KZN ANC Commissar Sihle Zikalala’s diagnosis at the recent ANC provincial council meeting that the country is facing “economic warfare” from “western monopoly capitalism” is vintage communist fulmination which echoes Stalinist rhetoric of the 1930s when the five-year plans and collectivisation of agriculture were failing.
Zikalala’s claims are based on deceit. The ANC’s friendship with China is increasingly becoming a critical factor in the South African economy -not Western capitalism. That is the reality.
- Has Zikalala not noticed that South Africa is China’s second-largest investment recipient?
- Is he not aware that China has a 20% holding in Standard Bank?
- That Chevron’s (Caltex) operation in South Africa has been taken over by China;
- That China has substantial holdings in metals and minerals companies such as Sinosteel, Blue Ridge and Shanduka Gold;
- That the ANC’s Gupta friends from India have virtually captured the state through manipulation and unscrupulous actions. And they have certainly captured the ANC faction of which Zikalala is the mouthpiece.
Indeed, it is common knowledge that China is leading the new scramble for Africa. But such reality does not accord with Zikalala’s agenda which is to obfuscate and deny that not only has his ANC faction run out of the road but that their moral and political bankruptcy is the cause of South Africa’s downward economic spiral.
The only correct perception in Zikalala’s rant is that his opponents seek more than the removal of Jacob Zuma. They seek the removal of the ANC from power. Quite right. In the words of RW Johnson (How long can SA survive – 2nd edition), “what is clear beyond a reasonable doubt, is that ‘liberation’ has failed and [instead] produced a regime that is incapable of governing South Africa as a free, democratic and functioning country” – (p. 238).
Sent into The Daily News and published, 28 June 2017.
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