No Gold at the End of the Rainbow

When I think of the new South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s so-called Rainbow Nation, the South Africa of President Jacob Zuma and the African National Congress (ANC), George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm comes to mind.  The ending is most pertinent;

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Look away of the old apartheid nation; look from the faces of the white Boers to those of the black Bores of the ANC; long since it has been impossible to say which is which.  One form of oppression and corruption has simply been replaced by another form of oppression and corruption.  The old East European joke comes to mind.  Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; socialism is just the reverse.  Practically speaking skin colour is quite irrelevant.  South Africa’s new black masters stopped the gravy train, as has been said, only for as long as it took to get onboard. 

Last month thirty-four rioting workers at the Marikana platinum works were shot dead by police, the worst incident of such violence since the fall of apartheid.  I suppose there was some comfort in the fact that 270 people were subsequently charged with their murder. 

What, 270 policemen; so many?  No, they were not police; they were miners caught up and arrested in the same riot.  They were charged with murder under a bizarre ‘common purpose’ law, a legislative hangover from the good old bad old days.  The crazy rationale here is that, by their actions, they ‘provoked’ the police into firing and were thus responsible not just for the death of their colleagues but their unlawful murder.

It’s caused a bit of a fuss.  The charges were raised by the National Prosecution Authority (NPA), a wholly ‘independent’ body.  Of course it is.  When lawyers acting for the accused went to see President Zuma, urging that the charges be dropped, they were told that it was not up to him to tell the prosecution service what to do. 

It’s certainly up to somebody.  No sooner had the lawyers left than it was announced that the detained miners would be released in batches, proceedings taken up and just as quickly discarded.  But the anger just grows and grows, the dispute itself a festering sore, not just at Marikana but at mines elsewhere in South Africa. 

The strikers at Marikana want better pay and conditions (they live in townships no better than the old days), but at least they are paid.   Not so the workers at the East Rand goldmine, who have received no wages for two years, yes, two years, because of a liquidation dispute.  The mine was partly owned by Khulubuse Zuma, the president’s son, and Zondawa Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson.  

Meanwhile, Julius Malema, the former youth leader of the ANC, expelled from the party (that’s the operative word) for his outspoken criticism of Zuma, has been busy mining some political capital.  This notorious black racist, an admirer of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, has announced, to all who are prepared to listen, that the white mine owners have co-opted a small elite of corrupt blacks to be allowed to remain in charge. 

Ah, yes, the pigs, you see, black and white.  The thing is Malema, who may very well be using the dispute as a point of entry back into a post-Zuma ANC, has is own snout deep in the trough, his populist demagoguery notwithstanding. 

His swinishness was detailed a couple of years ago by Fiona Forde, an Irish journalist, in An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘New’ ANC.  I have no idea what his present circumstances are, but when she wrote he had more than eight known properties, including a farm and a $2million mansion in Johannesburg. He demolished one house valued at $700,000, to be replaced with one at an estimated cost of $2.8million, complete with a bunker.  A bunker; what a sensible precaution that is.  One simply never knows when the Russians will come.

His expensive tastes run to designer suits, several Breitling wristwatches at $17,000 each and Luis Vuitton manbags. All gifts from friends, who also offer him the use of several luxury cars, he told Forde. Not friends and comrades from the townships, one assumes; not South Africa’s beleaguered mining community, that’s for sure.

The truth is modern South Africa is a corrupt and ill-managed kleptocracy.  The gold at the end of the rainbow has been snaffled.  There is no racism though; the black pigs and the white pigs feed from the same trough.  A great comfort, that must be, to those who find it difficult to feed at all.  As ever, all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.  

Penis Power

I do try so hard not to be a ‘cultural relativist.’  I try so hard to be tolerant of others, of the customs and practices of other peoples and other nations.  But, alas, the demon of prejudice snaps even at my tolerant heels.  Where I fall down and fall down badly is over the marriage customs of South Africa’s Zulus. 

Actually I could not care less about the Zulus or how many wives they are allowed to take by tribal custom.  My problem is with Jacob Zuma, the country’s grinningly inane Zulu president, the butt of repeated jokes when he came on a state visit to London two years ago.  More than a few made me laugh. 

