An Expats' View of South Africa (Part 2)

Cry, the Beloved Country

Cry, the Beloved Country

Investigative essay by Justine Isernhinke, Fellow and Head of Geopolitics and UAP Research, The Malone Institute

In Part 2 of this series, Cui Bono - Malema vs. Musk, Justine covers the fight between South Africa’s most famous expat - Elon Musk- and the leader of an ANC opposition party, the EFF (Economic Freedom Front), Joseph Malema, who started shouting “Kill the Boer” (Boer meaning Farmer, specifically Afrikaans-speaking farmers) at public rallies - in stadiums of 100,000 people no less.

You can find Part 1 at this link:

Part 2

Somewhat overtly, yet with perhaps covert approval from the ANC, the leader of an opposition party, the EFF (Economic Freedom Front), Joseph Malema started shouting “Kill the Boer” (Boer meaning Farmer, specifically Afrikaans-speaking farmers) at public rallies - in stadiums of 100,000 people no less:

AfriForum, a non-governmental organization that champions human rights and safety in South Africa, laid a complaint against Malema for hate speech and were represented by Advocate Mark Oppenheimer, a friend of mine.

This slur began back in the 90s to be discarded for a few years. However, when “transformation” (which translates into theft in practice) for the ANC wasn’t fast enough, it came back into fashion.

It has been proven that the use of the phrase at public events gives rise to an increase of farm murders in subsequent weeks. It is not a meaningless phrase. Why would any government do this or allow this to happen?

Cui Bono, a forgotten Latin phrase, means “who stands to benefit”. This should be repeated every time you see something in South African politics. Patterns start emerging.

ANC members studied and trained in the Soviet Union. The ANC has communist roots and has never fully embraced capitalism and free markets. If there was one thing the Soviets did well was play the Long Game. In fact, James Lindsay delivered an excellent speech about how communism has been playing that long game for the past 50 years. KGB Propagandist Yuri Bezmenov talks about this in his famous video as well.

The Long Game is about setting aside quick wins or short term goals, but looking at the arc of history and deciding that your lifetime is merely one step along that arc but you’ve served your purpose as the Game will be won decades after you’re in your grave.

Back in 1986, the CIA drew up an opinion piece on the ANC. Below is an extract from the ANC’s manifesto:

Along with teaching the ANC the Soviet’s Long Game, they also taught them about controlled opposition.

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves." - Vladimir Lenin

Lenin solved the crisis of opposing ideas, advancing the psychological warfare in the Soviet-era propaganda campaigns. The Soviet Communists mastered the concept of Controlled Opposition which creates the illusion of opposition - the government orchestrates both sides of a conflict. On the one side, you have the status quo authority, while on the other, you have those that are also controlled by the same authority as that of the status quo.

This creates the facade of opposition - one that appears to challenge the status quo, but in fact, it eradicates any true dissent. As long as people feel that they can oppose the system through an accepted conduit, they won’t revolt and burn the system to the ground. Further, by controlling the opposition, which you can fill with the worst and the dumbest politicians, you prevent legitimate and organized opposition from forming any real threat to the status quo.

Malema was “kicked out” of the ANC Youth League for ostensibly being too radical. He went on to set up the EFF - Economic Freedom Front, joined by several other vocal anti-white, pro-communist politicians. He is an icon of political corruption and utterly self-serving.

This hatred bleeds to other politicians and recently a member of Parliament said “For every one black person we will kiII five white people. We’ll kiII the children, we’ll kiII their women”

The hate speech case against Malema was dismissed in the lower courts and is now making its way to the Constitutional Court which is the highest court in South Africa - akin to the US Supreme Court. I suspect the issue is too political for judges to want to make a call against the establishment.

Elon Musk called out Malema last year for his inciting of violence.

And he went after Malema again this year:

Elon has called for sanctions to be placed on Malema.

