Staggering Out Over The Abyss

[Woody]

19R to the £, saving me loads on my ongoing purchase

[Cacophonix]

19R to the £, saving me loads on my ongoing purchase

Worrying about the state of the Rand. You are now truly an honorary Saffer Woody!

This exchange rate just means my ex-wife will just get more of my money!

Caco

[Woody]

Not worried, just means that I can purchase more wine

[Cacophonix]

Not worried, just means that I can purchase more wine

Adding to the local economy and saving water. SA salutes you!

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

Still nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds from those who used to haunt the pavement outside South Africa House.

I think you will find that a lot of these were not South Africans but Brits etc. and thus had no real skin in the game. Most of this group have grown up, got mortgages, had children and disappeared into suburbia. As for the rest, professional protestors or otherwise all over the world ("julle break dansers is almal betogers") have moved onto other causes or simply faded away or died. Thus it is in life and death, and of course, some did die for what they believed in (e.g. people like Ruth First, Neil Aggett, David Webster, shot in front of his daughter in Jhb, etc.).

I think you will wait in vain for a post hoc vindication of whatever it is you want from them ALC!...

My point exactly. Bog standard rent-a-mob. Doubt most of them could point out SA on a map but happy to kick up a fuss. It's called virtue signaling these days I believe.

As for dying for their beliefs, I doubt Zuma is what they had in mind (Who knows? The lust for power is strong in some) but like most on the left, paying attention to the obvious being pointed out to them at the time wasn't their strong suit.

[A Lutra Continua]

Something every one could clearly see. All except the short sighted left as usual.

https://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders ... ed-herbst/

When SA was aflame: Damage caused by a jaundiced journalistic eye – Ed Herbst

CAPE TOWN — It’s a subject that could keep the pub open for a week and only those with the strongest livers and minds would emerge alive. Not that this way of trauma debriefing after a day in the townships ducking bullets, petrol bombs and witnessing horrific necklacings pertains today. It will hopefully never be revived. But here veteran journalist and astute historical media analyst, Ed Herbst, puts the cat among the pigeons in a certain flock of journalists and liberal academics who reported on and spoke out during the turbulent 1980’s and early 1990’s. It’s prompted by a participant/commentator – of whom there were several – Mondli Makhanya, whose recent City Press article – No rest for brutal Buthelezi – reflects a common discourse and wisdom that has pertained for decades. Herbst, in an uncomfortably astute media analysis, questions this discourse, the passing of time having added valence to an enthralling argument which goes to the heart of journalistic independence and ethics. – Chris Bateman

By Ed Herbst*

Fifteen years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political conflict; and the memory of the trauma has faded. Some 20 500 people were nevertheless killed between 1984 and 1994. The conventional wisdom is that they died at the hands of a state-backed Third Force, but the more accurate explanation is that they died as a result of the people’s war the ANC unleashed. As the people’s war accelerated from September 1984, intimidation and political killings rapidly accelerated. At the same time, a remarkably effective propaganda campaign put the blame for violence on the National Party government and its alleged Inkatha surrogate. Sympathy for the ANC soared, while its rivals suffered crippling losses in credibility and support. By 1993 the ANC was able to dominate the negotiating process, as well as to control the (undefeated) South African police and army and bend them to its will. By mid-1994 it had trounced its rivals and taken over government. – Anthea Jeffery People’s War – New Light on the Struggle for South Africa (Jonathan Ball 2009).

That hatred has never subsided in Makhanya’s heart. It flavours everything he writes with bile – it laces every word with poison and putridity. – Mangosuthu Buthelezi Prove your lies, Mondli City Press letter 12/11/2017

On 5 November City Press posted an article by Mondli Makhanya headlined No rest for the brutal Buthelezi. Its theme was familiar and it echoed countless ANC attacks on the IFP’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the past as it sought to assert its catastrophic hegemony over our country.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi

I have, as an SABC television news reporter, interviewed Buthelezi at news conferences in the past but I carry no torch for him and have never voted for his political party. I have also, fortuitously, read Anthea Jeffery’s book, The People’s War, a stellar example of scholastic research to which no counter has been produced.

Buthelezi replied to Makhanya’s attack and his letter was carried last week in City Press under the headline Prove your lies, Mondli.

You won’t find this letter on the internet but you will find the original article by Makhanya – which is how successful propaganda works.

If I were to choose two sentences from Buthelezi’s letter it would be these:

Unlike many who received blanket amnesty from the TRC for murder, torture or mayhem, I called on the state to formally charge me if I had committed or orchestrated any criminal act.

