*South Africa*
[image: File photo. Police fire rubber bullets at residents at point blank
range, 13 March 2014, in Bekkersdal, Westonaria. Residents protested by
blockading streets and pelting police cars over an election campaign
planned by the ANC. Picture: Alaister Russell]
*Police and ANC Fired and Shot Protesting South African Schoolchildren and
the ANC Betrayal, The Clock is Ticking...*
March 19th, 2014
South Africa and the sterile flower of its Rainbow democracy has once
again raised it ugly petals of ANC betrayal. Since history is the best
indicator, those of our progressive leadership in solidarity with the ANC
as the sole leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle. One would think that
the so-called progressive activist seem to always lack political insight
and historical understanding of the forces that they were in solidarity
with.
For this brings up the political integrity and insight of the US
solidarity movement and its single issue approach to most things in the
world. One of the things that the solidarity can't seem to face is the
actual betrayal of the masses of the South African people by the ANC
leadership through Nelson Mandela.
Since the mid-90s to Nelson Mandela death the world has seen the
confuse chaos on internal dog fighting of who will get the grand prize of
money and prominence from the electoral vehicle.
<http://eyesandvoice.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/nelson-mandelas-death-9-controversial-things-that-happened-drogba-sign-man-obama-and-more/>
While, in all bourgeois class elections of bourgeois democracy when
the population is never in the position to choose any candidate, must
choice the candidate that was given, the role of this type of democracy is
to build consensus with political candidates and forces against their
material interests. Thus the role of the electoral process is to provide
rationalize of the capitalist election system as the best representative of
human choice in a democracy. While the question of democratizing the
economy will never be raised, thus the politicians must rely on symbolism
of personal decency and concern. For this only provides a trade of theater
and never actual program. For this involves a culture that dumb down the
people outside of their own interests and to seek what is just through
celebrity of elections.
What history has shown the world that the once so-called leadership
of South African liberation has become the violent hounds of protectors of
white capital and Black middle class privilege and there are no different
than the violence of the white power of apartheid.
[image: South
African sign language interpreter Thamsanqa Jantjie, 34.] Thamsanqa Jantjie
Now the ANC has to try to maintain a level of legitimacy in the
coming May 7th, 2014 election, after more than decade of Black working
people betrayal by the ANC. Perhaps the gestures of Thamsanqa Jantjie the
deaf signer at the Nelson Mandela funeral would be more relevant in
expressing complete garbage of the coming internal dog fight of political
symbolism.
Last week the world has seen the empty dance of symbolism become the
dance of repression of the people. What has to be understood in
understanding current events in South Africa is to understand the
transition from anti-apartheid to neo-liberalism was led by the ANC and its
middle class agenda.
A few days ago on March 15, African National Congress (ANC) spokesman
Nkenke Kekana said his party would meet the citizens of Bekkersdal to
discuss "concerns of the community." Town citizens, together with
schoolchildren, were shot at last week by the police and members of an ANC
delegation campaigning in the area.
[image: Gauteng healthier, residents live longer - Nomvula Mokonyane] Nomvula
Mokonyane
Bekkersdal was the scene of powerful and intense protests lasting a
month towards the end of 2013. People have not forgotten a visit paid by
Gauteng premier Nomvula Mokonyane last October, when she was jeered and
insulted by the very large crowds. She exacerbated that situation by
telling her audience, "People can threaten us and say they won't vote, but
the ANC doesn't need their dirty votes."
When people heard last week that the ANC dignitaries would be
campaigning in the area, they erupted even in Mokonyane's absence.
Schooling was disrupted around 11 a.m. as pupils flooded into the streets.
The local tabloid paper called mostly based Gauteng called *The*
*Citizen* of the prior day carried a photo taken in Bekkersdal of an armed
man wearing ANC colors. Nkenke said, "Right now, we don't know who that
person is. If he is a [VIP] protector, he is not supposed to wear ANC gear."
Nelson Mdayi of the ANC
Without much difficulty, the *Mail & Guardian* identified the man as
former ANC councilor Nelson Mdayi.
As the blue armed cowards of the South African Police Service (SAPS)
carry out state repression against unarmed miners is going to give the
stench of South African fascism under ANC leadership.
Another image from the *Citizen* shows a South African Police Service
(SAPS) officer firing a shotgun at point-blank range at two civilians
backed up against a wall. Along with scores of other towns, Bekkersdal in
the west of Gauteng continues to be the scene of violent protests over
issues like municipal corruption. In last week's incident, residents vented
their spleen on an ANC contingent including Ntombi Mekgwe, head of the
housing department in the provincial cabinet, and the West Rand district
municipality mayor, Mpho Nawa. The politicians were canvassing door-to-door
for the party ahead of the May 7 elections, when they were forced to vacate
the area after being pelted with stones.
