US says ‘No more money’, South Africa is a failed and racist government

President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio’s expulsion this week from the United States of the South African ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, is another delightful wringing down of the curtain on a long era of hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil hypocrisy of the West. Despite the well-earned and widespread admiration for Nelson Mandela and the general revulsion at the apartheid system, post-apartheid South Africa has been a disaster, not only in misgovernment and corruption, but in repeated and unctuous assaults upon the civil rights of minorities, particularly the whites who built the country but not confined to them. Repulsive system though apartheid was, what has replaced it has been chronic and ostentatiously corrupt, bigoted, and incompetent misrule.

Mandela himself came late to office and proved to be a heroic personification of a national and international crusade for human rights, on the lines of but probably more universally accessible to admiration than Lech Wałęsa of Poland, a heroic shipyard worker, champion of the rights of labour and brave lay Roman Catholic defending the practice of Christianity against oppressive foreign-dominated communist atheism. Wałęsa was a nationalist and sectarian hero as well as a champion of human liberty. He proved not to be a competent president of Poland and quietly withdrew from that position after one term. Nelson Mandela was a better educated man dealing with a regime that was at least of domestic origin and did not arrive in the baggage train of a conquering army as the Polish Communists did. The apartheid government, odious though it was, was reasonably democratic in regard to those who shared the pigmentation, if not necessarily the culture and heritage of the ruling Afrikaans ethnic group. In straight administrative terms was an effective regime.

The last National Party president, F.W. de Klerk, as he released Nelson Mandela after 27 years of confinement, and lifted the ban on the South African Communist Party and its leader Joe Slovo, promised a two-tier federalism in which one level would be entirely based on representation by population. The other level would be an equal representation for as he put it, “each culture.” These were understood to be the Afrikaners, the English-speaking whites, the Zulus, the east Indians, the Cape Coloureds, and the other blocks amongst whom the Xhosa were pre-eminent. And there would be in this federal chamber, somewhat like the United States senate with equal representation for all states regardless of population, a check on the ability of the majority or any coalition comprising a majority to run roughshod over the rights of any group. Since the National Party started with all the power of the state, it need not have abdicated so completely and simply jettisoned all minority rights to the mercies of the Xhosa majority, almost none of whose leaders was remotely as equitably minded as Mandela. And it should be remembered that even he described the intolerable rates of criminal intrusion on the property of the well-to-do minorities not as crimes, but as a fast-track method of “wealth redistribution.”

South Africa’s wealthiest man, the distinguished controlling shareholder of Anglo-American Corporation, which was with Canadian Pacific, the Hudson’s Bay Company and Broken Hill Mines, one of the great historic enterprises of the British Empire, was a renowned liberal and supporter of South Africa’s greatest modern statesman Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, who was defeated by the authors of the infamous apartheid policy, the National Party led by Daniel Malan in 1948. As a tangible gesture of goodwill and cooperation, Mr. Oppenheimer, the world’s greatest diamond producer, effectively gave the legendary corporation in the development of South Africa since the days of Cecil Rhodes and Barny Barnato, Johannesburg Consolidated Industries, to the leaders of the ANC, specifically South African mine workers union leader and now the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa. This was an outright gift of $1 billion, designed to be a conciliatory gesture (“Black Economic Empowerment”) at this decisive turning in the history of South Africa as well as implicitly, a placebo to help settle within reasonable limits whatever extreme tendencies, despite Mr. Mandela’s placations, might understandably have arisen in the long era of abusive white rule.

The African National Congress accepted the gift but has not produced the quid pro quo. President Trump has lifted the veil on what has been a failed and racist government. The magnificent country of South Africa has been operated as a giant candy store for the delectation of the post-Mandela demagogic bosses of the ANC. The South African power system which was always completely reliable, broke down so badly that it had to be rented out to the management of a Japanese corporation which accompanied the contract with a po-faced public gift of $1 million to the ANC.

Until now, the Western world has completely abandoned the white South Africans and gone along with convenient pretext that the transition of South Africa has been a tolerably smooth and equitable one. President Trump has exposed the bigotry and corruption and objective failure of this regime and he is about to cancel $500 million in American assistance to South African sustainable energy project, another epic and moronic boondoggle of the Biden administration. The fact that the expelled ambassador who had the effrontery to impute the American governing Republican Party slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ to a racist ambition to prevent a non-white majority arising in that country, was greeted on his return to Cape Town by several hundred people waving Palestinian flags, exposes the moral bankruptcy of this atrophied ANC regime.

As with other Western failings that prior to the Trump administration dared not speak their names, such as the chronic freeloading of America’s NATO so-called allies, Trump’s plain-speaking and sensible actions are almost certain to have important sequels. The might of America, which President Biden artfully concealed with his senescent bumbling, is being deployed to the reinforcement of the West and its values. In the enfeeblement of South Africa which has been ignored out of understandable but exaggerated happiness at the end of apartheid, is about to be starkly exposed. Nor should Rubio attend the G-20 meeting in South Africa – there are too many of these unnecessary gatherings. The ANC will soon have to contemplate an agonising reappraisal; not only has the cookie jar been closed, the American candy store has been shuttered.