This article appears in the January 12, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

STRATEGIC BACKGROUND

Post-Election South Africa:
Close Combat Over the
New Economic Paradigm

by David Cherry, R.P. Tsokolibane, and M.M. Maxongo

[Print version of this article]

Do not underestimate the power of the BRICS bloc and the change in the balance of world power that it represents. Especially for Africa, BRICS represents the first major opportunity in centuries to break the grip of colonialism and post-colonial oppression for the continent. Jacob Zuma understands that, and the West is none too happy about it either.

                                               —Gayton McKenzie,
                           black South African millionaire,
                                                     December 2017

Jan. 9—South Africa is the only African country with a full-set industrial economy. South Africa is crucial for the future of Africa, and the future of Africa is vital to the future of the world. No wonder, then, that South Africa is an important arena in the worldwide struggle between the British empire of money and the China-inspired drive for universal industrialization.

It was South Africa’s President, Jacob Zuma, who vigorously campaigned for South Africa to be included in BRICS—the brainchild of China and Russia—and later insisted that the BRICS’ New Development Bank open a branch in Johannesburg. This year, 2018, South Africa again chairs the BRICS, as it did in 2013.

View full size Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Ramaphosa opponent.

Another South African, Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as head of the African Union (AU), 2012-2016, took bold leadership in laying plans for the industrial and cultural development of all Africa called Agenda 2063, especially with the cooperation of China. Those plans include, for example, the development of a continent-wide network of high-speed railways, plans that are now being elaborated by a technical unit of the AU in Johannesburg. And a Chinese company has now committed itself to building a new iron and steel complex in South Africa, vital for Africa’s development, and is investing $3.2 billion in this complex. No one in London or New York is interested in large investments in the basics of agro-industrial development in Africa.

The contending forces—for and against Africa’s agro-industrial development—are visibly active in South Africa, and never more so than in the mid-December election within the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC, in power since the transition to majority rule in 1994, is divided between leaders who look to China’s successful economic model—the New Economic Paradigm—and to the BRICS, to achieve major advances in infrastructural, agricultural, and industrial development, and improvements in the welfare of the entire people, on the one hand, and other leaders who suffer from a well-known delusion. We mean the delusion that the generous, kind, and honest financiers in London and New York, and their junior counterparts in South Africa, are their friends, and wish nothing but the best for South Africa—or at least, that they are the usual victors and the source of the best patronage in the long run.

View full size Credit: Government of South Africa/GCIS South African President Jacob Zuma (left) and Cyril Ramaphosa, newly elected president of the ruling African National Congress party (right).

The mechanics of the ANC’s elections are part of the necessary background. In the mid-December election, as reported in EIR’s Jan. 6 issue, the ANC elected a new president and a new, 86-person National Executive Committee (NEC), the party’s ruling body. The party president then becomes its candidate for President of South Africa, in a national election that takes place a year later. That means the incumbent President of the country (also from the ANC, so far) may finish his or her term while the new party president and possible successor holds power in the party.

In December, the ANC suffered the misfortune of narrowly electing Cyril Ramaphosa of the Colonial faction as its president. But the newly elected NEC is slightly tilted toward the Look East faction led by Ramaphosa’s opponent, Dr. Dlamini-Zuma, mentioned above. And the new Secretary General—a powerful position—is Ace Magashule, also of the Look East faction.

The national electoral conference also adopted the Look East faction’s program of Radical Economic Transformation, which emphasizes free post-high school education for all qualifying poor and working class students, nationalizing the central bank to bring interest rates down, and enabling the government to ensure that the land is being used productively, with power to confiscate land without compensation. These objectives are in line with the ANC’s historic program.

View full size Credit: CC/Szekszter Johann Rupert, one of Ramaphosa’s backers.

Ramaphosa’s London-oriented backers—including the Oppenheimers, Ruperts, and Menells—have been insisting that he must help them to immediately oust President Jacob Zuma, who looks east, and put in one of their own as interim President for the remainder of Zuma’s term. When that extraordinary step was taken against President Thabo Mbeki in 2008, it badly split the party, and would almost certainly split it again now, and in the process, deny the ANC a majority in the national presidential election in 2019. A truce between the factions, to forestall any such split, was still in place at the time of writing, but the NEC is expected to deliberate on what it wants Ramaphosa to do, when it meets on January 10. Will Zuma, or will Ramaphosa, give the State of the Nation Address on February 8? This is how it looks at ground level in South Africa.