Six people were arrested for public violence, according to Gauteng
police spokesman Lt. Col. Lungelo Dlamini. ANC Gauteng caucus spokesman
Mbangwa Xaba praised the SAPS and claimed there were no deaths or injuries
in the clashes.
Police fired at schoolchildren and residents who had barricaded
streets with rocks and burning tires. The *Citizen* likened the scene to
the Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976. By the time the ANC dignitaries
arrived, there were running battles between residents and police and
columns of black smoke in the air.
A potential scapegoat for the authorities, the local community leader
Thabang Wesi, denied that he initiated the attack on the ANC campaigners.
Wesi, a leader of the Greater Westonaria Concerned Residents' Association,
said "residents learnt about the ANC's planned campaign through social
media networks." He also goes to say that the violence was from another
incident between two rivals local gangs call the Calabash and the Creatures.
As evidenced by the two-month platinum miners' strike, working class
militancy is enjoying a needed revival. The weekly protests in every
province are like little explosions foreshowing a more general
conflagration. The timing could not be worse for the ruling ANC.
During another door-to-door campaign last Saturday in the Jacksonville
area of Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape province, President Jacob Zuma was
jeered and booed by a crowd that was so inimical that bodyguards had to
physically intercede. Before that, Zuma was booed at the South Africa vs.
Brazil soccer match on March 5 at FNB Stadium. This is the same venue that
hosted Nelson Mandela's memorial service last year, and where Zuma was
booed in front of a global audience. *City Press* reported that the ANC's
own internal polls show electoral support for the party slumping in 2014 to
as little as %36 percent in Gauteng. The ANC won %64.4 percent of the same
vote in 2009. An ANC West Rand branch chairperson said of the internal poll
results, "The mistake we made was to underestimate Julius [Malema's] boys."
[image: Jacob Zuma ((c) Gallo Images)] Jacob Zuma being booed in Port
Elizabeth
Expelled from the ANC, Malema now leads the Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF), which according to a 2013 Markinor poll could win over %7 percent of
the vote in the province. Another ANC leader remarked that his party may
well find itself in the "embarrassing situation where we have to go cap in
hand, begging to Julius for a coalition for us to stay in power."
In spite of his leftist rhetoric, Malema has already signaled the EFF's
readiness to serve in that capacity.
[image: Julius Malema's appeal didn't go so well and he has been expelled
...] Julius Malema
The ANC position is that protests like those at Bekkersdal are about
service delivery. More specifically, the party line is that a minority of
citizens impatiently take to violence when they see that they lack the
facilities already delivered to other communities, courtesy of the ANC
government.
Peter Alexander and other researchers attached to the South African
Research Chair in Social Change at the University of the Witwatersrand
(Wits) refute such claims. In a *Business Day* piece, Alexander et al.
point out that the very rubric "service delivery protest" has become a
catch-all for issues encompassing representation, corruption, unemployment
and crime. Citizens also complain about the quality of municipal services
as opposed to absolute non-delivery.
The Wits researchers urge the establishment to "take into account the
way in which sympathetic handling of grievances can minimize conflict, and
that dishonesty and arrogance trigger disorder." Excluding the bloodbath at
Marikana, they note that 43 protesters have been killed by police since
2004. There are "no reports of police killed by protesters."
[image: Cyril Ramaphosa] Cyril Ramaphosa
The ANC government is oblivious and neglectful of all this. Already,
indications are that Cyril Ramaphosa, one of the instigators of the
Marikana mass murder of miners, is to serve as deputy president in the new
administration. In this role, he will be entrusted and assigned with
fulfilling the National Development Plan (NDP). Together with trigger-happy
policing, the NDP, is an anti-poor neo-liberal blueprint, is the white
ruling elite's only answer to the worsening crisis of global capitalism.
Under these circumstances, the ANC polls suggest that fully %25
percent of characteristic ANC voters are undecided about their preference
in the upcoming election.
For under this sterile dance of so-called rainbow freedom of the
economic privilege of white settler colonialism and their raging dogs and
proxies will play the dance of empty symbolism of electoral celebrities of
plastic flowers trying to sale this is a real rose of democracy and they
will even ask that Africans must take in the grant scent of this plastic
rose, only to be told, by the metallic click of a fully loaded magazine
ready to dance with the blue shirted cowards of the South African Police
Service and this bitter dance of revolution will scream the whisper before
the final assault to the people that history was on their side, but not
time...
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