The ANC and EFF reacted to Trump’s allegations of expropriation without compensation as “misinformation”. However, in typical fashion, Malema cleared up any misunderstanding and said:

“We will expropriate without compensation whether they (white Afrikaners) like it or not. If they object, they can seek refugee in America.” - Malema

Malema recently called Elon Musk a racist and a “white supremacist". Interestingly, the same insult Ambassador Rasool lobbed at Trump. When all you have to fall back on is the history of Apartheid, everything looks like racism. The hammer and nail analogy.

(The following sections of this essay are for paid subscribers. Please consider joining the community of paid subscribers to Malone.News. These sections cover the following topics:

• Crime and Corruption, two of South Africa’s most popular national pastimes

• Farm Attacks

• Strategic National Interests and the “Ethnonationalist Gangster Regime in Pretoria”

• What does the Future hold for South Africa)

Crime and Corruption, two of South Africa’s most popular national pastimes

“You know, South Africa; as beautiful as it is, it’s public knowledge how crazy the situation is there. In terms of the crime, the murders, the gang activity. It’s unlike any place in the world. People getting shot for watches, cell phones, every day, all the time.” Dirkus Du Plessis

No doubt many PhD students in political affairs and researchers point to the current crime stemming from South Africa’s violent past, the draconian measures under Apartheid and poverty. All nations have a violent past. America had its Indian wars, the British Empire had so many wars that one doesn’t know how far back to go in history. But at a certain point, whatever the cause, you need to stop making excuses for the leaders of a country doing NOTHING to stop the crime.

The average number of murders in my home country is between 23,000 to 30,000 per year. The number of rapes of women exceeds that of any other country in the world, and the rape of minors - including infants - is so staggeringly high, I won’t share those stats. You can look them up. It’s beyond sickening.

Since 1994, the crime has increased exponentially and evolved, Bank fraud is so sophisticated that South Africa’s banking system is one of the most advanced in the world. It forever needs to be one step ahead of the criminals.

Cash-in-transit crime is carried out by military-style tactics. In fact, a video of my friend’s Lone Operator trainer, Leo Prinsloo, went viral when he was driving a cash-in-transit truck and they were attacked on the road:

Car hijackings are notorious and incredibly lucrative for the criminal gangs. So prevalent has it become that South Africans sometimes are able to escape the attack if they are sufficiently aware of what is happening at the time.

Kidnappings and ransoms have become scarily “popular” and the crime isn’t solely targeting white victims. A black farmer is still being held hostage after 4 months for a ZAR 10 million ransom. This Farmer has been missing over 4 months, our main stream media houses didn’t even bother to publish the news about his disappearance! The other week a friend of mine was dropping someone at her house when the police arrived en masse along with helicopters to free a kidnapped Ethiopian man who was held 3 houses down!

Theft is rampant. If a new building goes up, people will literally steal the bricks, or a roof off a building!

Years ago, my dad was attacked driving into his townhouse complex. My dad carried a revolver and shot back at the attackers. He survived and the attackers fled. However, it changed the course of his life in ways I’m not sure he ever came to terms with.

My mother was held up outside her house but managed to only lose her jewelry before the robbers were scared off.

A year or so later, my mother left the house unexpectedly for an errand at a time she would normally not have gone out. When she arrived back later, she found the maids tied up and the dogs pepper-sprayed. Home invaders had come looking for my mother specifically knowing that she would have cash on hand for the home-security business she and my stepdad ran. It was two close calls. I was already living abroad at the time and my mom repeatedly told me to never ever move back to South Africa.

Crime has only carried on in ever greater numbers. Hundreds of private security companies have sprung up and it’s likely a significant employer these days to the point where politicians might be both benefiting from the crime (ties have been alluded to between local politicians, police and criminals) and from the security industry’s employment of their supporters.

Yet crime chases away foreign investment, tourists (Benedict Cumberbatch was robbed and abducted in South Africa), and its own citizens. I never left because of crime yet crime keeps me from moving back.