Not a single charge was ever brought, for never once had I committed, ordered or condoned any act of violence.

The rest of the letter exposed the dishonesty and hypocrisy of Makhanya’s moral high ground/virtue signalling crusade against Buthelezi.

In short, Makhanya, unlike Buthelezi, was personally involved in the murder of IFP members, the razing of their dwellings and the theft of their possessions and glories in that involvement – yet no mention of this was made in the latest of his many attacks over many years on Buthelezi.

Makhanya has never suggested that the extract from the Anthea Jeffery book which appears below is not true, neither has he sought legal recourse in this regard. His censorship by omission of the extent to which he was conflicted in his City Press article attacking Mangosuthu Buthelezi a fortnight ago, is the propagandist’s stock-in-trade.
Anthea Jeffery’s The People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa

The details of Makhanya’s enthusiastic participation in this murderous mayhem are contained in the foreword of Anthea Jeffery’s book and what you read below is an OCR scan of the relevant section of her book which was published eight years ago.
Introduction

One black journalist, Mondli Makhanya (currently editor of South Africa’s largest newspaper, the Sunday Times) actively participated in a key aspect of the people’s war. Makhanya came from KwaMashu (Durban) and supported the ANC’s internal ally, the United Democratic Front (UDF), in the conflict with lnkatha. Writing in l99l under a pseudonym, Makhanya described his own participation in an incident on 11 February 1990 (the day Mandela was released from prison) in which an approaching lnkatha ‘impi’ was repulsed and the IFP was then routed from a nearby shack settlement. According to Makhanya, ‘the young lions then helped themselves to radios and other valuables left behind’, before setting shacks ablaze. Makhanya himself ‘concentrated on burning shacks’, while other youths ‘finished off wounded lnkatha warriors’, one of whom had his eyes gouged out and his genitals cut off while Makhanya looked on. One injured lnkatha man was dragged down to the township and set alight, and then had rubble piled on him to prevent his escape. Wrote Makhanya: ‘To me he was not a human being – he was an enemy who deserved what he got.’ Looking back on his experience ‘as a warrior’ in Natal, Makhanya added: ‘Nauseating as it all was, l was proud to be part of it. .. I must also admit that I enjoyed the excitement of battle: the sight of a sea of burning shacks and desperate men running for dear life.’

Makhanya’s account suggests that his capacity for objective assessment and reporting might have been eroded via his involvement in the fighting.

Many of the white journalists writing for the commercial or ‘alternative’ English-language press also seemed to suspend their critical faculties, preferring not to probe beneath the surface of the ANC’s perspective on the conflict. In addition, some of them — as they themselves were later to acknowledge — were closet members of the ANC (Howard Barrell) or the SACP (Gavin Evans) or had been recruited to the task of helping raise the ANC’s profile within South Africa (Alan Fine) or were so outraged by the iniquities of National Party rule that they thought ‘journalistic objectivity, . . . in the moral climate of apartheid, was tosh’ (John Carlin).

Moreover, the various alternative newspapers established during the 1980s — particularly the Weekly Mail, New Nation, and Vrye Weekblad were assiduous in shielding the ANC from critical scrutiny of the people’s war and constantly placing the blame for violence elsewhere. This was in keeping with what former Vrye Weekblad editor Max du Preez euphemistically described in 2006 as ‘an old tradition among “progressives” or “the Left” in South Africa to be silent on certain problems . . . if it were judged that speaking out would strengthen the arguments of the “reactionaries” or the “right wing”. In 2007 a disillusioned Du Preez became more outspoken, writing that the ANC had ‘actively supported and encouraged journalists like myself and newspapers like New Nation, Weekly Mail, South, and Vrye Weekblad in the dark days before 1994 to operate as media guerrillas for free speech and democracy’. However, said Du Preez, the ANC’s real objective had not been to strengthen democracy, but ‘merely to undermine their enemy and advance their own cause’.
Greg Marinovich won the Pulitzer Prize for this image entitled ‘Human Torch‘ that he shot in 1990 and shows how brutal the time was.

