Cape to NATO

Why the Cape is essential to the West

Readers of this blog will be aware that I am rather critical of America. I don’t like their progressivism, and I don’t like their strongarm foreign policy tactics. But I sure do prefer them to the Chinese, if anyone’s going to be sovereign. Plus my grandfather was American, so I do still have a soft spot for them.

For small nations there are few times when the stars align to open a window to heaven, but it seems that for us pale natives of the southern wild, just such a vault has manifested itself. Of course, this is not to say that it will be easy to squeeze through this narrow wicket gate, but with hell on our tails, we have little other option.

From the Western perspective, South Africa is a story of misery and dashed hopes for liberal universalists, just as it is for us orphaned colonial stragglers caught in the web of their ambitions at the height of the unipolar moment.

But today, there is a peculiar arrangement of factors that threatens us with far too much of a good time, and offers our sympathisers across the ocean an opportunity to offer a pragmatic shoulder to lean on, while securing a key strategic position for the coming frozen conflict with the Eastern Alliance.

There is a constellation coming together, and from the Donbas War, Saudi de-dollarisation, and the 2024 elections in South Africa and the United States, we can snatch a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

Going East

At the risk of stating the obvious, the ANC is in love with the East. While our state relies on the West for much of its trade, the ruling party has long hoped for the right opportunity to shift its allegiance to the East, and has recently shown this inclination rather boldly.

When the Russians invaded Ukraine, the ANC adopted a formally neutral position, but in private celebrated the end of American hegemony in a cocktail bash at the Russian embassy. They plan to host Vladimir Putin this year, in defiance of an global warrant issued by the Americans for his arrest.

Additionally, while naval drills with the Eastern powers are not new, the recent ones have achieved opprobrium for the fact that military drills with the Americans have been turned down, leading to a rebuke from certain American Congressmen, though it seems unlikely their Bill (HR145) will pass the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and so is justifiably ignored by our politicians. New drills now include Iran.

But the biggest benefactor is China. ANC cadres are regularly sent to the Chines Communist Party training school set up in the former mining town of Venterskroon, while our officials are sent to China to learn how they run their state-owned enterprises. The Chinese benefit from a special economic zone in Limpopo province, and has South Africa footing much of the bill, and police are taught Chinese to give the Chinese colonists privileged service delivery. This has paved the way for big loans from the China Development Bank.

BRICS, an increasingly outdated moniker, has seen some significant expansion in recent years. While looked at as a mere statement of West-vs-Rest resentment, it is more ambitious. It is actually composed of real institutions, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the New Development Bank.  

The membership of these organisations overlaps considerably, and the eagerness of new countries to join has only accelerated as a result of the recent peace deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The normalisation of relations with Egypt, Syria, Iran and Israel, coupled with the so-far successful mission to diversify and de-dollarise their economy.

This latter development is often scoffed at by economic commentators, possibly because the dollar still occupied a majority share of global trade, but it is declining, pretty much everywhere, and the backfire of the SWIFT embargo on Russia has only accelerated matters, pushing not only the BRICS bloc, but the middle east as well, to ditch the dollar and pursue trade in other currencies. Even France has done deals in yuan recently.

This is not an immediate threat to the United States, but it will be soon. Lord Jim O’Neill, former Goldman Sachs chief economist, has become a cheerleader of de-dollarisation. Admittedly not a new voice, but certainly not a small one.

South Africa may not be a very vibrant economy, but it contributes an extraordinary amount of essential minerals to the global economy. Quoting from the University of Witwatersrand Mining Institute:

16 commodities ranked in the Top 10 internationally. South Africa has the largest reserves of Platinum-group metals (PGMs; 88%), Manganese (80%), Chromite (72%) and Gold (13%) known reserves in the world. It is ranked second in Titanium minerals (10%), Zirconium (25%), Vanadium (32%), Vermiculite (40%) and Fluorspar (17%). In addition, the country contains 17% of the world’s antimony reserves. […] the country is ranked in the top three globally in terms of production of PGMs (59%), Vanadium (25%), Ferrochrome (39%), Alumino-silicates (60%), Vermiculite (35%), Zirconium (32%), Titanium minerals (19%), Manganese ore (17%) and Antimony (2%), with its Gold (8%), Coal[3] (4%), Iron ore (4%), Ferro-silicon, Silicon metal and Fluorspar ranked in the Top Ten globally.

The Cape is also one of only two routes to trade between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the other being the Suez Canal, owned by China-aligned Egypt.

Going South

There is little to say on the topic of South Africa’s demise that hasn’t already been stated in more detail and eloquence elsewhere, or by me on this blog in prior posts, but suffice it to say, every single aspect of governance is falling to pieces just like every other postcolonial disaster zone.

