What is that smell? The abattoir or something fishy?
Some good news, finally. The Fourth Estate was beginning to smell like an abattoir with so many of the nation’s institutions being dragged out for public scrutiny by, um, other rotting carcasses. But to the good news just dragged out, ironically, by SA’s First Carcass, our self-styled president of radical stuff. Anyway, the news is that the much-regurgitated Expropriation Bill has been returned to Parliament on the grounds of insufficient public participation.
The bill is intended to replace the Expropriation Act of 1975, which contradicts the Constitution, particularly in that it limits expropriation to serving a public purpose. It now includes provision for expropriation in the public interest, in line with the Constitution, expressly to allow land reform. If the bill helped to fill in this policy-bending money pit, it could be a good law.
But why has First Carcass sent the thing back? The bill ticks all the boxes, doesn’t it? First, it irritates certain white people, which can be a plus, especially if it includes the land-owning rent seekers who shall take collective responsibility for everything. Second, it opens the expropriation party to all manner of radical stuff, including movable goods, such as your Benz-andBreitling combo. Who knows which of your favourite things would have to be commandeered by a clerk in the volatile future of public interest?
No one buys the public-participation line. It sounds like an executive afterthought. Something else is afoot.
Not to gratuitously introduce fishing into this column, but stalling the Expropriation Bill is beginning to smell like a red herring. If we backtracked the fishy smell to its origin, we’ll find ourselves at the debate on the state of the nation address, during which Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti said the government had to start expropriating land without compensation. This is far easier to do under the 1975 law than under the new bill, and it comes with the bonus of executive indignation about the inadequacies of Parliament.
Always the money. That is, the money SA no longer has (see overdraft in this week’s national budget) and the failed land-reform money pit. If something isn’t done fast, there will be nothing left to loot. Who knew?
Backtracking smoked fish could become a thing. Take the fishy banking scandal. At least one person (name withheld) known to this columnist agrees that the coincidence of collusion charges in forex trading against a slew of banks emerging so soon after the First Carcass’s spat with the nation’s lenders (aka white monopoly capital) over his pals’ dodgy ways is just too rich to be palatable.
Journalistically speaking, though, there must be a counterpoint to the narrative, and it is this: South Africans tend to forget that whenever some outrage or the other enters public life, we walk upside down; normal here is abnormal elsewhere; we are down the rabbit hole.
Literary nonsense does not begin to describe how the lies and deceit and dark political machinations are messing with the nation’s collective head.
We may never know how badly the alleged collusion in forex trading damaged the economy. Or why, with all the money and power at the state’s disposal, every black citizen is not on the land, hacking away at the unforgiving soil. Nkwinti’s cadastral survey is not helpful either. It does list land ownership by race, but the cold numbers do not reveal who farms stones at Middelpos or who owns a sugar-cane farm in Mpumalanga.
Ours is an upside-down land because our radical president thinks he is the government and the government thinks it is the state and, thus, the president thinks he is the state. Begging the question, yes, but in upside-down land dismissing fallacious arguments is redundant.
But it is upside down by design. The design is the ANC’s pseudo-leftist appropriation model underpinned by official state racism. It smells bad and journos love it, but that will not stop the zombie army from appropriating land, mines, water, banks, the lot, black-owned or white, communal or private.
Tsotsis are nonracist equal-opportunity thieves and they won’t stop until it is all gone. Perhaps the news is not so good after all.
Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write.
LITERARY NONSENSE CAN’T DESCRIBE HOW THE LIES AND DECEIT AND POLITICAL MACHINATIONS ARE MESSING WITH THE NATION’S HEAD