Such admissions not only understate the important role of the alternative press in assisting the people’s war, but were also not forthcoming in the vital decade preceding April 1994. A few of the key reports on Third-Force violence published by these alternative newspapers were investigated by the Goldstone commission in the early 1990s, and were then shown to be unsubstantiated or devoid of truth. However, findings of this kind had little impact because they were generally downplayed by both the newspapers concerned and the wider press. In addition, such findings were forthcoming only after intensive and time-consuming investigation. Hence, most were released many months after the initial false allegations had been splashed over front pages under banner headlines. Moreover, accusations about the Third-Force role in violence were generally not subjected to critical scrutiny. They passed unchallenged on the whole, helping to reinforce a common wisdom which drew further strength from the fact that both Inkatha and the police were undeniably to blame for a host of attacks and fatalities.

In addition, alternative newspapers with pro-ANC coverage were not only amply endowed with overseas funding, but were also commonly depicted as providing an independent assessment of events. By contrast, when Inkatha in 1987 assumed control of a major Zulu-language newspaper, llanga, the publication was soon dismissed as nothing more than an Inkatha mouthpiece. Among township residents, coercion and intimidation also followed. According to Arthur Konigkramer, managing director of the newspaper, ‘shopkeepers were threatened that their shops would be burnt down if they sold llanga, the lives of llanga staff were threatened and their homes had to be protected by police, and numerous bomb threats were received at Ilanga,…while many people who were caught buying llanga in the townships were actually forced to eat the paper — it was stuffed into their mouths’.

At the same time, the small white liberal community which had always opposed apartheid failed to use its influential position in the press, the universities, and civil society to question or expose the tactics intrinsic to people’s war. Though liberals rejected violence on principle and had always strongly condemned state repression, many found it difficult to take issue with revolutionary excesses for fear of having their anti-apartheid credentials questioned. The result was what Jill Wentzel, in her book The Liberal Slideaway, called the ‘twenty-to-two’ rule. Liberals concerned about necklace executions and other killings found themselves under pressure to preface any criticism with a lengthy and detailed denunciation of apartheid injustice and repression. Only after roughly twenty sentences had been devoted to this topic could two be used to condemn revolutionary violence or question how best to counter it. Wrote Wentzel: ‘lt was like being made to say grace before meals. If you didn’t do it, someone or other would lecture you on how the structural violence of apartheid was the root cause of mob attacks, and how it was necessary to “understand why” they happened. Others would follow suit and say that the only way to end such attacks would be to end apartheid, and the discussion would go no further. And even if you did begin by “saying grace”, the discussion would follow the “twenty-to-two” rule in any case, for every single speaker would be obliged to say grace also.

In closing: Anton Harber has written a typically cogent analysis of contemporary media triumphs and tribulations for Daily Maverick and I wonder what he makes of Mondli Makhanya’s dishonest attack on the IFP’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi. For a journalist – who acknowledges with relish that he has happily involved himself in acts of fatal brutality – to abuse media influence and to accuse a politician of violence when that politician has never had charges laid against him, takes South African journalism to a new low. It is something the country can ill afford. Will the South African National Editor’s Forum (Sanef) an organisation allegedly committed to promoting ethical journalism, continue to maintain its craven silence in the face of yet another example of journalism which is anything but ethical?

Ed Herbst is a retired veteran journalist who writes in his own capacity.

[Cacophonix]

What is the author of this piece trying to imply? That the Buthelezi people (amongst many others) weren't involved in acts of violence during the period running up to the first election? If so I wonder what the hell he is smoking.

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

Don't see him saying that anywhere. However, your response is exactly what he's described.

[Cacophonix]

It is pointless even trying to ascertain what you might be thinking of or what your point is as you seem to have the kind of fixed mind that is prepared to jump to conclusions that aid your own preconceived ideas. Some may call it confirmation bias. I call it it intellectual laziness at best or mental sclerosis at worst.

Whatever the case, I could feel a little sorry for you but don't. Life must be very hard stuck as you are denying aspects of the past, hankering for other bits and blaming everybody else for what is wrong today as you fail to really understand the present too and attempt to regain a past that never really existed.

Did the ANC promulgate violence during that period? Yes. Did the IFP promulgate violence? Yes. Did elements of the security forces aid and abet this process to exacerbate cultural, tribal and political differences to destabilise and alter the transition process prior to 1994? Yes.

Your point is? Who knows!

Enough said!

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

No one came out of that smelling of roses yet you remain in denial about the dodgy dealings of an obviously biased media.

[Cacophonix]

That looks more like one of my landings in a bad x-wind.

Where did I say that most of the media are not slightly biased, some of the time? ALC you are like a digital switch it is either on or off for you. There are no shades of grey apparently (as there don't appear to be to the virtue signalling poephol who wrote that article)!

