MANTHORPE:
PROBLEMS FOR SOUTH AFRICA
The last time I saw South Africa’s white supremacist leader Eugène Terre’Blanche was one fresh morning early in 1993 when he and his black- clad bodyguards galloped on spirited horses into the square in front of the city hall in the administrative capital, Pretoria.
But slippery cobblestones took either Terre’Blanche or his frisky white stallion by surprise. Terre’Blanche with his fierce, jutting white beard and trademark Afrika Korps khaki uniform was almost dumped ignominiously onto the street.
“Gene’s been at the brandy already,” said a man standing near me, evidently a supporter of Terre’Blanche’s white separatist Afrikaner Resistance Movement, known by its Afrikaner initials AWB.
As post- apartheid South Africa approached in those months with a deal between President F. W. de Klerk and the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela to create a non- racial political dispensation, there was indeed a comic opera aspect to Terre’Blanche and his diehard followers.
But many believed the AWB’s neo- Nazi instincts, fanaticism and determination to carve a white homeland out of the new South Africa in one of the black “bantustans,” Bophuthatswana, was a real danger.
However, that endeavour came to a very public and ignominious end early in 1994 when the AWB’s attempted invasion of Bophuthatswana was halted by a single black policeman who shot three of Terre’Blanche’s followers to death.
The whole sorry episode was captured on video and played repeatedly on television.
The sight of these Afrikaners, whose ancestors had fought the British Empire to a standstill in the Boer Wars, dying on the road at the feet of a single black policeman was a potent but brutal snapshot of a world that had changed.
Nearly 20 years later, there has in the last few days been a bleak coincidence of events that present a picture of the successes and failures of those decades.
On Wednesday, the man who murdered Terre’Blanche in April 2010, one of his farm workers Chris Mahlangu, was sentenced to life in prison.
On the same day, South African President Jacob Zuma announced a judicial inquiry into the killing of 44 people in violence during a strike at the Marikana platinum mine owned by the veteran African resource company Lonmin. The death toll included 34 strikers mowed down in volleys of police fire, the likes of which has not been seen in South Africa since the height of the anti- apartheid movement.
And all this has for the moment distracted attention from a major longterm National Development Plan produced by former finance minister and head of a 25- member National Planning Commission Trevor Manuel.
The report catalogues the failures of the last 20 years, especially the growing disparity between rich and poor, and charts a course out of South Africa’s gathering storm of troubles.
The court at Ventersdorp, 120 kilometres west of Johannesburg, trying Mahlangu heard that it was a dispute over wages, not race, that sparked the murder of Terre’Blanche, who was bludgeoned with a metal pipe and finished off with a machete, known locally as a panga.
The labour dispute at the Marikana mine, which is threatening to spread throughout South Africa’s key resource industries as the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union gains influence, is also about money and disparity.
The rock drillers in the mine earn the equivalent of $ 478 a month while the mine’s CEO gets $ 120,000 a month and even the general secretary of the establishment- oriented National Union of Mineworkers gets $ 167,548 a year.
A World Bank report in July focused on the persistent inequality in South Africa since the end of apartheid.
“At the heart of the inequality lies the inability to create employment opportunities on a large enough scale,” said the bank report.
The report and plan by Manuel’s group goes further and says income disparities, together with national unemployment conservatively estimated at 25 per cent, must be confronted or there will be chaos.
South Africa needs to maintain an economic growth rate of at least 5.5 per cent a year — it’s now 2.5 per cent — and to create 11 million jobs in the next 18 years, says the Manuel group.
To this end, the government must focus on investment in 13 areas, says the plan, especially education, childhood nutrition, transportation, housing and services like clean water, electricity and sanitation.
As finance minister, Manuel has been a pillar of stability and continuity in South Africa during the transition. But there are questions now whether the ruling ANC, which is increasing plagued by internal squabbles, has the will to follow the road map set out by Manuel and his team.
The fear is that if the mainstream ANC does not tackle the country’s problems it will give an opening, as it has in the past, to extremists.
High on the list of threats is the charismatic and militant Julius Malema, in some ways the reverse side of the Terre’Blanche coin, who has been expelled from the leadership of the ANC Youth League because of his vitriolic anti- white speeches, but who remains very popular among young unemployed South Africans.