There he was with one of his four spouses, a more ridiculous sight is difficult to imagine.  Apparently they take turns deciding who is to travel with the polygamist president.  How do they do it, I wonder?  Is it a case of eeny, meeny, miny, moe; one wife, two wife, three wife four?  Just imagine the arguments over exactly who is the country’s first, second, third or fourth lady! 

Yes, I find him ridiculous but I’m not alone here: a lot of South Africans also think that he is ridiculous, even within the African National Congress, the corrupt ruling party.  Objections have been raised over the tax-funded support Zuma receives for his wifely quartet.  This is hardly surprising considering what’s officially referred to as ‘spousal support’ amounts to $1.6million.  Enough is enough, the cry has gone up; we are not funding this man’s sex life! 

His sexuality is rather the topic at the moment, raising other issues of concern in the tawdry ‘rainbow nation.’  The thing is, you see, South African’s have recently been regaled with something only Mrs Zuma One, Two, Three and Four normally see – the presidential penis!  Yes, they have, in the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, where a painting called The Spear was recently on display.  There he is, Mr President, in a Lenin-like pose with the, ahem, spear in question on prominent display. 

Poor man; he is not best pleased by this insult to his dignity.  He’s applied to the courts to have it removed, a challenge to the country’s liberal constitution which guarantees freedom of expression.  ANC thugs have already forced the gallery to close.  Though Brett Murray, the artist, has impeccable credentials as an anti-apartheid activist his work has been denounced as ‘racist’ on the grounds that he is white.  Some, though, have the wit to understand what it’s really about, including Mondi Makhanya of the South African Sunday Times.  Of Zuma he wrote;

It will be his sexual legacy that we will remember more than anything else. His sexual endeavours are therefore fair game for artists, cartoonists, comedians, radio DJs and tavern jokers.

I personally think he will be remembered for more than his spear; I think he will be remembered for presiding over the final degeneracy of the Mandela legacy.  My, oh, my, how far this nation has sunk in a bog of corruption, how far the ANC has embraced a culture of ‘bling’ in the most vulgar and rapacious forms imaginable. 

It’s gone beyond satire when they can’t even recognise it themselves.  Let me give you one tiny illustration.  At the end of a jamboree in January, called to mark the ANC’s hundredth birthday, Kgalema Motlanthe, Zuma’s deputy, proposed a toast to the plebs in the stadium below – “The leaders will now enjoy the champagne, and of course they do so on your behalf through their lips.” 

Vicarious luxury wine, vicarious jobs, vicarious opportunities and vicarious homes is the reality of the Rainbow Nation.  People of all colours unite; you have the sight of the nomenclature going past in luxury cars to witness.  The simple truth is that politics in South Africa is a racket, with the pigs of the ANC vying with one another to get their snouts in the trough.  I do not believe that this country has a happy future.  All the gold has gone from the end of the rainbow into the coffers of Zuma and his kindred.

Let me leave you on a slightly lighter note.  Let me leave you with another picture of the Spear in action, this time dancing at his nuptials to wife number four.  There he is, all kitted out in traditional Zulu costume, even so far as his traditional Zulu trainers.  

Some Animals are More Equal than Others

Earlier this month the African National Congress, the ANC, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its foundation. This is the party of Nelson Mandela, terrorist come secular saint, that rules South Africa, the wonderful ‘rainbow nation’…or a sad cesspit of corruption.

The latter is the view of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the country’s other secular saint, who once observed that the ANC had stopped the gravy train only long enough to get on board. Actually he may have underestimated the problem, at least according to the writer Zakes Mda, who has said that the new South Africa is overtaking Nigeria in patronage and cronyism.

The ANC has been sadly misrepresented. In the good old bad old days of apartheid it was taken to be the face of black South Africa. In reality it was only ever the face of a self-interested and self-serving minority, one that hijacked a cause to advance its own ends. The old apartheid state was bad; the new rainbow state headed by Jacob Zuma, its corrupt, polygamous and laughable president, is not really that much better.

In some ways South Africa is a little like post-communist Russia, a place where a few well-placed individuals established a monopoly over the good things in life. It was a case of power not to the people but power to themselves. Almost two years ago I wrote an article in which I made the following points;

Socialism or capitalism, it really makes no difference, because the principal beneficiaries will always be the ANC nomenklatura. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, has accused Zuma and the ANC of corruption and the abuse of power. It’s easy to see why when some seventy million rand has been spent on perks; on grace-and-favour homes for cabinet ministers wives and families, and of course cars and more cars, the kind of gas-guzzling toys African leaders love.

