Why Mbeki had to go

BBC News ^ | Sunday, 21 September 2008 | Martin Plaut

[MinorityRepublican]

The African National Congress's decision to sack President Thabo Mbeki has been described by some South African commentators as "regicide".

Certainly it is unprecedented in South African history that a head of state is dismissed in this way. Nor is the ANC the kind of organisation that goes in for this humiliation of its leaders.

So why did it happen?

The immediate cause was Mr Mbeki's ongoing feud with his former deputy, the ANC party leader Jacob Zuma.

But this was not just a personal vendetta between two men. Behind these events lie two major factors: one political, one personal.

Fight with the left

Thabo Mbeki, although a former member of the South African Communist Party, has used conventional economic policies to drive the country's development agenda.

Tight monetary and budgetary targets have been set and met. The result has been a period of unprecedented economic growth, reaching 5% a year in recent years.

In June 1996 Finance Minister Trevor Manuel introduced a neo-liberal economic strategy known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear).

This included commitments to open markets, privatisation and a favourable investment climate.

The ANC is in a formal alliance with two groups on the left, the Communists and the trade union movement, Cosatu. Both were fiercely critical of the strategy and argued that they had been excluded from its development and implementation.

In the report to the Communist Party Congress in July 1998 the Central Committee spelled out their objections to Gear in great detail.

This concluded: "We remain convinced that Gear is the wrong policy. It was wrong in the process that developed it, it is wrong in its overall strategic conception, and it is wrong in much of its detail.

[MinorityRepublican]

It's hard to believe. After reading this article, it appears that Mbeki was not so bad after all. His economic policies were effective enough to convince 5 million Afrikaners to stay and use their skills in the economy(despite the high crime rate).

Now the question is with Zuma coming in and what would he do? If he acts like one bit similiar to Mugabe, he can kiss the productive Whites good bye and the country will turn into another Zimbabwe.

[wardaddy]

lol...PC meet koolaid

yep Africa was a veritable paradise before those nasty brutish Euroracists got there...

much like the Amerindian western hemisphere was too

naked folks running around eating mangoes and having warm fuzzy moments

believe it or not colonialism was thought of as more benign than just going in and taking what you wanted and killing everyone who got in the way which was the common course of human history in the past

Christendom and white man’s burden pushed civilizing savages and teaching them salvation whether they wanted it or not.

Now they are simply reverting to their natural ways. Mass murder, rampant disease and an inability to govern themselves.

Rights?

that is a very new concept in the persuasion of conquest for land and material as practiced by every culture through out our recorded history?

why hold whites to higher standards?

are whites smarter, more accountable maybe? Why?

I’ve lived the world over including much of the 3rd one and I can tell you that anywhere the Brits laid a footprint is better off for it....maybe Hibernia is an exception but that’s debatable.

[Captain Peter Blood]

The ANC is and has always has been a Communist and Terrorist Organization. Mandela is nothing but the same and yet is looked at as a great leader, what Bull.
Africa was and still is in many ways very tribal and what the Western News Media never reported on was what the other Tribal Political groups thought in South Africa who were for the most part shut out there.
The political leaders in South Africa have become just as corrupt as most of the rest of the African leaders.
Africa as a whole is a vast cesspool of leaders that have great natural resources that have been squandered.
AIDS is rampant along genocide and most of the world doesn't seem to care. Frankly I doubt much can be done unless real change comes and I don't think it will. We are throwing a lot money after bad into a sinkhole.

[MinorityRepublican]

btt

[Captain Peter Blood]

Well there is a lot you say that is true. But if the White Man had never come to Africa then it would as it was before. Absolutely Tribal. There would no progress just the same as they had lived for thousands of years. Without any outside stimulus of ideas they would living in the blissful ignorance they were before the Europeans came.

[wardaddy]

LOL....again the evil whites destroyed the place.

Hell, the only civlization these places ever knew was Euro or Arab.

You guys have been taught too much PC crap.

and so you think Asia and China and Thailand are like cool or something?

compared to what?

Liberia?

again you expect more from whites than you do others...and you don’t find that racist in itself?

I lived in Sierra Leone, those savages were quite capable of killing one another with no help from the dreaded all powerful white man.

I often wonder how naive politically correct revisionist notions like your’s and Guadalajara’s find their way on to a right wing board.

To blame Africa’s cliff dive on whites and not blacks themselves who are destroying their own sub continent is precisely soft bigotry.

[MinorityRepublican]

No matter how beneficial Apartheid was, it was inherently an immoral system.

I agree with you, things were much better in South Africa when the Whites were in charge but that does not make it right.

Remember in this age, if South Africa continued Apartheid indefinitely, the regime would had been overthrown through a civil war or outside intervention.

[wardaddy]

I wasn’t talking about morality but to be frank, sometimes morality has it’s shortcomings when viewed pragmatically.

I fear the consequences of the geographic isolation of sub Saharan Africa after the Sahara went dry will be with us for a very long time.

[MinorityRepublican]

That is what the Afrikaners probasbly figured out. I can see why they did the things they did in the past hundred years or so but what killed them at the end is their dependence on cheap labor.

They would had been better off if they had a great wall of South Africa dividing the Afrikaners from the African tribal lands.

In reality, if that had happened, South Africa would had been divided into five or more countries, and one country could continue under Afrikaner rule.

[puroresu]

If the European nations had decided not to bother with sub-Saharan Africa, and if no one else (Arabs, Indians, Chinese...) had filled the void, that region would still be as it was a thousand years ago.

It's absolutely amazing. Europeans can go into the most backward, brutish lands on earth, places that are impoverished beyond human imagination. Places where they have never had a written language or invented the wheel. Places where every form of brutality is practiced routinely. Those Europeans immediately raise the standard of living there, but we're told that this is evil because there's an income gap between the Europeans and the natives. The Europeans bring stable government, suppressing the endless genocidal tribal feuding, slavery, and cannibalism, and we're told this is evil because the government doesn't include a quota of natives in office. The Europeans bring in technology the locals never dreamed of, and we're told this is evil because the amount of this technology is less than exists back in Europe.

I still recall Carter's UN ambassador Andrew Young whining 30 years ago that European homes were far more likely to have electricity, running water, and telephones than African homes, and he blamed this on Europeans. Apparently he forgot that there would be none of those things in sub-Saharan Africa at all without those hated Europeans.

Then, when the Europeans get fed up with the mess and leave, the place degenerates back to the way it was before they arrived, and we're told this is the Europeans’ fault.

This is just the usual liberal routine of blaming whitey for every failure of non-whites everywhere.

[VOA]

bump

[puroresu]

There’s no comparison between the East Asian nations and Africa before the arrival of Europeans. Marco Polo found a civilization so advanced in China that he was accused of lying when he told of it. And that civilization was countless centuries old when Polo visited it. Nothing even close to that was found in sub-Saharan Africa by the early European explorers. The idea that those places would be comparable today to Japan or South Korea if only Europeans hadn’t “raped” them is a difficult argument to maintain.

[MinorityRepublican]

Bump back at ya!

[MinorityRepublican]

bttt