We repeat: South Africa is an important arena in a worldwide fight between two systems—it’s either the dying British empire of money, or China’s offer to share the methods of its own dramatic economic success with the rest of the world for a win-win result. There is no way to understand what is going on in South Africa without recognizing it. Indeed, the inner councils of the City of London and its Wall Street sideshow have been aware, for at least three decades, that they are no longer able to rule South Africa, and more recently, that proposition has been true for Africa generally. But the British oligarchs cannot accept that Africa should rule Africa, because it would likely become a great power. When Dlamini-Zuma wrote her “Email from the Future” in 2014 while she was African Union Commission chairwoman, she described the Africa of 2063 as a great power. For the oligarchs, therefore, it were better if Africa and South Africa did not exist.

For this reason, the same financial empire that sought a South African bloodbath in 1990—prevented only by Nelson Mandela—has ever since been taking steps to degrade South Africa to ungovernability and chaos, while keeping some window dressing in place to conceal the intention. It aims to derail the efforts of President Jacob Zuma, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and China’s President Xi Jinping, to make of South Africa the continent’s leader in the fight for the New Economic Paradigm, the paradigm of which the BRICS nations are the leading force.

Let us be clear about the nature of imperialism. For the British empire and most empires, the issue has never been race, but rather power, domination (even while racism is used as a tool). Even before World War II, for example, the British imperial center had begun to think in terms of moving to a new model of domination, based not on white colonial administrators or white settler communities, but on financial and psychological operations to control black governments—the neocolonial model. Under that model, the empire could no longer tolerate a local white ruling caste—even of British stock—for example, in Kenya. The community of whites in Kenya had begun to be hostile to London in the 1920s, with dreams of forming a white nation independent of the empire, ruling over black Africans as they pleased. The same phenomenon emerged elsewhere in Africa. Developments during and after World War II also drove the British toward this new model.¹ In the case of Kenya, the British addressed this problem in the 1950s, in a double-play against the Kikuyu people of Kenya and the white settlers.²

The British imperial center has never wanted any nation-building in Africa, whether white or black, but it thought it could more easily control black governments. The Kenyan example illustrates how the British oligarchs play the local elites just as much as they play everyone else, and the local elites have usually been loyal, willing suckers.

Makings of a Powderkeg

Thus, in South Africa today, the British oligarchs’ intention is to prevent nation-building through a range of means that converge on ungovernability. With British backing, the local elite—mostly white and entirely aligned with the policies and morals of the speculators of London and New York—starves South African industry, agriculture, and infrastructure of investment. It uses the excuse that the country cannot expect to attract investment when there is so much political instability—instability that this elite itself has kept at a boil. The British also encourage financial speculation, which diverts capital from productive investment. They are deliberately creating an explosive condition among the masses by retarding the development of the country.

It is obvious that the British are determined to prevent the construction of nuclear power plants. It is less well known that the local elite, in line with British policy prescriptions, have also held back investment needed in the two massive coal-fired power plant projects, Medupi and Kusile, and cover themselves by complaining about the government’s cost and schedule overruns, to which they have just contributed.

The iron and steel complex in Limpopo—now at last being financed ($3.2 billion) and built by Shenzhen Hoi Mor Resources of China—was delayed for more than two-and-a-half years by misleading “expert” advice in South Africa that the market for iron and steel was too weak or too volatile. That advice came to the fore in the Autumn of 2014, after the African Union Executive Council had formally adopted plans for a continent-wide Africa Integrated High Speed Railway Network (AIHSRN) in June of that year and regional rail plans were in the air! The Addis Ababa-Djibouti line was already under construction, and financing for the Mombasa-Nairobi standard-gauge line had just been finalized in May! A vast need for steel was on the horizon.

View full size Credit: Xinhua/Chen Cheng New standard gauge railway in Kenya between Mombasa and Nairobi.

The financial press in South Africa is now creating a negative image of projects financed by the New Development Bank of the BRICS, such as the Mzimvubu dam project in the Eastern Cape to provide irrigation for agriculture, and the Moloto road and rail corridor connecting the three provinces of Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and Limpopo.

The leader of the financial press, Peter Bruce, who is editor-in-chief of BDFM Publishers, wrote last November that the country should focus on “agriculture, mining, and tourism” as “growth sectors,” not infrastructure, agriculture, and industry.