Zille, the conscience of the nation, has faced death threats, been called a “filthy whore” and “an exponent of a new apartheid” for her outspokenness. But look beyond the villas of the ANC cadres, look beyond the houses and the cars, and one might easily conclude that there is no need for a new apartheid, for the simple reason that the old apartheid is still very much in place; that the new bosses look very much like the old bosses, except for the colour of their skin; that oppression and poverty feel like oppression and poverty no matter if the ruler is white or black. In many places people still live in squalid townships where the government fails to deliver on the most basic services, including clean water, sanitation and power. Protesters have been dispersed by riot squads using rubber bullets.

Under apartheid the black majority were second class citizens. They are still second class citizens. To deflect them from the miserable condition of their lives a scapegoat has been found, and the scapegoat is the vulnerable white minority, repeatedly blamed for all of the country’s problems by the black racist Julius Malema, onetime head of the ANC’s youth wing, a man who takes Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as a model. Yes, indeed; Robert Mugabe, who transformed one of the richest nations in Africa from a breadbasket into a basket case.

Richard Dowden wrote in the Spectator that the new South Africa is an archipelago of fortified islands of luxury in a sea of poverty. To be more precise, it is a fortified sea of black luxury amidst a sea of black poverty.

The ANC has become what it always was, not a party for the people but a party for itself, an elite determined to protect its own interests. In November of last year the nation’s parliament was told by Willie Hofmeyr, head of the Special Investigative Unit, that some five to seven billion dollars a year was being lost in corruption, negligence and incompetence in the public service. Not long after he was sacked.

Fearful of further exposure the government drew up the Protection of State Information Bill, a measure which effectively treats any investigation of official activity as spying, carrying a possible twenty-five year jail sentence.

Here we are eighteen years after the ANC came to power and South Africa has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The poor may be poor, miserably poor, but at least they have one comfort in their bleak lives – they no longer suffer from oppressive white rule. But, alas, the pigs are in the trough. All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

I Give you Che Juju

I can remember the moment exactly, the moment when my suspicion of Nelson Mandela, the former terrorist who became South Africa’s living saint, spilled over into outright dislike. It was 2005, at the end of a Make Poverty History rally in London’s Trafalgar Square, where Bob Geldof, the boom town rat and abject acolyte, declared him to be president of the world. Seemingly the world agrees, at least in the shape of the United Nations, which launched 18 July, Saint Nelson’s birthday, as an international day in his honour.

If only Mandela could have done for the world what he and his cohorts in the African National Congress (ANC), a party seemingly set to rule in perpetuity, have done for South Africa. What did they do, what have they done? Why, drawing on the observation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they stopped the gravy train of corruption only long enough for them to get on.

If anything the situation for a great many in the black community is even worse than it was in the days of the old apartheid state. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but that’s OK because a lot of the rich now have black faces, so it must be better, this inequality of opportunity, this rainbow kleptocracy.

Yes, just as life gets better for President Jacob Zuma and his ANC cronies it gets worse for the majority of ordinary South Africans, black and white alike. Under the old regime infrastructural services for the black majority were bad, that’s true, but that has to be better than virtually no services at all; for no service is what they are getting.

Amazingly some 80% of South African municipalities are now bankrupt due to misspending spurred on by the demon of corruption. Power shortages and the abysmal state of repair of many of the public roads have made the problem even worse, all this in a country with crippling rates of personal taxation.

Somebody has to be blamed for this; some scapegoat has to be found. Not the corrupt, inefficient and venal ANC, absolutely not; rather there is an easier target, the target favoured by Julius Malema, head of the ANC’s Youth Wing. It is they who are to blame. Who are they, you may wonder? They are the whites, the people, according to Malema, who “stole our land”, who are “criminals and should be treated that way.”

Malema, widely known as Juju, was not so long ago the butt of national humour, after the school results of the ANC’s leadership were leaked on the internet, showing him to be particularly dim. Bad Juju may be an academic dud but he is not stupid. He’s managed to carve a nice little niche for himself as the ANC’s number one demagogue and rabble-rouser. He is the new voice of the townships, the voice of the dispossessed, labouring under the burden of frustrated hopes, labouring under the disappointments of a rainbow nation that has made them even poorer than they were under apartheid.

