South Africa's history is a tale of profound injustice, often untold. It's a narrative of state-sponsored land confiscation from Indigenous people, a story of wars fought over land dispossession and its defence. The basis of commerce is the state's use of land as a resource for development, which was unjustly taken from its rightful owners.
In its quest to forge nationhood between conquerors and the conquered, South Africa has been working on a project to expect those with a conqueror mindset to voluntarily surrender the spoils of the conquest without a post-war treaty. The ANC-National Party accord, which preceded the CODESA negotiations and the 1994-1996 legally mandated constituent assembly, remains the only agreement with the force of a post-war treaty. It justifies South Africa's belief that it operates in a peaceful settlement firmament.
The 1996 Constitution, the outcome of the constituent assembly, places a weighty obligation on the state. It must act in the interests of all citizens, even when those interests conflict. The Constitution mandates respect, protection, promotion, and fulfilment of the Bill of Rights, a crucial step towards recognising past injustices and healing the divisions they've caused.
As society grows into newfound freedoms, tension between those who became land-dispossession-created landowners and those who became landless from the same process is inevitable. Land dispossessors' knowledge, skill, and experience are in such near memory that their opposition to development-driven expropriation is informed by what they know they had done within a similar context. They oppose what they would have done with the Expropriation Act as they imagine or believe others could do the same.
The basis of global racism is traced to spatial manipulation through the use of land expropriation and gentrification. Genocides or 'smallpox pandemics' have all been associated with dispossessing those who die of the resultant empty spaces. Already, Gaza is poised to be a candidate for purchase; it will be a property on a title deed with a person's name that does not include the facts of here also lies the mortal remains of unburied owners of the land.
The science and practice of land development objectives-based rearrangement of spatial planning requires the legal power to expropriate with reasonable compensation. This is international practice. The civility of this practice includes extensive negotiation with the title deed owner, irrespective of the history of the deed of ownership. The point of expropriation is often preceded by intransigence and rarely the arbitrary prerogatives of rogue political thinking associated with regimes along the continuum of apartheid and authoritarianism.
Equality
as a founding provision of South Africa's constitutional order was never going
to be easy in a society whose accumulated resources were based on state-sponsored and racism-inspired inequality engineering. For equality to happen it would call for regstellende
interventions. Correcting the demographic inequalities within a human rights-based
democracy would prolong the execution of the assignment. Unlike where
regstelling to deal with the 'poor white problem', sanctioned by laws that are
now part of the global criminal complex against humanity, in some instances
genocidal in character, the management of a post-apartheid equality
establishment program requires less of ethnonationalism victimhood. The term
'genocidal in character' here refers to actions or policies that resemble those
of genocide, a serious crime under international law.
It might be true that affirmative action works when a minority is persecuted. However, the RSA version deals with conditions where a conquest mentality requires attention to make the founding provision of establishing RSA to be legally realised if not enforced. To this effect, equality and non-racialism believing South African leaders ought to know that what a Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu axis represents is not a guide to a social and economic justice-based coexistence of humanity. It is, in fact, a manifestation of a socialisation process whose intent can only be racial purity and white supremacy of Goebel's vocabulary.
The
incapability of the state, misguided cadre deployment, corruption and state
capture, and a public service that loyally executed unlawful policies has, over
the past thirty years, played into the hands of an otherwise black government mistrusting
constituency of the country. A theme of racial supremacy and mistrust of a
black government, woven throughout South Africa's history, developed into a
funded endeavour to institutionalise fear of non-racial coexistence and
equality. Fear or distaste of a non-racial democracy, disguised as a manufactured Afrikaner victimhood is the anti-thesis of what ... screamed at the Landrost office in Stellenbosch. This 'funded endeavour' refers to the deliberate financial support
for initiatives that perpetuate racial fear and inequality, thereby hindering
the progress towards a non-racial society.
The
comfort of blaming corruption and state capture to shield racism is no longer
sustainable. Race supremacists in society cannot and should not be allowed to
keep on justifying the myth of a possible single-race governed world in South
Africa. In the unlikely event of it being allowed, the country would have
abdicated responsibility for changing the outcomes of our country's worst-ever criminal social engineering project, apartheid. The spin is starting to blame political
parties and their leaders rather than systems and templates of dominance
anchored on conqueror mindsets.
