WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-02-03 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
[This is from a recent TAU bulletin. I like the reference to the Eskom power blackouts as the ANC’s Waterloo. Nice! It has definitely had a huge impact. Whites are stockpiling much more than we did in 1994. Jan]
The past few weeks of daily power failures and blackouts in South Africa have indeed become the SA government’s Waterloo, or to use a popular South African political term, its Rubicon. This catastrophe elicited the attention of the world’s news media which termed it a power “emergency”. Eskom, South Africa’s power monopoly, fumbled and failed, and the consequences were devastating.
Electricity is the great equalizer. It’s either here or it’s not. Obfuscation, referring matters to committees, stating the problem is sub-judice or simply ignoring phone enquiries may have worked until now with other problems besetting the country, but these excuses can no longer be used to fob off a now-enraged South African public. The TV actuality show Carte Blanche’s coverage of the fiasco elicited far more response than any other program in the network’s recent history as hundreds of thousands of viewers registered their disgust and anger. Other websites set up by concerned groups received thousands of hits within hours.
There isn’t anyone who was not affected by the calamitous electricity blackouts that temporarily closed down the country’s mining industry which was stricken with losses of R193 million a day. On January 28, some mines had entered their fourth day without enough electricity to work underground.
SURPRISING
It is surprising that many are surprised at the latest South African debacle – electricity “load shedding”, a euphemism for blackouts. This latest shambles is surely part of a trend so obvious over the past few years as infrastructure crumbled, productive farms became squatter camps, lavish salaries ate into budgets (Eskom’s top brass has been paid a total of R157 million over the past three years), and municipalities became the black sheep of governmental structures in South Africa.
Perhaps it is time to cease dancing around the crux of the problem – forward planning and preventative maintenance are Western concepts and have never been generic to Africa. But subsistence thinking and practice are: Martin Meredith’s recent book The State of Africa – A History of Fifty Years of Independence reveals in depressing clarity that “no other area of the world arouses such a sense of foreboding, and few states have managed to escape the downward spiral”.
The ills of South Africa’s power provider are mirror images of what has happened in sub-Saharan Africa since the end of colonialism. Not only has little emerged to show that the populations built on that legacy, but that what remained after the European powers left has fallen into disrepair and decay. This is evidence not only of a subsistence mentality, but in some cases a destructive one. This mindset does not plan ahead, and does not maintain. One can see this now in South Africa – the decay, the peeling paint, the broken pipes, the government buildings going to seed, our Defence Force structures plundered, our roads, hospitals and schools deteriorating, our farmland eroding, our cities sliding into slums and crime nests. Why would Eskom escape the trend?
Dictionaries define “maintain” inter alia as “keeping unimpaired or in proper condition”. This means fixing before it breaks, not afterwards. Thus, to maintain means to look ahead, to foresee problems rather than have to confront them when they arrive. Generally, South Africa’s African languages do not embrace a concept of maintenance – a Zulu dictionary defines “to maintain” as keeping a standard, or the government must maintain the roads. This implies that someone else must maintain. In Venda and Tswana, for example, the concept of maintenance is foreign. There are words to repair things, but this only after something is broken.
Machinery, industrial and electronic equipment necessary to keep up with an industrial age are symptoms of colonial and settler cultures. Industry never evolved in Africa, it was not a generic development, it was brought to Africa by people of other continents. Thus, to maintain, to plan forward, to understand maths and physics and to possess the engineering skills needed to keep a modern first world system functioning are not generic to Africa. If they were, Africa would have evolved along with everyone else.
FARMS
This is the basis of the tragedy surrounding the handover of South Africa’s productive farms to third world people to whom commercial farming, with its complicated functions and sophisticated methods, is in many respects a foreign concept. Former productive farms are still collapsing, despite empirical evidence that the government’s land “reform” process is an abject failure. A recent Business Day report makes distressing but predictable reading:
“If all white farmers’ fears, resentment and prophecies of doom about land reform by SA’s black majority government could be reduced to the fate of one district, it would be that which befell Trichardtsdal in the Limpopo lowveld. Here in this tropical fruit farming community lie the ruins of what once held the hopes and dreams of those aiming to subject the anarchic Bushveld to modernity and agricultural enterprise. On now deserted farms transferred to land claims beneficiaries between five and two years ago, we found scene after scene of destruction. These were not farms where production had simply been halted as a consequence of land claims and where neglect had taken its toll – these farms had been destroyed beyond redemption. They are now perhaps fit only to be returned to the era before the eradication of malaria and the tsetse opened up the lowveld to agriculture on a scale and productivity unmatched anywhere in the country”.
The report talks not only of decline but vandalism, destruction, theft and decay. It is a shocking report, but not shocking to those who know what happens when some third world components of South Africa are allowed to take control of the country’s first world assets. Warnings by commercial agriculture over the years have fallen on deaf ears – the country seemed to believe that the availability of cheap and beautiful fresh produce seen daily in our supermarkets would go on forever.
But Eskom’s power failure has put an end to that. Now South Africa is looking at why the lights went out, and is demanding that those qualified people who were cast aside when the new government took over be brought back to salvage what is salvageable, before our country’s infrastructure indeed sinks into what the Business Day journalists call a situation “beyond redemption”. (Much of the press which so unctuously punted the coming to power of the current government is now infuriated at the current state of affairs.)
Martin Meredith’s book confirms the above trend. In country after country, the pattern was the same. Euphoria with independence, the world’s cognoscenti applauding the new freedom, soon followed by the centralization of power, subversion of the judiciary, corruption, plundering of state assets, the collapse of infrastructure, the foreign aid, then wars over the shrinking economic cake.
It was all so predictable, and what has happened to Eskom bears all the hallmarks of this trend – the huge self-awarded salaries, the total lack of shame at taking those salaries while the system collapsed, the blithe neglect of forward planning and timely warnings, and the blatant lack of accountability to taxpayers who pay the salaries of the new elite, many of whom believe South Africa and its assets are theirs for the taking. The trends in Africa so visibly and grotesquely detailed by Meredith are now becoming part and parcel of South Africa.
It’s time to take back the function of keeping South Africa on the rails. Otherwise we will indeed be “beyond redemption”.