It’s no longer possible to blame past injustices for present wrongs; no, present wrongs are all the fault of white people, or those white people who still own businesses and farms. Malema, looking to the example of Zimbabwe, where his hero Robert Mugabe has all but destroyed a once flourishing economy, is calling for the expropriation of white-owned mines and land without compensation.

Some may consider this as all so much verbiage, but Malema, a power to be reckoned with, has been suggested as a future president of South Africa, even by the present incumbent. So, if you want to know South Africa’s future look to Zimbabwe’s present, look to the viscera of a goose, plundered in a futile search for a horde of golden eggs.

This radical, this darling of the masses, recently took to sporting a Che Guevara-style beret, declaring that “Cuban revolutionaries should be saluted. Because of their ideological clarity and willingness to fight, millions were released from colonial subjugation”. The huddled masses yearning for more of the good life, any of the good life, lap up this kind of stuff. But, as Rian Malan wrote recently in the Spectator, they are poorly educated and unlikely to know that an illiterate Johannesburg gardener earns more in a day than the average Cuban does in a month

Let’s look a little more closely at Che Juju, racist and revolutionary. Beret or not he is no aesthete, no paragon of virtue, no sea-green incorruptible. “He poses as such a figure”, Malan writes, “but in person he resembles nothing so much as a capitalist porker grown fat on shady dealings” Pretty much in keeping, then, with the tone being set by the rest of the ANC, South Africa’s oligarchy in perpetuity.

Apparently he earns around $5000 a month as president of the Youth League, a decent income, beyond the dreams of his rag-tag army, but nowhere near enough to explain his lavish life-style. Fiona Forde, an Irish journalist, recently published An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘New’ ANC, in which she details his considerable assets. He has more than eight known properties, including a farm and a $2million mansion in Johannesburg. He recently demolished one house valued at $700,000, to be replaced with one at an estimated cost of $2.8million, complete with a bunker (Hitler style?)

His expensive tastes run to designer suits, several Breitling wristwatches at $17,000 each and Luis Vuitton manbags. All gifts from friends, who also offer him the use of several luxury cars, he told Forde. Not friends and comrades from the townships, one assumes. This self-styled “economic freedom fighter” is now being investigated by the revenue services, the office of the public protector and the elite crime-fighting unit known as the Hawks.

On this evidence, and other examples like it, South Africa is a predatory state on its way to becoming a banana republic. That’s not my view, well it is, but they are not my words. They are the words of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

Ironically, while he makes life better for himself, Malema’s power-hungry demagogy is making life even worse for his benighted and resentful supporters. His rhetoric about nationalisation and property seizures is frightening off foreign investment. According to a recent UN report, South Africa’s share of foreign direct investment fell 70% last year from 2009. That same year it overtook Brazil as the country with the widest gap between rich and poor. Unemployment increases still further, particularly among the young; resentment increases, hatred increases; Juju, the ‘saviour’ of the poor, waxes fat and wealthy on the results

Meanwhile, at rallies, Malema and his supporters like a rousing chorus or two of Shoot the Boer, a song from former days which incites ‘hate speech’, so South Africa’s Equality Court ruled recently. But the singing goes on as, sadly, does the practice. In one of the most horrific examples, Attie Potgieter, a white farm manager, was stabbed and slashed more than 150 times, with implements as varied as a machete and a garden fork. The pathologist concluded that he had been “tortured to death.” His wife and three-year-old daughter were killed with a single bullet in the backs of their heads.

Potgieter and his family now join more than a 1000 others from white farming families who have been killed since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, on average 70 a year. These are the official figures. The true number is calculated to be closer to 3000. But that’s just part of the picture in a country that now has one of the worst crime rates in the world, a country were 21,000 people are murdered and 52,000 women raped every year.

That’s the world Nelson Mandela was president of in time past; that’s the world that Julius Malema may be president of in time to come. You may care to think of that next July when you celebrate, at the behest of the UN, the achievements of Geldof’s tawdry saint.

This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.

Hating the quality of whiteness

I wrote this for another site I belong to earlier this month. I’m adding it here for Jaycee.


Eugene Terre’Blanche, the murdered leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweing, was buried earlier this month amidst much Nazi-style gesturing and gnashing of teeth. Once again a tale of two nations seems to be unfolding, with the local black community looking on in an understandable mood of apprehension. But the baton has been passed on. The racist is dead; long live the racist. And the new racist is not white; he’s black – he’s Julius Malema.

