With this Mattress Money, we Will Liberate our People

Ramaphosa has burnt the last false hopes of the Rainbow Nation

This post will be relatively short, since I have a lot of work I need to get through before my first child is born, but I couldn’t resist climbing into this one.

For the past several years, the progressive media have attempted to sell us the notion that Cyril Ramaphosa, the trade-unionist who became a billionaire without ever starting any enterprise of his own, is the squeaky-clean corruption-fighter we needed to end the Zuma era, for which all failures of ANC governance could then be blamed.

They had to believe the ANC could be rescued, because it had been chosen by the vast majority of black voters for decades. To accept that the ANC were fundamentally beyond any hope was to say the same for the voters, and thus the whole post-apartheid order. For the Liberals, the hope was to convert the black majority to English Liberalism.

Such was the unspoken logic.

As mad as that sounds, it has persisted right up until five minutes ago. when the President of the “moderate faction” of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, got caught with US$4mil stuffed into his furniture. After his house help had collaborated with a criminal gang to nick the cash, Ramaphosa scrambled to intervene and prevent the crime entering the official record, pulling strings, bribing, kidnapping and intimidating the various parties to ensure silence.

Arthur Fraser, a Coloured RET loyalist and senior intelligence officer, sat on the evidence since 2019, and then suddenly decided it was time to drop the bomb, just in time for a planned national shutdown by RET allies in the EFF.

What the result has been, is that the progressives and the Liberals have been forced to abandon all hope. At first, there was shock. Then there was denial, then there was a lot of fingerpointing at Fraser and his factional motives. And now they are just pissed off.

Helen Zille @helenzille

I have to be honest and admit that, until fairly recently, I thought there were some decent people left in the ANC with whom we might, one day, be able to negotiate a new govt. That hope is now well and truly dashed. They are all, indeed, the African National Criminals.

Watching Daily Maverick and M&G journos turn on Ramaphosa in press conferences has been a delight. But they have little idea about what to say beyond expressing a sense of betrayal and frustration. But for everyone, the writing is on the wall, and almost everyone can see it.

Raymond Suttner has a fairly decent analysis, as does Heinrih Bohmke. Even Stephen Grootes, who usually is fairly milquetoast, has become dour and pessimistic lately, and this last straw seems to have broken the back of his compulsive optimism.

What I find remarkable, is how these left-wing writers have been so forcibly confronted with reality that they have even become accustomed to describing matters in the same way as I do, and I am fairly far off on the other end of the political aisle. They refer to the ANC as a cartel where unity means omerta, and consider the country and its entire order doomed by the endless factionalism of our political system.

The entire post-apartheid order was doomed from the get-go. A centralised party-list proportionally-representative democracy was destined to produce a dominant-party system, followed by the European-style quagmire of rotating coalitions centred on an un-purgeable political core.

That’s bad enough when you are a wealthy and educated country with a common set of values, but utterly lethal to a violent, broken and divided country with one of the sickest economies in the modern world.

All battles for meaning in coalition politics (indeed in democratic politics of most forms) are vitiated by horse-trading, and serious reform is impossible, while state largess must grow indefinitely.

The calcification of permanent interests means a staunch core who controls the media and permanent institutions who will viciously attack from any and all angles that one force that can create the leverage for reform - populism.

And so we are destined to grind ourselves into dust.

The alternative is to clear the way for radical transformation of the political system, and there are only two such ways open to us now - Cape independence, and black-national-socialism.

These are not exclusive either. A post-Cape South Africa would then have to wrestle with the identity of a nation carved from the brutality and greed of the Rothschild family and the Anglo-supremacy of the English Idealists of the Round Table group who dreamed of creating a world government through empire and reunion with the USA.

The same people are with us today. The American-backed Oppenheimer dynasty has dominated mining since the 1920s. The Rothschilds are now the biggest receivers of BEE contracts under Cyril. The old Afrikaner entrepreneurs who dreamed of building the nation instead settled for being filthy rich, and now back the same forces, as Smuts did when glory and pretty philosophy tempted him to embrace the millenarian whimsy of his former enemies.

In wrestling with their own destiny, the youth of Azania would then have to ask themselves if this chimera the empire stitched them into is the best way to survive and prosper and preserve their heritage. They will have to confront the real limits of power without scapegoats in their midst. They will need to follow the state-building processes that every people ahs been forced to confront since the dawn of agriculture.

Whether they will choose the path of nationalism or remain a kind of post-imperial satrapy remains to be seen, though Gauteng will certainly remain at the heart of this mess, tempting each neighbour to conquest and domination at the behest of transnational capital.

The descent is inevitable, friends. Only those who renounce the accursed share and the dreams of Empire may prosper, and even then, the future cannot be guarenteed.

I pray we all choose wisely.