Where does this lack of respect of law come from? It comes from the top. The ANC was a movement which was wholly funded by foreign interests throughout the 1990s. Before it came into power in the 1994 elections, many ANC cadres were already well practiced in the dark arts of diverting and purloining donor funds. And though there were some internal efforts to check this, they proved largely ineffectual. Many of those caught embezzling money were not just let off the hook but subsequently promoted into the highest positions in the state. One was even made the country's Chief of Police and ended up as the head of Interpol.

Through replacing white bureaucrats in the civil service with black patrons (called “Cadre Deployment”) and divvying out state contracts (“Tenderpreneurship”) to friends and family, state capture of all business has become the norm, resulting in an infinite loop of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. If black politician is accused of corruption, he is seldom successfully prosecuted.

During Covid, the World Bank lent the South African Government ZAR 500 billion (which even in dollars is a staggering amount).The funds went missing the moment they became available and Covidprenuers were created overnight. This was meant to alleviate the economic hardship lockdown would have on the economy. That money evaporated. Friends of mine were having to organize food banks to feed local villages and communities because the politicians pocketed all of that.

The disillusionment with the ANC is not just a white-South African issue. Many black South Africans see the ANC for the inept kleptocracy for what it is. This lady recalls the Apartheid past with nostalgia and gives a damning attack against “democracy”. She calls the ANC “Satanic” - https://x.com/recon1_za/status/1897185761319117063?s=61&t=ZkGlKlsk87_0RhWymgVxlw

This young man doesn’t hold back after Cyril Ramaphosa’s Speech of the State of the Nation:

There are a plethora of videos and posts on social media from all South Africans, not just white or Afrikaner, complaining about the ANC and its corruption, incompetence, arrogance and myopic policies. It is becoming clearer to many South Africans that the Expropriation Act and the Land Court Act are merely more levers for the ruling party to pull to acquire even more power and wealth.

Farm Attacks

And then there are the Plaasmoorde. The farm murders. Attacks on farmers started to escalate. The attacks are carried out by several men, highly armed and sometimes carrying signal jammers. The attacks are brutal. Savage. This documentary by an English journalist is not for the faint of heart:

So close to the heart of the matter - who is behind the attacks - that this journalist’s passport was seized at Johannesburg’s international airport and she was told to never return to South Africa, citing “racism”. Her documentary in fact goes on to show how much love and kindness exist between farm owner and his/her workers. The loyalty and affection runs deep, one farmer feeling that despite the attack, despite the trauma his family suffered and his child on anti-depressants, he feels he needs to keep the farm in part to support his worker.

This documentary by a local South African journalist, starts out hard:

“There was an elderly man and he was in his late 80s and he was tortured for almost 9 hours in his house. When we arrived at the scene, his nail marks were stuck in the carpets throughout the house. And that day changed my entire way of thinking about farm attacks. Because no one can come and show me where that happens so regularly in any city robbery or urban area in this country.”

Farmers have left South Africa in droves. They’ve moved all over Africa, some to America, some to Russia. They have been welcomed everywhere. Hardworking, motivated. Nearly 12,000 young farmers work on a temporary on American farms for half of the year.

Above is an image from X showing the high-powered signal jammers used by farm attackers. This kind of equipment is not easy to come by and is not cheap. Some of the jammers found with the invaders are the exact same ones used by the South African Defense Force.

I spoke to another friend of mine who is involved with African governments in relation to strategic security and military affairs. He said to me a few years ago that the South African government lacks the political will to do anything. If the government had the political will to stop the farm murders and crime they could. I never thought political will mattered until I saw Bukele turn El Salvador around in a matter of a few years. Javier Milei in Argentina has literally moved a country from inflation at a 1000% to 2% in a year. Political Will is EVERYTHING. Decisive leadership coupled with a supportive legislature and an effective police force can implement drastic, positive changes in a country. We are not doomed to inflation and crime.

When we threw out Apartheid, racist laws were meant to end. Calling out the mass killing of a people in South Africa ought not to have any place in the Rainbow Nation. We were supposed to be a democratic country that provided freedom and human rights to all its citizens. That was the declared intent of the ANC. But instead, the ANC, which can’t escape its communist dogma, implemented their “boiling frog” plan.

