Tag: socialism

The State Capture Report released by Chief Justice Raymond Zondo is a scathing account of collusion between the State and politically connected cronies. The Inquiry took almost four years and cost nearly R1 billion to complete; uncovering the reasons why State-owned entities are performing abysmally with corruption playing a central role in the decay.

The recent press reports of the Venezuelan government relaxing its controls over the economy is heartening. This comes after the government of Zimbabwe also in recent years signalled its intention to open up for business and set right the disaster of Mugabe-era land grabs. South Africa would do well to take heed of this trend away from socialism toward freedom.

Proponents of socialism and social democracy would have you believe that capitalism is a purely Western construct that carries no deeper legitimacy in terms of our evolutionary development or our historical roots. They claim that the hierarchical nature of capitalism was imposed by the West, and without this system, humans wouldn’t arrange themselves hierarchically.

South Africa needs an extraordinary plan and a huge amount of political will to dig itself out of the proverbial hole we find ourselves. The ANC’s discussion document ‘Reconstruction, growth and transformation: building a new inclusive economy’, is not such a plan.

The almost simultaneous implosion of socialist and communist systems throughout the world is arguably the single most significant political event of the twentieth century. The year 1989 is particularly poignant because in that year the Berlin Wall was dismantled.  This event signalled the beginning of the end of socialism in Europe and hastened an already growing worldwide disillusionment with socialist ideology.

It is most astonishing that even as the Venezuelan crisis unfolds on TV screens across the world, the orientation of governance in the United States is in danger of degenerating into the same socialist experimentation that has brought such suffering and tragedy to the South American country.

The people of Africa have been subjected to multiple injustices, slights, and violence. The list of things inflicted on Africans is endless and has no modern equivalent, except for Asia in geographical terms and the Jews in ethnic terms.

Venezuela is proof of the miraculous impact of socialism. They took a prosperous nation and destroyed it almost overnight. That’s a problem for that other socialist paradise - Cuba.

If you counted every hair on your head, that amount probably will not add up to the amount of times you have read and heard about the causes of the Eskom crisis. Corruption and state capture have been identified as the bedrock reasons why South Africans have been thrown into darkness over the past two weeks. A few people have pinpointed the unions as the cause of the problem because they are enraged about President Ramaphosa’s announcement that Eskom will be unbundled. Yet others have laid the blame on transformation policies, specifically BEE.

“Black man, you are on your own.” – S Biko. What did Biko mean when he said this? Did he mean that putting people with a black skin colour in power would automatically solve all our problems?