I’ve mentioned before in previous blogs on South Africa that this man is the leader of the African National Congress’ youth wing, and one of the main political props of President Zuma. There was an interesting account of his background and outlook in The Daily Telegraph recently by Rian Malan, drawing attention, once again, to Malema’s trip to Mugabeland, where he sang Kill the Boer, that old ANC favourite from days gone by, feasting with his friend and picking up tips on how to run a successful decolonialisation programme.

Malema, as the report details, though relatively young and poorly educated, rose to prominence as a supporter of Jacob Zuma’s bid for power, intimidating and threatening violence against any opponents. A socialist and champion of the poor, very much in the model of Mugabe, his efforts were rewarded, as well-appointed houses, a fleet of cars and a Breitling watch fell into his hands, seemingly like manna from heaven.

Alas, it’s the old, old story, the story that has seen the Wabenzi, the big shots, advance across the rest of Africa in their limos; it’s a story of socialism for the many and wealth for the few, wealth for people like Mugabe and Malema. Their socialism is also accompanied by forms of racism, racism born of the need to create scapegoats, covers for their own venality and incompetence.

But Malema denies being a racist, denies hating white people. It’s just the quality of “whiteness” he hates, to use his own bizarre words. He was even more bizarre when he was in Harare, saying “They are so bright, so colourful, we refer to them as white people. Maybe their colour came as a result of exploiting our minerals and perhaps if some of us get opportunities in these minerals we can develop a nice colour like them.” I hope you can make sense of this gibberish, because I most certainly can’t!

He certainly has his eyes on those minerals, on the wealth of South Africa, having the support of a powerful faction within the ANC- perhaps even the President himself- for the same kind of ‘indigenisation’ that ruined Zimbabwe. This man is a dangerous, muddle-headed, greedy and unprincipled demagogue. If South Africa is to be destroyed, if the goose that lays the golden eggs is to be killed, he and his kind will be the cause, not Terre’Blanche and the ghosts of the past.

Kill the Boer

There is something rotten in the state of South Africa, something I hinted at in a previous blog (What have the Romans ever done for us?)Now Eugene Terre’Blanche, a white farmer and the leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), has been murdered. I confess I had never heard of this man, or his movement, until I read the reports following his death. I find it difficult to believe that the majority of Afrikaners, no matter how unhappy with the government of the African National Congress, could have in any way have identified with his clonish and clownish Nazi-style party; even the flag it uses is derivative.

The death of this man is just part of the wider fragmentation of the so-called Rainbow Nation, which shows every sign of degenerating still further under the mismanagement of the ANC. If the white racist fringe had Terre’Blanche then the black racist fringe (is it a fringe?) has Julius Malema, the leader of the ANC’s youth wing, a friend of President Zuma and a great admirer of Robert Mugabe, that inspiration to all progressive Africans.

Terre’Blanche is just another statistic, one of more than three thousand white farmers who have been murdered since 1994. This would, at least on the face of it, appear to be something pleasing to Malema, as he resurrected Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer, a favoured ANC song from apartheid days. He sang it on his recent visit to Zimbabwe, though he has been banned from doing so in South Africa itself by court order. But still he is indulged by Jacob Zuma. Now this is where the rottenness goes really deep.

Here is part of what I wrote in my previous piece;

…look beyond the villas of the ANC cadres, look beyond the houses and the cars, and one might easily conclude that there is no need for a new apartheid, for the simple reason that the old apartheid is still very much in place; that the new bosses look very much like the old bosses, except for the colour of their skin; that oppression and poverty feel like oppression and poverty no matter if the ruler is white or black. In many places people still live in squalid townships where the government fails to deliver on the most basic services, including clean water, sanitation and power.

It’s actually getting worse; for in preparation for the football world cup many people are being forcibly moved from their homes and dumped elsewhere, treated very much as they were by the old apartheid state; treated very much in the same fashion as the aliens in the movie District 9. One woman said that “They took people from the streets because they don't want them in the city for the World Cup. Now we are living in a concentration camp.”