“In his brutal honesty, Ramaphosa told me of the ANC’s 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.”

Dr Mario Oriani-Ambrosini

More proof comes from the ANC’s very own document on the issue:

If nothing else, you can say that the ANC have never really wavered from their initial agenda. Consistency seems to be their only achievement in 30 years.

Strategic National Interests and the “Ethnonationalist Gangster Regime in Pretoria”

When I studied International Relations at Wits University, we spent a semester on US Foreign Policy which was in truth a study in what is a country’s National Interest. The geopolitics of a country - its geography, climate, resources, land - determines what a country’s national interest is.

Russia will always be concerned about land invasions. China will always want to secure arable farmland. These are facts arising from a nation’s geographical circumstances.

Likewise, a country will seek to secure its interests abroad and keep its population safe. This is common logic but we’ve seen with the Western nations how distorted those interests have become with Wokeism and the change in their own demographics as their populations are increasingly more Islamic (through unchecked immigration) and no longer Judeo-Christian. This is all obvious of course but has to be said in order to lay the foundation for why America (not just Donald Trump) have taken a dim view of South Africa in recent years.

Like it or not, in 2022 America took the position that Ukraine was aggressively invaded by Russia and Russia was to be sanctioned and excluded from the civilized community of nations. Visa and Mastercard pulled out of Russia, the Euro-Dollar system of finance was undermined and Russia needed to sell oil to fund the war. We drove Russia into the arms of China and BRICS, an organization that was more a club than an economic association, took on new life. BRICS is made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and is supposed to represent a counter-balance to the Western-US led financial and economic system. It’s debatable whether South Africa has the economic might to be in that group, but it’s managed to convince the others that it has something to offer. BRICS is a strategic threat to the US. How much of a threat is not clear yet, but it challenges US and Western hegemony and that is an issue.

Israel remains a key strategic partner to the US. It is the only democracy in the Middle East and a trusted ally of the US. It is a launchpad for the US into the Middle East and it will remain that way for decades to come. Iran, operating from a weak position due to sanctions, cannot project its power overtly but has chosen to do so through proxy wars and its various fundamentalist groups that it sponsors. Hezbollah was Iran’s creation and Iran has sponsored almost every Shiite Muslim jihadist group that’s sprung up.

You may recall that days prior to the Oct 7^th attacks, Saudi Arabia and Israel were preparing to announce to a peace deal, which would have turned the Middle East on its head. Iran has been in a constant conflict with Saudi Arabia to be the predominant power in the region, and has sponsored, amongst others, Hamas for several years.

Several months after the attack, the South African government filed an International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide .The timing was odd. It was Israel that had been attacked, Israel’s citizens mowed down in their beds and homes. Israeli girls brutally raped and then paraded on the streets of Gaza, and Israelis kidnapped and held hostage - still to this day. It made no sense to an outsider why South Africa, this so-called beacon of human rights and women’s rights, would take the position that it took - that is until the ANC went from being unable to pay its debts and facing liquidation and had millions of dollars to spend on the 2024 election the following year.

Informed rumor has it that Iran sent a delegation to South Africa with either a literal or figurative briefcase of money and paid the ANC party cadres to file the claim against Israel. Word is that the Trump administration is looking into this alleged bribe by the Iranian government.

On the one side, during Apartheid the ANC was funded and supported by other communist and terrorist organizations around the world. On the other side, the West gave the ANC safe haven and succor while allowing them to use the West’s media platforms to propagate their narrative. Call them freedom-fighters if you will, but the fact of the matter is that the ANC embbed in these terrorist organizations, acted like a terrorist organization in South Africa pre-1994. ANC members were hosted and funded by the PLO (the Palestinian Liberation Organization), Russia (formerly the Soviet Union), Gaddafi, Iran, North Korea, China. You name your Axis of Evil and the ANC had them over for tea after 1994.

