[A-List] South Africa: ANC rightward lurch

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

ANC in flux after purge by Mbeki

Rory Carroll in Johannesburg
Tuesday November 26, 2002
The Guardian

South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, has purged rebellious members of the
African National Congress who were accused of plotting a leftwing challenge
to his leadership and turning Eastern Cape into a "political disaster area".

The ANC's national executive annulled the results of provincial party
elections in Eastern Cape amid reports that corruption and mismanagement
were pushing one of the country's poorest provinces to the brink of
collapse.

The crackdown has thrown the spotlight on long-running personal rivalries
and ideological tensions bedevilling the party's effort to deliver improved
services to poor South Africans eight years after it took over from the
apartheid regime.

As an ANC stronghold which spawned Mr Mbeki, Nelson Mandela and Oliver
Tambo, Eastern Cape is turning into a scar on its record in office, with
tales of incompetence and graft emerging weekly.

A delegation from the ANC's national executive travelled to the province
last weekend to enforce the annulment of the results of the party's Eastern
Cape election on the grounds of irregularities in the vote. Until fresh
elections are held next year the province will be ruled by the outgoing ANC
administration.

The national leadership was known to be impatient with the provincial
premier, Makhenkesi Stofile, for failing to sack officials accused of
milking their jobs for personal gain or not doing their jobs at all.

In a survey by the public service accountability monitor, almost half of
Eastern Cape government officials said it was "not wrong" or "wrong but
understandable" for them to accept gifts from the public in return for
services.

Mr Mbeki's crackdown has been portrayed as an attempt to crush the
movement's left wing, which is suspected of planning to challenge several of
his allies at next month's ANC conference.

Eastern Cape is a stronghold of the Communist party and trade unions -
alliance partners of the ANC - and will send the largest delegation to the
conference.

-----

Radio Pretoria rallies supremacists

Afrikaner middle class embraces a new, more dangerous sense of nationalism

Rory Carroll in Pretoria
Tuesday November 26, 2002
The Guardian

Asun-dappled morning breaks over Braam Pretorius street, a picture of leafy
serenity, and the white-only staff of Radio Pretoria turn on the microphones
for another day of vocal resistance to the new South Africa.

"There is a storm out there. Our culture is under attack. We're expected to
speak only bloody English. Things are going to have to change," said the
station manager, Jaap Diedericks.

With its Boer flags and portraits of victories over the Zulus the studio
resembles an Afrikaner museum, but Mr Diedericks believes Radio Pretoria is
about the politics of the future, not nostalgia.

A regime of black "racialists" is uprooting the language, the wealth and the
freedom of those who found empty veld and built a first world country, he
said. Everything they and their ancestors worked for risks being blown away
in the rainbow nation.

In such times it is right that each day's broadcast starts with Christian
prayer. God will provide, one day, but meantime the Afrikaner must defend
himself as best he can. Eight years after history's lid closed over
apartheid the dreams and fears of the Boers are back on South Africa's
political agenda. A spate of bombings has been blamed on militant whites who
allegedly want to stir a race war and overthrow the government.

Arms caches

The police have found several arms caches and a dozen suspected ringleaders
are due to go on trial next year, but many think the terror is just
starting. Last weekend a bomb exploded in a hangar full of police aircraft.

Security analysts put the odds of a successful coup as zero, the state being
too strong, the plotters too weak, but mayhem and racial tension are
possibilities.

Deepening the unease is the sense that the bombers, however few and
isolated, are drawing on a well of Afrikaner resentment shared by farmers,
liberal intellectuals and business executives.

While the police try to anticipate the next attack, President Thabo Mbeki
and his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, have recently sat down with rightwing
white politicians to ask, with a sense of urgency, what do Boers want?

Tuning into 104.2 FM provides some answers. The Afrikaner-language Radio
Pretoria has an official listenership of 110,000 but claims the real figure
is six times higher. It aims to nourish the striving for freedom and
self-determination by promoting a Christian-Protestant European heritage.

When the apartheid-era version of the national anthem, Die Stem , fades the
newsreaders, chat-show hosts and phone-in listeners talk of persecution by
the democratically elected "regime". Namibia is often referred to as South
West Africa and Zimbabwe as Rhodesia.

Their own country throws up questions: is Aids the solution to black
population growth? Should farmers keep illegal guns to deter robbers? Where
is the safest place to ramble with the kids? How do you get a visa to
emigrate to Australia?

Seldom do you hear that since 1994 whites have retained the vast bulk of the
country's wealth and that "black empowerment" schemes to balance the
ownership of resources have faltered.

"We don't want to go back to apartheid, we want more say in a real, new
South Africa that accommodates all our differences. We're the people with
experience in running a modern state but the government just milks us as
taxpayers," said Mr Diedericks.

Hankering for lost status was part of the resentment, he admitted, but most
came from the erosion of the Afrikaans language in schools and public life,
the deterioration of hospitals and services, the affirmative action which
denied jobs to whites, and the crime.

The solution was a 10th province for whites only in the old Transvaal and
Free State republics. The constitution allowed for self-determination so
peaceful pressure, such as economic sanctions, would hopefully be enough,
said Mr Diedericks.

Coup plotters

Many listeners sympathised with the alleged coup plotters but considered
their strategy ridiculous and counter-productive, he added. "The black
leaders waiting to take over from Mbeki and Mandela are more radical.
Violence against whites will increase because the blacks aren't controlling
their racial feelings whereas we are controlling ours.

"Even so, we weathered the English storm and we will weather this one. We
are the most successful white tribe in Africa," said the station manager.

For the first time since the 1930s, it is now common to see whites begging
at road junctions. After a rocky start Orania, an Afrikaner enclave on the
rim of the Karoo desert, is reporting a surge in applications of people
wanting to move there.

Boer intellectuals also warn of alienation. Liberal academics recently
formed a new organisation, the Group of 63, to promote Afrikaner culture and
involvement in public life. Despite rejecting violence some of the academics
were named by the alleged coup plotters as potential cabinet ministers,
according to police.

A draft copy of a report to be published this week by the Pretoria-based
Institute of Security Studies suggests the new militants are very different
from the redneck bluster of Eugene Terre'Blanche's AWB, a force in the early
1990s.

"The new guys are middle class and intellectuals. They are doctors,
engineers, senior military officers," said Henri Boshoff, one of the
report's co-authors. "They are not personally losing out in the new South
Africa but have grievances over what they see as an attack on their
language, culture and identity. In that sense I would compare them to the
terrorists of Eta in Spain."

They may number less than 1,200 and will not overthrow the state but have
the military training and organisation to commit atrocities. "I reckon they
will be around for at least a few years."