Endemic financial speculation is another form of the system’s destructive activity. The British financial system was at the heart of the 2001 conspiracy to run down the South African rand. Again in 2016-2017, the British empire is obvious among the banks implicated in the foreign exchange scandal known by the name of their chat room, “ZAR Domination.” ZAR is the currency code for the South African rand. The implicated banks included Barclays, Standard Chartered Bank, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Investec Ltd, Standard New York Securities Inc., and BNP Paribas. That list is a good cross-section of the British financial empire across several countries.

The still ongoing collapse, or near collapse, of the South Africa-based Steinhoff International corporate empire, after giddy speculation, capital flight, and cooking of the books, is another kind of destruction wrought by the British financial empire. According to Magda Wierzycka, CEO at Sygnia Asset Management, “The serious question to ask is how so many active asset managers in South Africa missed this. . . . they should have seen what was obvious from the beginning: that this was as close to a corporate-structured Ponzi scheme as one can get.” She called the resulting losses to South African pension funds “huge.”

Black millionaire Gayton McKenzie is just one of those who have recently noted the consequences. He observed, on December 14: “Black people live in squalor. Rats and broken sewerage pipes are common in most areas. Blacks are spectators of white wealth in South Africa. You must be mad if you think this will be tolerated forever . . .”

However, this elite is determined to add (literally), racist insult to injury through its vicious language in the press it controls. The retarding of development is thus combined with mass psychological operations to produce a combined effect. It is aware of what it is doing.

As journalists go about their daily grind of assaulting the ANC and President Zuma, journalists such as Peter Bruce; Simon Lincoln Reader, Business Day columnist; and Richard Poplak, columnist for the Daily Maverick, among many others, set the pace with their hostile vituperations, not to mention the frequently vile, syndicated cartoons of Jonathan Shapiro (“Zapiro”). This spirit is often picked up on and amplified, in Internet readers’ responses such as this one from a Business Day reader on December 30: “All these articles paint the ANC in a dirty Brown colour. . . . This really makes him [Zuma] a very very disgusting and a special kind of excrement . . . .to call him a man would be insulting all men. Let us hope he gets what he deserves.”

This is not an isolated example, but a daily feature of the mainstream media. The viciousness and hatred of the language appearing in articles and responses, even in the supposedly most high-brow news publications in South Africa, also legitimizes and reinforces the language of hatred that black people encounter in the street.

Mayor Mzwandile Masina of Ekurhuleni, as the opening speaker at the Chris Hani Memorial Lecture in Boksburg on April 10, 2017, said: “Being shown the middle finger everywhere by white people . . . must come to an end. . . . the issue of nation building and social cohesion requires all of us, not these insults that you get from social media and you get called everything else . . . we are not monkeys, we are people.”

Apartheid may have been removed from the statute book, but the traditional British imperial attitude that also resonated so well with most Afrikaners has not been cleansed from the proud and self-entitled heart and mind.

You cannot say that the top dogs “know not what they do.” The destruction is deliberate. Gayton McKenzie reports, in his new book discussed below, that billionaire Afrikaner Johann Rupert, speaking on behalf of the British empire, told cabinet minister Fikile Mbalula in early 2017:

I want you to go and tell your president that I looked after Mandela. But if he fires [Finance Minister] Pravin Gordhan and [his Deputy] Mcebisi Jonas, I will destroy this economy. My friends and I will make it look worse than Zimbabwe.

But the threat communicated by Rupert was chiefly bluster: Rupert and the people he calls his friends have been doing their worst to destroy the economy for years, as we have shown. President Zuma was not deterred; he fired Gordhan and Jonas on March 30, 2017.

Beyond the ANC

Now consider what happens as a result of years of ceaseless, daily attacks on the ANC. Many thoughtful black South Africans, whether or not they support the ANC or President Zuma, begin to see themselves as the implicit target. The British-directed business elite—with help from some think tanks and academics, such as the Eddie Webster crowd at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg—thought it could isolate and destroy the ANC by means of psychological warfare, but is now faced with resistance of unknown dimensions that goes beyond the ANC, a resistance that comes—consciously or unconsciously—from the worldwide presence of the New Economic Paradigm and the optimism that it brings.