After 1994, the South African government under ANC rule cozied up to just about every terrorist group on the US watchlist. The South African government has turned a blind eye to the Islamic fundamentalist training camps set up all over South Africa. It’s common knowledge that Al Qaeda and its spawn ISIS have training operations throughout South Africa. Islam is not just a tolerated religion, it’s becoming a force to be reckoned within the country. The US has already called out South Africa on this issue.

“A classified report allegedly drafted by the country’s National Intelligence Agency in 1998 noted the presence of Hamas delegates and affiliated individuals in the country. The report detailed these individuals’ fundraising efforts and attendance at conferences near Pretoria that were attended by members of other Islamist militant organizations such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. The report stated that foreign Islamist militants “prefer[red] to keep South Africa [as a] rear base for military training, convalescence, fund raising, media and proselytizing,” claims that were later confirmed by the head of the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee in 2007. Kasrils, for his part, raised concerns in 2008 that al-Qaeda operatives were taking refuge in South Africa with the possibility of establishing networks.

These assessments came after the arrest of two South Africans, Dr. Feroz Ganchi and Zubair Ismail, in a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid in Gujrat, Pakistan in 2004. Ganchi and Ismail were captured in the company of one of the perpetrators of al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and were alleged to have been planning attacks in South Africa at the time of their arrest. Then in 2007, the U.S. government sought to add two South African cousins, Farhad Ahmed Dockrat and Junaid Ismail Dockrat, to a list of UN sanctions on al-Qaeda and Taliban members.According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the cousins worked as al-Qaeda financiers who had “facilitate[ed] travel for individuals to train in al Qaida camps” in Pakistan.”

[https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/the-counterterrorism-conundrum-exploring-the-evolution-of-south-africa-s-extremist-networks]

In 2024, 95 Libyan militants were flown back to Tripoli, on a chartered jet, after being discovered at a secret military training camp in Mpumalanga:

A whistleblower was charged when she tried to expose the training camps:

Iran remains a material adversary of the US Government. Concern about the actions of the ANC is bipartisan in the US. Last year the Biden Administration took a dim view of South Africa meddling in the Israeli-Hamas affair as a proxy for Iran. In February 2024, a bill was proposed condemning South Africa South Africa BILL (See this link) that stated:

“SEC. 3. SENSE OF CONGRESS. It is the sense of Congress that—

(1) it is in the national security interest of the United States to deter strategic political and security cooperation and information sharing with the PRC and the Russian Federation, particularly any form of cooperation that may aid or abet Russia’s illegal war of aggression in Ukraine or its international standing or influence; and

(2) the ANC’s foreign policy actions have long ceased to reflect its stated stance of nonalignment, and now directly favor the PRC, the Russian Federation, and Hamas, a known proxy of Iran, and thereby undermine United States national security and foreign policy interests.”

The US Embassy website in South Africa is unequivocal in its position vis-a-vis South Africa’s policies:

Trump had in fact focused on South Africa during his first presidency when in a Tweet on August 22, 2018 he instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate land seizures and the large scale murder of farmers in South Africa. His current position should not come as a surprise to the ANC leaders.

It should be noted that Trump is not completely alone in calling out the South African Government. Recently, the World Bank has also come out and publicly told the ANC that excessive regulation and BEE are crippling the country economically.

Joel Pollak, an investigative journalist for Breitbart News, and slated to be the next US Ambassador to South Africa, is of South African birth and Jewish. He also spent several years in South Africa in various advisory capacities to the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. He is highly educated on South Africa and quite frankly is probably the most suitable candidate for that diplomatic role. He has been outspoken on this issue in the past few weeks.

In a recent webinar, Joel raised the issue that the US Consulate in Johannesburg would be shut down if the ANC Government went ahead with its plan to rename the street on which the US Consulate sits after a Palestinian terrorist, Leila Khaled, who hijacked two planes - deliberately reminiscent of 9/11 and deliberately to provoke the US. The ANC dispelled any doubts as to their intentions with this move:

“We want the US embassy to change their letterhead to Number 1 Leila Khaled Drive. We are sending a message that they cannot dominate us and tell us what to do. It must be in their faces, it must be in their computers, on their letterheads.”