The resilience of RSA
racism and economic exclusion is a function of a meticulous and socially engineered dominance of one race by another. The trumping of fragile
nationhood to defend South Africa's current disproportionate living standards
under the guise of a race-defined self-determination program anchored on
ethnonationalism is a risky endeavour, even for the worst mavericks.
Endangering an economy the majority are not part of, as we experienced in July
2021, can only take all of us into the abyss and accelerate discontent to reach a breaking point.
What our fellow South Africans, those living the benefits of dispossession, have done is to demonstrate that they have not realised the depth of the forgiveness they got without having proffered an apology for the criminal acts of colonialism and apartheid. While South Africa expected a commitment to the rule of law, which has made our democracy hold thus far, the response to a legal and constitution-anchored expropriation act can only amount to a nation that lives in a culture that circulates relentless messages of racial superiority and a disdain to genuinely recognise the injustices of the past.
Some
have gone to levels where anyone that challenges their racialised worldviews,
and acutely, the mistrust of a black government, as a challenge to their
conveniently crafted identities as good and moral people. The truth is that the
funded fear and somewhat sustained fragility of sections of racial communities
organised against racial integration and non-racialism is born out of racial superiority-inspired
entitlement.
What
is unfortunate for such organised formations or secret societies is that in RSA,
racism and all its manifestations are illegal and an affront to the founding
provisions of the supreme law of the country. Unlike in other countries where
affluence and racism can congregate because of systems that are meant to
support everyone engaged in the perpetuation of racism, in RSA, it is a
declared intention of the state to eliminate any system or template designed to
make racism work.
The recent executive
order by the USA's Trump administration to sanction South Africa and start a
process of redefining trade and related relations should be seen against this
backdrop. Plausible as it is, the disclaimer and declaration of not knowing who
masterminded the disinformation that RSA is confiscating land and private
properties of minorities, there is growing evidence that there is a non-aligned
and loosely organised group of disgruntled persons that has fuelled the
disinformation.
The managed or
choreographed disclaimers, the taking up of the opportunity to challenge
restitution policies of the post-apartheid state, the brazen declaration of
legally arrived at economic empowerment and affirmative action policies, and
the exploiting of the chance to challenge the crime against humanity narrative
against apartheid and its land dispossession consequence is cause for concern.
The commitment to South Africa, which belongs to all who live in it, has,
during this period, suffered a significant knock, if not a reversal.
The declaration of
Julius Malema as an international person of interest to be isolated opens a
loophole to pigeonhole several others who would openly advocate against US
interference in an otherwise domestic matter, save for scaling the global
racism agenda to go beyond borders. The script and scenario for RSA's role in
the ICC case against Israel are now generated to guide multiple actions in an
unfolding high-stakes geopolitical battle. South Africa needs to reframe its
response accordingly and gain clarity, regain its balance, develop new options,
and find new strategies to save itself against a multiple onslaught to its
democratic order and what it stands for. Only in RSA would Afrikaners live and survive; other ethnic groups around them have no history of cross-racial genocide.
The idea that RSA sees itself as a darling of the world or the custodian of the best Constitution makes it a formidable world capital city of legal non-racialism. However, RSA needs to have a dialogue with itself and make long-term decisions. A local right-wing lobby is liquidating the basis of our nationhood.
The time for sober leadership
has arrived in RSA. The agenda of the National Dialogue is writing itself. Not only are dysfunctions in the governance of social and economic justice the drivers of the National Dialogue idea, the brazenness of responses by the Afriforum and Solidarity is a catalyst to the evolving necessity for a National
Dialogue. South Africa urgently needs a social compact. Muscle flexing by all
parties in a context where RSA has real geopolitical and diplomatic tiffs with
the USA and its essential ally, Israel, is unnecessary. The declaration of the
GAZA War as genocidal and how Israel treats Palestinians as apartheid, and thus
a crime against humanity, and at the behest of RSA, is a complexity the
National Dialogue will have to deal with.
After all is said and done, we are all Africans. We owe our being to this land. We constitute the human presence that completes its beauty. Like Hendrik Biebouw, we will not walk away. No superpower bullying should make us surrender to the crime of racism we have defeated. We must refuse to be silent. CUT!!!
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