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

All sides had their moments but on the whole, unless you were Helen Keller or living outside SA, it was noticeable that most of the shit going on was quite obviously stirred up by the ANC/UDF. Conveniently, the reaction was reported and tutted over by the toilets in question while the main instigators of violence went largely unchallenged.

As it turned out, 'liberation' was a handy excuse to coerce handing over the piggy bank to a mob of thieves and thugs. Meanwhile the journos who nudged the whole debacle along continue to tut and wonder why the security situation, economy and pretty much everything in SA handed to the tender mercies of the ANC is spiraling ever closer to the drain.

But hey, as long as the pilferati can keep playing musical gravy troughs who gives a shit, right...?

[Cacophonix]

All sides had their moments but on the whole, unless you were Helen Keller or living outside SA, it was noticeable that most of the shit going on was quite obviously stirred up by the ANC/UDF. Conveniently, the reaction was reported and tutted over by the toilets in question while the main instigators of violence went largely unchallenged.

As it turned out, 'liberation' was a handy excuse to coerce handing over the piggy bank to a mob of thieves and thugs. Meanwhile the journos who nudged the whole debacle along continue to tut and wonder why the security situation, economy and pretty much everything in SA handed to the tender mercies of the ANC is spiraling ever closer to the drain.

But hey, as long as the pilferati can keep playing musical gravy troughs who gives a shit, right...?

Well I care a ***** and so do you (clearly), even if we don't necessarily agree entirely on all points past and present. You see, it will be the current crop of journalists (vide. people like Sam Sole, Jacques Pauw et al) who keep the barrel of political shysters from completely setting the whole ***** house ablaze.

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

Pauw has retired from serious journalism except for the recent last swing at the hollow glitter ball. Doubtful he'll bother getting involved again and to be quite honest, closing the stable door once the horse has disappeared into the sunset is a pretty futile exercise.

What we're left with is a rapidly sinking ship with what remains of the steerage class passengers saying we told you so while the drunken crew pretend they heard nothing and try to blame the collision with the iceberg on those steerage class types in order to curry favour with the passengers along for the free ride. Meanwhile, the steerage class pax being demonised are the ones who have spent the last 20 odd years plugging holes to keep the thing afloat, being below the waterline as they are and the first to get nailed when it all turns to shit.

[Cacophonix]

Pauw has retired from serious journalism except for the recent last swing at the hollow glitter ball. Doubtful he'll bother getting involved again and to be quite honest, closing the stable door once the horse has disappeared into the sunset is a pretty futile exercise.

What we're left with is a rapidly sinking ship with what remains of the steerage class passengers saying we told you so while the drunken crew pretend they heard nothing and try to blame the collision with the iceberg on those steerage class types in order to curry favour with the passengers along for the free ride. Meanwhile, the steerage class pax being demonised are the ones who have spent the last 20 odd years plugging holes to keep the thing afloat, being below the waterline as they are and the first to get nailed when it all turns to shit.

I can't deny that your metaphor is possibly an accurate one, albeit it very depressing one!

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

Zim is an echo of the future. Lot of parallels going on.

[Cacophonix]

Zim is an echo of the future. Lot of parallels going on.

I hope you are wrong as I am currently ploughing money back into a new business in SA and have a son over there who is committed to the country in the long term...

Tis a worrying situation I agree...

Caco

[A Lutra Continua]

Too many parallels, right down to the hero worship by the left and those not at ground zero in the face of all evidence that their heroes have feet of clay.

[Woody]

I think the answer to the question is, unlikely.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-42078707

[Capetonian]

The folk at top rated money manager Allan Gray join the financial dots better than most.

At Biznews we often refer to their graphic of South Africa’s debt-to-GDP ratio – which shows a 45 degree rise, from virtually the same day Jacob Zuma took office.

Allan Gray’s chief investment officer Andrew Lapping did so again during a recent roadshow, this time drawing numbers from Eskom’s own annual reports to expose the extent of the mismanagement at South Africa’s electricity providing monopoly.

Lapping pointed out that in 2003, Eskom employed 32,000 people. Today that number stands at 47,600, up almost 50%.

The average annual salary of each Eskom employee has risen from R220,000 to R785,000 – massively over the inflation rate (R400,000).

But here’s the real crunch.

Eskom’s electricity production is the same as it was in 2003. In other words, today it employs 50% more people and pays them almost double the real wages of 14 years ago.

Yet they deliver the same amount of power. That’s called a productivity meltdown.

No mystery to why taxpayers are expected to keep coughing up billions in bailouts.