Yes, the old resentments are building up again. The obvious target should be the corrupt cadres of the ANC, who are more than content to leave their brothers and sisters in the dust. But there are other ways to release the tensions. Why not raise some old specters, why not sing Kill the Boer? I’m not suggesting that this incitement to racial hatred is a strategy actively adopted by the ANC – I simply don’t have enough evidence- , though there are those in South Africa who are prepared to claim that the party is using race to divert attention from its own failings. And as long as Zuma refuses to reign in Malema, so long as he fails to condemn songs like Kill the Boer who can blame them. Not I.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

A few weeks ago I saw Mrs Mandela, a TV biopic about the wife of the former president of South Africa, an altogether impressive performance by Sophie Okonedo in the title role.

In some ways Winnie Mandela was the greater victim of the old apartheid state than Nelson, her husband. Although she was only imprisoned for a relatively brief period, she was subject to systematic persecution by the authorities, even being dumped in an area where local people were warned to boycott her, and under constant police surveillance. She had to rise above this, to fight off her persecutors, who did not stop short of attempted murder. She did, but not in the same way as her husband; he might be said to have been ennobled by his experience; she was brutalised and corrupted by hers.

There is one tremendously effective scene in the movie where she is shown interrogating Stompie Moeketsi, the boy who was eventually murdered by her thuggish bodyguard, intercut with scenes of her own earlier brutal interrogation by Major Theunis Swanepoel, played by David Morrissey. We look from one angry face to the other and all difference disappears; sex, race, circumstances; only hatred and anger remain, only venality.

Winnie Mandela is still a major figure in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and I rather think more typical of the political class of the ‘rainbow nation’ than her husband, the closest thing South Africa comes to possessing a secular saint. But the new South Africa is not a country of saints; it’s a country of sinners; the country of people like Winnie Mandela, and the country of people like President Jacob Zuma, who came to England on a state visit last week. The new South Africa is a country where, as Archbishop Tutu once said, the gravy train only stopped long enough for the ANC to get on.

Mr Zuma, the face of the new nation, came to town, not at all flattered by the depiction of him in the British press; not at all flattered by references to his polygamy, his adultery and his talent for fathering children, lots of children. Our attitude, he retorted, is born of cultural imperialism and our colonial past. I do begin to detect slight traces here of a condition that might be termed Mugabeitis. Is South Africa itself, I have to ask, in danger of infection, in danger of the condition spreading south from Harare? Well, let’s have a look.


There is the ANC, to begin with, now far more Winnie than Nelson, and beginning, ever so slightly, to take on the appearance of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF. The youth wing is headed by Julius Malema, a firebrand impatient with Zuma’s pragmatic capitalism, urging a more inclusive ‘African socialist model’. One only has to look to the north to see how that pans out.

Socialism or capitalism, it really makes no difference, because the principal beneficiaries will always be the ANC nomenklatura. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, has accused Zuma and the ANC of corruption and the abuse of power. It’s easy to see why when some seventy million rand has been spent on perks; on grace-and-favour homes for cabinet ministers wives and families, and of course cars and more cars, the kind of gas-guzzling toys African leaders love.

Zille, the conscience of the nation, has faced death threats, been called a “filthy whore” and “an exponent of a new apartheid” for here outspokenness. But look beyond the villas of the ANC cadres, look beyond the houses and the cars, and one might easily conclude that there is no need for a new apartheid, for the simple reason that the old apartheid is still very much in place; that the new bosses look very much like the old bosses, except for the colour of their skin; that oppression and poverty feel like oppression and poverty no matter if the ruler is white or black. In many places people still live in squalid townships where the government fails to deliver on the most basic services, including clean water, sanitation and power. Protesters have been dispersed by riot squads using rubber bullets.

Symptoms of Mugabeitis can also be seen in the countryside. According to official estimates some 2000 white farmers have been murdered in the more remote parts of the country, though unofficially the figure has been estimated as high as 3000. People are talking about a white exodus, easy to see why when some 750,000 out of a total population of four million have left since 1994 and settled abroad. With them have gone many skills essential to a developing country, and here is now a shortage of engineers and medical practitioners.

In his report in The Telegraph commenting on Zuma’s visit, Graham Boynton says that he met one African aid official who told him that “We could well look back on British colonialism as the golden age of Africa.” This reminded him, on hearing Zuma’s complaints, of the Monty Python sketch that begins with “What have the Romans ever done for us?” I had a look on You Tube and it seems to be the most apt – and comic- observation ever on the benefits of imperialism. Yes, the Africans may have cause to regret the passing of the Pax Britannica as Mugabeitis enters into the terminal stage.