many thousands of young Israelis and foreign volunteers have been trained in diverse skills – agricultural, industrial, even ecological.
Although there has been a recent movement to the greater comfort of Israel’s cities, the 270 kibbutzim still account for 40 per cent of the country’s agricultural output.
Would that not be a viable way of employing and training some of the millions of South African youngsters currently out of jobs? By creating collective farms on all that vacant land, with the assistance of Israeli experts?
It would indeed. If only the ANC could forget the past. Forget that Israel helped the Nat government develop the atomic (though not the nuclear) bomb in the late eighties.
That must be the sticking point, for it is inconceivable that somebody in government would not have considered the kibbutz route before now.
‘They couldn’t run a bath’
In Lusaka, leaders of the African National Congress were returning from exile. In four years, they would be in charge of South Africa.
With the party was a member of the anti-apartheid movement who had been close to them for several years. I asked him what sort of government he thought they would make.
“They are good people,” he said. “But right now they couldn’t run a bath, let alone a government. They’ve got some quick learning to do.”
The man explained, “The ANC has never really prepared itself for this. Before sanctions seriously began to bite two years ago, many members had come to believe that change would not happen in their own lifetime.”
Evidence of that unreadiness (and immaturity) came early, with the announcement of free health care for children under six and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers.
One effect of that has been to clog queues at hospitals and clinics with youngsters and mothers suffering from minor ailments, while chronic patients are delayed or even denied treatment.
Another is much more serious and even tragic. Teenage girls, many of them still at school, have become pregnant in order to get the grants on offer. And hundreds of those have abandoned their babies because they lacked the will or the proper funds to carry on as mothers.
Just a few weeks ago, a two-year-old boy was dumped by his mother in the traffic on a motorway. Fortunately, a truck driver was able to brake as the child ran into the path of his vehicle and the police were on hand to contact the welfare authorities.
Babies have not only been abandoned. They have been battered too. And not only by young mothers driven to their wit’s end by constantly crying infants. There seems to be a boyfriend or partner syndrome in some cases: “If you don’t shut that child up, I will!”
Introducing these grants may have been an honest mistake by honorable men but they have become a point of corruption ever since. Old age pensions continue to be claimed long after the death of the original recipient. Many thousands of rands in social security funds have been embezzled by officials down the line.
The incompetence of civil servants has been another major problem in the 20 years of democracy. A recent independent report showed that less than 20 per cent of municipalities were properly managing the funds allocated to them. Hence all the protests over the non-delivery of services.
Mismanagement is rife at province level too, particularly in the education departments. Witness the scandal in Limpopo a few years ago where hundreds of pupils had to go without school books for most of a year because a consignment had simply been dumped in the veld by the company contracted to deliver them.
Another issue has been the quality of teachers appointed. If they are appointed at all, for there are instances where posts continue to go unfilled, year after year.
This is particularly true in the rural areas where pupils have to write exams on work they have never been taught.
Where money is there, yet no one is sure how it should be apportioned, major corruption can readily flourish. And that in turn is fed by a sense of entitlement that has almost become endemic. If you don’t know where that cash should go, just help yourself! You deserve it, after all, after apartheid.
And that path leads us right to Nkandla, and to a shameless president we legally may call a liar now.
Political commentators differ on how much Jacob Zuma will suffer at the polls through the folly of his R246-million homestead. I believe it will be considerable.
More than a million of the “born free” generation (whom Zuma and company must have come to regard as their party’s voters-in-waiting) are so disillusioned they haven’t bothered to register. Julius Malema’s EFF group should attract a fair number of the former ANC Youth members. And Ronnie Kasrils’s “don’t vote” call to ANC voters at large must be a barometer of how many of the older leaders feel.
If the new ANC leaders had any common sense, they would have called for Zuma’s impeachment ahead of the Democratic Alliance. But then common sense seems to be a commodity in short supply among the present ANC hierachy.
As are honesty and integrity.
A party in disarray
Almost the first encouraging sign in the early Nineties that a peaceful transition might be possible after all was the relationship formed between Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer.
The two were the chief negotiators for the ANC and the National Party in the Multiparty Negotiating Forum, whose brief was to end apartheid and steer the country towards its first democratic elections in April 1994. Public optimism grew even further when Ramaphosa offered to introduce Meyer to the sport of trout fishing and had to remove a hook from the novice’s finger.
It was almost analogous of Androcles and the lion he befriended by taking a thorn out of its paw.
There must have been the same kind of encouragement among many voters recently when Cyril Ramaphosa returned to active politics from big business and became the ANC’s deputy president. Surely, disillusioned voters would have thought, such a cool and experienced head was exactly what was needed to reform the capricious Jacob Zuma or even replace him should he be indicted or impeached.
But hopes of that kind were dashed on Sunday when Ramaphosa urged Limpopo voters to support the ANC “or the Boers will come back to control us”.
Not only was it a tired race card from a man who helped set up a non-race Constitution 20 years ago. It was a race card entirely without substance and suggests the governing party is in a state of complete panic and disarray on the eve of the elections.
John Ryan 