This broader resistance showed itself in December in three notable instances—in an Anglican priest’s reaction to the political Christmas “sermon” of the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town; in a dissent of the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court from a politicized judgment of that court; and in a blockbuster book by Gayton McKenzie, leader of the Patriotic Alliance party, exposing the murderous manipulations of the elite and defending President Zuma. The three cases have this in common, that none was of a kind that the ANC could just order up.

Surprise: the Judge. South Africa’s Constitutional Court made one more contribution to regime change on December 29, by ordering Parliament to establish criteria and procedures for the impeachment of a President. The decision responds to an application in September of the British-owned Economic Freedom Fighters and two lesser parties which seek to force President Zuma’s impeachment. While the court’s decision does not compel an impeachment proceeding against Zuma, it attempts to keep the regime change process moving forward.

View full size Credit: SABC Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, Mogoeng Mogoeng.

Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, however, wrote a dissenting opinion expressing his “deep-seated agony and bafflement” over the judgment. During Judge Chris Jafta’s reading of the judgment in court, while it was being televised, Mogoeng interrupted to ask that Jafta also read his dissenting opinion for the record. Mogoeng wrote that, on constitutional grounds, it cannot be said, “that the President has never been held accountable for the non-security upgrades at his Nkandla private residence. That position would be sustainable only if the constitutionally acceptable notion of holding him accountable for Nkandla were nothing short of his actual removal from office.” The judgment was a “textbook case of judicial overreach,” he said. There is no option of appeal, however.

Impeachment requires a two-thirds vote. A President removed in this fashion loses his government-supplied physical security.

Like other moves from the British-directed side over the past weeks, this judgment not only targets President Zuma, but attempts to break down the tactical truce between ANC factions in order to shatter the party.

Surprise: the Priest. In his Christmas Eve “sermon,” the Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Cecil Makgoba, demanded that the new ANC president, Cyril Ramaphosa, force the immediate resignation of President Zuma, a move that would likewise end the ANC truce and could destroy the party. Archbishop Makgoba works closely with George Soros’ organizations in South Africa.

However, Anglican priest Maieane Khaketla of the Cathedral of St. James and St. Mary in Maseru, the capital of neighboring Lesotho, spoke for many on Dec. 27 when he wrote, “I hung my head in shame and utter disgust.” We expected to hear a sermon on the baby in the manger, he said, but the Archbishop talks about the alleged misdoings of President Zuma, while “there are numerous cases of corruption, fraud, and sexual abuse against bishops, which the Archbishop has conveniently ignored.” He called on the Synod of Bishops to boot him out, or alternatively, the Archbishop could just resign and seek political office.

Surprise: the Millionaire. Just days before the ANC electoral conference in December, black millionaire Gayton McKenzie published a book supporting and effectively protecting President Zuma, titled Kill Zuma by Any Means Necessary, now available as an Amazon Kindle ebook. It identifies the world-historical importance of the BRICS and the crucial role of Zuma in it. He writes that “a new order will emerge, and South Africa’s alignment with BRICS is a strategic manoeuvre that could shield South Africa in a way that we may find ourselves crediting Jacob Zuma’s presidency with for generations to come.”

While McKenzie admires Zuma, he left the ANC in 2013 and founded the Patriotic Alliance party.

View full size Credit: African News Network ANN7’s Sifiso Mahlangu (right) interviews author Gayton McKenzie.

McKenzie provides detailed information, not previously made public, about multiple attempts to kill President Zuma by poisoning and sabotage of the presidential airplane. In the case of one poisoning attempt, reported in EIR in our March 27, 2015 issue, Zuma was not properly diagnosed and treated until he got to Central Clinical Hospital near Moscow. Attempts were also made to poison David Mabuza and Willies Mchunu, the premiers of Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, respectively, according to McKenzie. They, too, were only correctly diagnosed and treated when they reached the Central Clinical Hospital. Of these attempts, he writes, “Mabuza and Mchunu were also nearly made to pay the price for South Africa’s membership of BRICS.” McKenzie also exposes other high-level operations of the British against the ANC.