Nomvula Mokonyane, the first deputy secretary-general of the AN

I highly recommend watching the webinar with Joel Pollak to better understand the Trump’s position on South Africa:

On February 7, 2025, President Trump issued the following Executive Order:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/addressing-egregious-actions-of-the-republic-of-south-africa/

On February 11, 2025, four US Representatives penned a letter [Letter to Pres DJT.pdf] to President Trump calling the ANC-majority government an “ethnonationalist gangster regime” and call on Trump on him to hold them accountable:

250,000 jobs will be lost if South Africa is removed from AGOA. The ANC’s communist slant does not sit well with the US government under Trump. AGOA’s eligibility criteria require a country to protect private property rights. If South Africa proceeds with the Expropriation Act, it will violate the criteria for participation in AGOA and SA should expect to be expelled from that tariff-free regime.

It is clear to any observer that the ANC leadership has utterly failed to anticipate the Trump Administration’s position towards them. They have also failed to counter that position with anything other than Apartheid-era rhetoric couched in terms reminiscent of African independence movements in the '50s crossed over with Leftist quasi-communist diatribes. It’s challenging to determine whether their reaction is either sheer incompetence or deliberate antagonism, but in either case, their arrogance is on full display.

Instead of reading the room, the ANC has widened the rift with the US and overtly sided closer to the edge, even announcing that they would consider co-operating with Iran on nuclear technology.

In retaliation to Trump’s declaration on South Africa, EFF leader Julius Malema reacted with: ”The statement by Donald Trump is offensive and undermines our sovereignty. We want to make it categorically clear to the President of the USA that we are going to expropriate land without compensation and pursue legislative measures to do so—and no threat will stop us."

The South African government subsequently aligned itself with Colombia, Honduras, and Bolivia, with whom it does virtually no trade, to fight against the United States, its second-biggest trading partner. President Ramaphosa, along with the leftist President of Colombia and the Prime Minister of Malaysia published an article in Foreign Policy on February 25, attacking Israel without even mentioning Hamas’ actions on Oct 7th.

Aside from the article being drenched in hypocrisy, it took aim at President Trump:

“The recent proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to “take over” Gaza—meaning annexation followed by ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, who Trump has suggested should be deported to Egypt and Jordan—strikes at the very foundations of international law, which the global community has a duty to defend. Such actions, if pursued, would constitute a grave violation of international law and the fundamental principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter.”

Joel Pollak noted at the time that the article would elicit a strong response from the US, including targeted financial sanctions against its author and his wealthy cadres:

We all saw how the meeting between President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy went. Trump was willing to do a deal with Zelenskyy but when Zelenskyy in front of the press started to disrespect Trump and Vance, they turned on him. Joel Pollak has noted in another of his interviews with a South African podcaster that Trump does not forget who maligns him in public and that there are consequences for doing so.

So then it should not have been a shock to the South African government that their ambassador to the US, Ibrahim Rasool, was thrown out the USA last week after calling Trump a “supremacist”and implying that the people who voted for Trump were racists:

Joel Pollak commented that:

"It shows a failure to understand the American electorate and I think that failure that comes from imbibing a kind of ordinary, garden-variety, left-wing agin promo as a Lind of media diet. It is not good for understanding reality.”

The ANC and by extension the EFF and their offshoots are stodgy ideologists stuck in struggle that was over 30 years ago. But that defined them and they have seemed to latch onto a delusion that they are in a racist struggle with Trump and they hew to that line with stupefying monotony.

Following the announcement of the expulsion of the Rasool, Malema’s EFF formally called Trump the “grand wizard of a global flu klux klan dressed up as Make America Great Again (MAGA)”

At least Zelensky had the street smarts to apologize.

What does the Future hold for South Africa?