Our electricity supply is faltering and blackouts are now a minimum of six hours a day on a rotating local schedule, with total system failure predicted within the next year or so. This will result in widespread violence and looting, much like the partisan campaign that kicked off in 2021, resulting in the weeks-long shutdown of the Durban-Johannesburg trading corridor, which accounts for over 60% of our internal trade.

We have among the worst and most expensive public education systems in the world, one of the highest murder and suicide rates, a massive problem with political assassination, and a vast system of political corruption held up by giant tome of race-based legislation and political interference.

The shape of this system is easy to understand though. It is part of the National Democratic Revolution, a race-based third-world adaptation of Lenin’s two-stage theory of revolution. Essentially, the first is a political revolution, in which the natives take over the state, and the second is a socialist revolution, where the ruling party takes over the economy and brings socialism to the masses.

The ANC, having been boxed in by the apartheid state, and the Anglo-American establishment, were forced to abandon the second phase, but agreed to postpone it for 25 years – they are keen observers of the balance of forces, and surprisingly realistic about them, considering their blasé attitude to every other aspect of reality. And right on schedule, Cyril Ramaphosa announced the second phase as he acquired the presidency in 2019.

There is a raft of legislation that has been floated out to engender this stage of national reform, which is in various stages of completion, due to two factors. One, the ANC are colossally incompetent. Two, they are still on the back foot in balance-of-forces terms. But the reforms are to be taken seriously.

There is the Expropriation Bill, which aims to empower the state to arbitrarily dispossess anybody of property with negligible notice (á la Zimbabwe), there is the National Health Insurance Bill, which aims to nationalise the healthcare industry and outlaw private insurance, and there is the District Development Model, a strangely overlooked piece of policy which aims to remove all independence from provincial and local government by enforcing central oversight in a manner similar to the Soviet and Chinese party oversight systems.

In the meantime, the party has asserted its control over the civil service, judiciary and private sector through two policies – Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), and Cadre Deployment. Under BEE, race quotas are mandatory in ownership, employment, management and procurement. Cadre deployment means that every position is preselected from party loyalists, including private company placements. My breast-pocket reference here is Exxaro Resources, a major coal supplier:

Several members of its board of directors are either an ANC member (Mvuleni Geoffrey Qhena, Geraldine J. Fraser-Moleketi, Vincent Zwelibanzi Mntambo), or directly related to an ANC member (Mxolisi Mgojo, son of ANC veteran Khoza Mgojo), while Andiswa Ndoni is a former member of the Judicial Selection Committee, and Isaac Malevu was also hired from within the IDC. Qhena in particular was chosen by the ANC to be placed in the position, which as the CEO of the state-owned Industrial Development Corporation, was a position he was well-placed to leverage.

This means party control is almost impossible to evade. Our constitution offers little outlet for local autonomy, and the powers of the various spheres are strictly curtailed by the constitution, making it federal in name only.

Consequently, nothing will change without the ANC’s say-so. And while they are likely to lose power sometime around 2029 or after by educated predictions, we do not have that long.

Extrapolating on fiscal macro-indicators from the past ten years, we face stagnation in the best case, and total implosion by 2028 in the worst case. I took the treasury’s reported stats for the past decade, adjusted for dollar-exchange rate and inflation, and projected until 2030 based on the average growth rates of those indicators for the first five years, the second five years, and the decade average.

Very crude, yes, but considering the amount of infrastructural reconstruction required, and the 50% welfare dependency rate, it is well within reality. I will just take the best and worst cases of these three. Keep an eye out for the key thresholds for debt default/hyperinflation – 90% debt/GDP, and Peter Bernholz’s unimpeachable ratio of 40% debt/expenditure.

Observe, doom spaghetti (dotted lines plotted on the righthand side):

Looking West

So where does this leave the Cape? Well, we have made 99% of new jobs for the past year, have outstripped Gauteng in the construction sector, and have the best infrastructure in the country. So far so good.

Plus, the governing party, the Democratic Alliance, is heavily pro-Western. I have covered their rebellious pro-Western foreign policy and their provincial trade- and aid-deals with the United States before.

The differences between us and the rest of South Africa are well-noted, from demographics to political preferences – mostly minorities (white and coloured); have never voted in a majority for the ANC – and the independence movement is slowly gaining traction in international circles, albeit rather slowly. I find these foreign pieces often make a more comprehensive case than local pieces do.

What they often miss, is that we have, untapped, the purest deposit of rare earth minerals known.