McKenzie reviews the history of the newly elected president of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, as the willing agent of the British empire and its allied wealthy Afrikaner families—especially the Oppenheimers, Ruperts, and Menells. They installed Ramaphosa in 1982 as the first Secretary General of the National Union of Mineworkers—their own creation for managing black labor. Ramaphosa had a law degree, but has never worked a day in a mine. When the time came, in 1990, for negotiations between the Afrikaner government and the ANC, the ANC chose Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma as their lead negotiators. But the same wealthy families orchestrated a dirty trick to get them replaced. Ramaphosa became the lead negotiator. These families made Ramaphosa a very rich man later in the 1990s. McKenzie wrote that if Ramaphosa were to be elected president of the ANC (as he now has been), it “will be the worst thing that could happen to this country, particularly for black people, but perhaps in the long-term view even more so for the white population.”

McKenzie is not dredging up the events of a generation ago without cause. Important figures of the South African financial elite were on hand on November 13 to show their support when Ramaphosa unveiled his very vague “New Deal” program at an ANC colloquium in Soweto. Reportedly these captains of finance included, among others, Colin Coleman, the head of Goldman Sachs’ Investment Banking Division for Sub-Saharan Africa; Investec CEO Stephen Koseff; and Johan Burger, CEO of FirstRand Bank, all names well known in London and New York.

Now that Ramaphosa has been elected, it is just possible that he could now choose to become the servant of a far more noble idea than that of imperial domination. The possibility should not be pre-emptively foreclosed. His sponsors want him to preside over the destruction of the ANC and the country while they retire to estates in the English countryside; but he may wish to be the president of a successful ANC and a lively and growing South Africa. If he forces President Zuma out, he will be the president of nothing but an impotent fragment of the ANC.

African News Network’s Sifiso Mahlangu interviewed McKenzie at length on December 12, just before publication. He asked McKenzie why readers should believe the book. McKenzie answered, “I am speaking about people who . . . can come out and sue me. People who can come out and say, ‘No, that’s not true, we have never been poisoned, we have never been in a Russian hospital.’ ” Since publication, the mainstream media have condemned the book as “fiction,” while refusing to confront any of its content. But McKenzie’s claims were confirmed January 4, when the newly elected ANC Secretary General, Ace Magashule, at the funeral of Sandile Msibi, a provincial political figure, said that poison was suspected in Msibi’s death and that he and President Zuma had been about to fly Msibi to Russia when he died. Magashule, a strong proponent of BRICS, also confirmed that David Mabuza had been treated for poisoning in Russia.

The broadness of the resistance to regime change or “color revolution,” shown in these instances, is coupled with another kind of victory.

Another Blow to Color Revolution

The British-steered press has been forced to admit that it promotes foreign interventions into South Africa to change its government. For the past six months, the South African press has sought to legitimize and popularize the practice of “color revolution,” by name. Most recently, on Dec. 20, during a Radio 702 interview with Energy Minister (and former Minister of State Security) David Mahlobo, the interviewer praised the practice of color revolution, saying it benefitted people who were losing their freedom under dictatorial governments. But then he turned around and attempted to explain away accusations of color revolution as defensive moves against the supposedly legitimate protests of “civil society.” He attempted to get Mahlobo to name foreign governments he thought were attempting color revolution in South Africa, but Mahlobo answered that the government knows who they are, but as a matter of intelligence tradecraft, does not name them.

Radio 702 and the other color revolutionaries were answered at a Dec. 27 Christmas party for senior citizens, organized by President Zuma in Nkandla, his home town, attended by 5,000 local people. ANC Women’s League president Bathabile Dlamini told the crowd, “The most painful thing about what these people are saying, is that they are being used by western forces in a desperate attempt to shape our own policies.”

South Africa Chairs the BRICS

The year just ended saw important steps forward on the African continent, including victories in Kenya and Zimbabwe against attempts to install governments hostile both to the BRICS and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. And two important pilot projects toward modernizing Africa’s rails were successfully completed—the rail line from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, and the line from Mombasa to Nairobi in Kenya that will grow into a much wider network. Both use standard gauge.

South Africa assumes the chairmanship of the BRICS this year. It will therefore host major conferences of the BRICS, including participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. These meetings will organize for the new paradigm of peace and development. The British and their Wall Street ally would like nothing better than to create maximum chaos in South Africa that would render that nation’s leadership and perhaps even the conferences themselves impossible, or at least ineffective.

Knowledge of the evolving strategic picture is crucial for reaching the next victories. South Africans, know the strategic map! Join the struggle!

David Cherry is a member of the LaRouche movement in the United States. Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane is the leader of LaRouche South Africa, of which Mokete Meshack Maxongo is a member.