Trump has invited Afrikaners to apply for asylum as refugees. You can be sure that this move comes from his personal ties to so many highly accomplished South Africans on the world stage. We are a small nation but literally punch above our weight (thank you, Drickus). We benefit any country we move to. Only 7.4 million citizens pay income tax in a population of 63 million and 50% of the population are on some form of social grant or welfare. In 2024, 1,660,182 individuals—a mere 2.6% of the country’s population—contributed 76.2% of all personal income tax. The official unemployment rate was 32.1% in the third quarter of 2024.

SA's national debt (excluding debt of SA's SOE's) now stands at ZAR 4,570 trillion. That is 74.97% of GDP and payment of interest alone is ZAR 192 billion a year. South Africa is bankrupt. In a recent budget meeting, the ANC pushed to increase value-added tax to 17% from 15%. This was rejected at the time by the other parties in the GNU, at which point the ANC proposed a wealth tax, which clearly was unacceptable and we are now back at looking at an increase in VAT.

As a sign of the times, the ANC’s own staff haven’t been paid a salary for February.

Joel Pollak makes the point that what Trump is doing with his Executive Order allowing Afrikaners to come to the US as refugees is to highlight to the ANC and the world, that the most important resource South Africa has is its people. That the ANC is willing to lose its high quality citizens (and likely the majority of the citizens paying tax) purely out of some historic drive for vengeance, is to destroy the country for all future generations - black and white.

The South Africa in 2025 is not the South Africa of Mandela. Forgiveness is not a current internal policy of the ANC. Reconciliation is not on their agenda. What is on the ANC agenda now is theft under the guise of “redressing historical wrongs” and murder under the guise of “misunderstood utterances (not hate speech)” from the “opposition”.

Last week Tucker Carlson interviewed Ernst Roets, a well-known figure in South Africa , author of Kill the Boer and a former member of Afriforum, about the country and its challenges:

Ernst is potentially facing charges of treason along with four other South Africans that travelled to the US in the past few weeks to speak directly to lawmakers about the dire circumstances in South Africa. The ANC and EFF has accused them of spreading misinformation (now, doesn’t that phrase seem familiar?)

Personally, I do not want South Africans to leave my country in droves. As it is, over a million South Africans have fled to economic opportunities abroad - like myself. Any more and the country will be hollowed out. Vibrant, valuable commercial farms would be looted and then left derelict as happened in Zimbabwe. People would starve. Deindustrialization would occur. The Springboks would no longer win the Rugby World Cup. A country that breeds the best athletes and incredibly successful businessmen and women would be another failed state on the African continent run by despots.

Rob Hersov, a successful South African billionaire, goes into this in detail:

I believe that Trump, informed by his South African friends, can see that if he doesn’t take a stand against the ANC, the country would be lost forever.

The ANC has been mollycoddled by Western nations for too long. They have held onto the view that the ANC is the darling of the “free world” refusing to see reality for what it is. That is not unusual with the European Union whose bureaucrats are happy to commit cultural suicide in the misguided belief that they are being compassionate to illegal immigrants. The EU wanted a vaccine passport. The EU wants digital ID. Them supporting the ANC for 30 years of corrupt, inept and now destructive rule is in line with their general delusion of reality. No doubt to irk Trump, the EU recently committed to sending billions of dollars to the ANC for “investment”.

But we now have the party of Common Sense in the US and they call it like it is. A recent podcast with Joel Pollak describes how Trump sees South Africa and it’s worth understanding that as we head into what will become a confrontation between the two countries:

The Trump administration's efforts to pressure the SA government to close the door that the Expropriation Act is trying to open, represents the first time in living memory that the leader of a Western democracy has sought to rein in the ANC's kleptocracy – as it enters its final and most ruinous phase with the Expropriation Act - rather than excuse, enable or profit from it.

If it means that 1980s-style sanctions are levied against South Africa, tariffs imposed, South Africa kicked out of the AGOA free trade agreement, so be it. Actions need to be taken.

I believe that if South Africa is not saved under Trump, it will never be. We are at the Rubicon in South African’s history. Cross the river, we must.