The movement has begun to enter the middle stretch of its peaceful coup – with a recent bill tabled for the provincial legislature, which will tick some key boxes in international treaties signed by the ANC in the 1990s affording autonomy to subnational peoples who claim it by declaring the people of the Western Cape to be a people in our own right.

The DA is already involved in the Western Cape Devolution Working Group, which aims to seek the devolution of various powers to the provincial level. The next steps will exhaust the requirements for remedial secession by tabling a Bill for the National Assembly (with the foreknowledge that it will be rejected) calling for federal devolution for provincial governments in general.

From here, it simply remains for the Premier to call a referendum, which by independent polling, we stand a firm chance of winning. Spies in the party have let it be known to us in the movement that support is overwhelming and a independence is pretty much guaranteed to win in a referendum.

All we lack for the time being is open political endorsement from foreign states.

Kyk Noord

For the United States, which is the only real arbiter of international recognition when push comes to shove (except for, as time progresses, China) there is only one serious option for preserving their interests in South Africa in the long term – to endorse Cape independence.

It may seem a tad self-serving for me to make this argument, and it is. But for anyone paying attention to the nature of coalition politics in South Africa will note that the efforts so far to secure Liberal control over the various metropoles has failed everywhere outside the Cape.

Not only have these efforts failed, but support for the DA has been shown to decline after coalition government has been achieved. This has largely been the result of instability in these coalitions caused by small parties exploiting the weakness and slim margins of support to leverage gains for their vested interests, resulting in constant floor-crossings and shifts in government control.

This instability and political deadlock, and the resulting looting that occurs in these moments of insecurity have meant that the dramatic decline of governance in the national interior has been uninterrupted.

This resistance has involved sabotage, fraud, refusal to abide by electoral decisions, and widespread ruling-party directed protests and vandalism of public infrastructure. And that it is working to some degree is hardly surprising. The ruling party achieved its position as the sole representative of the black liberation movement through terror, bloodshed, and above all, making the country ungovernable. Their strategy in the Cape since 2011 has been deliberate and systematic collusion with the gangs to push up homicide figures and capture votes through intimidation.

And this is when they are playing for small stakes – when it comes to national elections, the notion that the ANC can be trusted to abide by any outcome which allows any element of the white minority back into national political office is folly. Their grip on key national resources will harden, and concessions to the East will accelerate, along with radical leftward reforms.

But if I were an ambitious master of American foreign policy, I would not stop at the Cape. The final aim of a power aiming to keep the free trade of essential global commodities stable would be to capture South Africa. But to do that would require encircling the old territories of the Boer republics once again.

This means capturing three ports – Cape Town, Durban, and Maputo – and squeezing Pretoria until it agrees to play ball.

These ports were once a threat to the maintenance of the customs union established between the colonies and republics under British control between 1902 and 1910 – competition between mining interests on the Rand were pitted in a truel between the port tariff regimes of the Cape and Natal, and when the tension became high, shunted their gold out of Maputo, much to British consternation, resulting in the Act of Union.

By surrounding the Rand, there would be no way for the mining belt to secure strategic deals in favour of China.  Our ports are declining, and are rated the least efficient in the world, already resulting in the shift to exports through Maputo in neighbouring Mozambique, a trend which has nearly tripled in volume since 2016:

However, reliance on Durban, Richard’s Bay, Cape Town and the Sishen-Saldanha line still occupy an enormous slice of our exports. Coega/Ngqura simply cannot replace this volume.

Cape independence is almost in the bag, and only needs a handshake from across the Atlantic to finish it off. Maputo would be relatively easy – after all, it is governed by Mozambique, who currently rely on the West for the stabilisation of the Islamist rebellion in Cabo Delgado.

Plus, the Zulus have been grumbling too – their national party, the IFP, has been rapidly gaining on the ANC, who slaughtered them for a decade and a half under the old regime. Currently, the DA and the IFP should have enough support to take KwaZulu Natal province in 2024, and the Zulu Royal Family, who have a hold over the IFP leadership, most of whom are aristocracy, are under pressure from the ANC, who have been threatening to dissolve their land holdings.

To push them toward independence would not require a great deal of effort, if one were willing to stomach the cost.  The ANC would exert a great deal of violence, though they do not have the funding to sustain it, and the party and state security forces are vastly outnumbered by local private security, who are far more competent. It is unlikely to run along the lines of the old People’s War, but more along the lines of the 2021 riots, which, while deadly and chaotic, shutting down half the country and threatening uprising, were quickly subdued, predominantly by volunteer militia from minorities and the middle class.

Of course, this is just a fantasy. But Cape independence is a reality, and an easy way to keep a small island of Western influence over the southern high seas, and for those of us living here, our only chance at liberty and prosperity.

It would be foolish of the West not to support it.