Submitted by Adriana Stuijt

‘GATVOL’ — headline of a hardhitting criticism of the Mbeki-regime in a top Dutch opinion weekly

August 10 2007 — THE HAGUE, The Netherlands. One of the most critical articles of the Mbeki-regime yet published in the Netherlands was issued this week in the Haagse Post/De Tijd, a widely-read opinion weekly in the Dutch capital city.

Its headline reads: “Gatvol – the ANC’s South Africa: racism, corruption, violence, unemployment”.

It starts off with the sentence, ‘ life under the ANC in South Africa is no joke, and many of its top-educated people are leaving. However, as long as the ANC can capitalise on its ‘freedom fighting glories’ of the past, it can stay in power.’The article is not yet made available its archives on the internet.

http://www.hpdetijd.nl

The no-holds-barred article by Dutch journalist Willem Talis pulls no punches. I quote just a few paragraphs from it to illustrate the point:

He wrote for instance:

“In The Netherlands, preferential treatment over one specific population group over another, is totally illegal.

“In South Africa it has been raised to a standard to strive for.

“No country on earth places such an over-emphasis on race.

“Indeed the ANC-government knowns within the decimal point exactly how the racial balances are situated in every facet of their society.

“As far as that particular subject is concerned therefore, nothing has changed at all under black-majority rule’. (since apartheid).

“And whenever his regime is criticised, the president simply has made it the habit of pulling out the ‘race card’.”

The article also describes detailed examples of why and how all the old struggle-era ANC-comrade-executives are turning themselves into dollar-millionaires practically overnight, and how they will always publicly hail and support each other as heroes even when they have been caught in criminal acts

“The first signs of (this) moral corruption started becoming visible in 1997 – the ANC had been in power about three years when reverend Allan Boesak was accused of stealing money which had been collected to help apartheid-victims.

“Upon Boesak’s return from the USA, he was awaited at Johannesburg airport by the then-minister of Justice – not to personally clap him into handcuffs, but to pay homage and honour to this former leader in the anti-apartheid struggle.”

“When Boesak was tried and imprisoned for fraud, he was accompanied there by supporters raising him high onto their shoulders; he was released from jail early and President Thabo Mbeki gave him amnesty personally.
“Soon it became clearly evident: the comrades from the freedom-struggle could do no wrong”.

“After the takeover of SA’s governance by the ANC-government, they also launched a massive social-engineering scheme, during which qualified, experienced white officials were dumped at a huge scale. The downside of this campaign was that huge numbers of these open posts were filled with inexperienced blacks, also in the judiciary, and that the new managers gave themselves lavish salaries often hundreds of times more than the minimum-wage scale”.

“The ANC also enriched its election funds with donations from a mining magnate who has since then been conveniently murdered, and stubbornly refused to refund these illegal donations. Earlier, the ANC had also earned 1,5-million Euros from illegal oil-deals with the Saddam Hussein-regime.’

“Companies are only given government or private-company tenders such as from banks if they have black partners. An annual 6,000 new ‘dollar-millionaires’ are being created in South Africa now. (…) the ANC’s official spokesman Smuts Ngonyama summed up this new order in a most meaningful way, saying: “We (the freedom fighters) did not fight to remain poor.”

The article continues:

“ANC-fat cats are only there for one reason: to enrich themselves, and they measure their status by owning expensive BMW’s, imposing homes, extravagant lifestyles and the number of security guards they surround themselves with. (…)

“Meanwhile more people now live in hovels than ever did a decennium ago (during apartheid) and the gap between rich and poor has grown even more.

“The ANC is the government and vice-versa. The division which is supposed to exist between politics and big differences is disappearing more each day.”

The article concludes: “nearly everybody here in South Africa now feels that it’s time to end all those nice words about improvements, and an end with a president who claims that he knew nobody who had died of Aids; and who announces that the crime-epidemic mainly is a queston of ‘perception’.

A president who has for years already maintained the myth that ‘quiet diplomacy’ with neighbouring Zimbabwe is the only way to solve the chaos caused by dictator Mugabe.’

“In short, many people are ‘gatvol’ – to use a flexible Afrikaans term (for this pervasive feeling) .’

http://www.hpdetijd.nl