‘Zuma is a parasite’
Bravo South African media! We must applaud the Mail & Guardian for exposing President Jacob Zuma’s R65-million ‘Nkandla splurge” (December 4). What is the difference between Zuma, Mobutu Sese Seko, Robert Mugabe, Moammar Gadaffi, Daniel arap Moi and many homeland leaders who lived in luxury amid a sea of poverty?
How does a nation expect Zuma to curb the extravagance of ministers such as Siphiwe Nyanda, Blade Nzimande and Sibusiso Ndebele if he lives such an extraordinary life? Like many monarchs, Zuma is a parasite on state resources.
I concur with Frene Ginwala: both the ANC and the state are leaderless. Rusty Bernstein was correct when he warned us about post-independence leaders who use the rhetoric of the left but accumulate behind our backs. That is why Zuma is loading the state, especially the National Prosecuting Authority, the judiciary and the police, with his puppets. — Penelope Nyawose, Harding
Review was a parody of my book
Drew Forrest’s review of People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa is an unconvincing parody of my book. He seeks to explain away 540 pages of evidence about the ANC’s ‘people’s war” on the simplistic basis that my alleged ‘dizzy romance” with Inkatha lies behind my supposed determination to ‘stretch the facts to fit my preconceptions” (‘Polemic pretending to be history”, Friday, November 27).
His review is also a perversion of the truth: he asserts that the ‘people’s war” was ‘largely a figment”.
He thus ignores the ANC’s visit to Vietnam in 1978 to learn the formula for ‘people’s war” and its adoption of that formula, as reflected in the ANC document, The Green Book: Lessons from Vietnam, which makes clear the ANC’s determination to embark on ‘a protracted people’s war” involving ‘a combination of political and military action”. This is backed by a host of subsequent ANC broadcasts and publications further exhorting ‘people’s war” and, in time, praising its achievements.
Forrest asserts that the struggle was simply ‘a mass movement of ordinary South Africans”, led by the United Democratic Front (UDF), in which the ANC was largely confined to ‘cheering from the sidelines”. The fact is that the UDF was a puppet of the ANC: 24 of the UDF’s 25-strong national executive committee were members of the ANC underground. After the ANC was unbanned and back inside South Africa in the early 1990s, the ‘people’s war” intensified and the death toll in political violence rose threefold from what it had been in the 1980s.
To explain this away, the ANC and its allies developed the Third-Force theory, which Forrest endorses: the belief that the then state president, FW de Klerk, had a ‘dual strategy” of talking peace while waging war: of pretending a commitment to negotiations while using the police and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) to destabilise the ANC.
The obvious involvement of both the police and the IFP in political violence lent significant support to this theory, but no credible evidence of De Klerk’s duplicity has ever been found, despite assiduous endeavour. More than 800 police and thousands of IFP office-bearers and supporters were killed in the early 1990s, many in ambushes. A Third Force that killed so many of its own made no sense, especially when neither the police nor the IFP drew advantage from the killings but were instead weakened by them.
By contrast, the ANC had a declared dual strategy of persisting with ‘people’s war” after negotiations began, because it saw the talks as nothing but ‘an additional terrain of struggle”.
It had little compunction about attacking black civilians, including its own supporters, for a ‘people’s war” regards all civilians as expendable. The ANC had a motive: it wanted to create enough mayhem either to spark an insurrection or to weaken its opponents so it could win in negotiations.
The ANC had the means, for the peace process allowed it to bring back into South Africa about 13 000 armed and trained combatants whom it refused to disarm or disband. It was the only organisation to benefit from the 15000 political killings of the early 1990s. It used them to stigmatise De Klerk and the IFP, to stampede negotiators into giving it what Joe Slovo called ‘a famous victory” and to put great pressure on the first all-race election, while making it unthinkable for anyone to demand a re-run of the deeply flawed April 1994 poll in which it was accorded (no accurate count being possible) about 63% of the vote. Forrest ignores all this.
He also suggests Inkatha was the principal villain in violence and that my book seeks to obscure this, which ignores one of the most important lessons from Vietnam: that ‘people’s war” can be used not only against an incumbent government but also against other rivals.
It is not surprising that most of the violence was directed against Inkatha, which had a million members in KwaZulu-Natal and on the Reef and so posed the greatest obstacle to ANC hegemony. The IFP bore the brunt of casualties. The police were correct to say ‘the ANC was waging an aggressive war” against the IFP, which was ‘disadvantaged” because it ‘lacked the quantity and sophistication of the weaponry available to the ANC”.
Forrest also overlooks the violence directed at black councillors, the police, the Azanian People’s Organisation, the Pan Africanist Congress, the Labour Party in Port Elizabeth, and alleged ‘vigilantes” — all moderate blacks tired of being coerced into ANC mass-action campaigns. The ANC was the common denominator in such conflict.
It is not my book but Forrest’s review that is ‘a shallow polemic”. His real gripe is doubtless that the book succeeds too well in piercing the veil the ANC has drawn across our recent past. — Dr Anthea Jeffery, head of special research, South African Institute of Race Relations
Cultural change can help beat HIV
We agree ideologically with David Harrison in ‘Missing driver of sexual behaviour” (Letters, December 4) that South Africa’s vast socioeconomic inequalities are unjust and a significant determinant of disease. Harrison however fails in his argument that inequalities are a major driver of our national HIV epidemic.
The only evidence he provides to back up his thesis is the ‘Young People’s Sexual Health” study which found that young South Africans who had not completed school had double the HIV prevalence of those who had completed. What he omits to mention from this study is that it found that, on multivariate analysis (which is controlled for socioeconomic and education levels) African females had eight times and African males three times the HIV prevalence of the other races. Clearly something else is mediating these massive racial differences in HIV rates.
Our analysis of the Cape Area Panel Survey showed that when one includes sex-partner concurrency (having more than one partner at a time) then the racial differences in sexually transmitted infections fall away completely. This — and the fact that concurrency was not measured in the survey mentioned by Harrison — suggests that it is concurrency that is mediating the racial differences in HIV.
More compelling, however, is the fact that the only countries in the world with generalised heterosexual HIV epidemics are in Southern and Eastern Africa.
Countries elsewhere in the world with equally high markers of inequality have adult HIV prevalences of less than 1%. Clearly something else is going on here and the distinguishing feature is not the number of lifetime sexual partners but the fact that there are cultural factors which sanction men having more than one partner at a time and, as a consequence, concurrency rates are much higher here than elsewhere.
Relative deprivation may be a contributory factor, but the way HIV is patterned globally and nationally tells us that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce high HIV rates. Ugandans worked this out more than 20 years ago.
Despite being a very poor country and at a time of widening inequality, Ugandans devised a home-brewed strategy of cultural change which cut the percentage of men who had more than one partner at a time in the previous year from 35% in 1989 to 15% in 1995. As a result HIV incidence plummeted.
The question we need to ask is: are many South African academics still trying to concoct complex socioeconomic explanations to avoid addressing cultural factors that they find awkward? — Chris Kenyon and Sizwe Zondo
All the power under the sun
South Africa has all the free sunlight and unlimited supplies of zero-cost seawater needed to rid ourselves of our dependence on fossil fuels.
We could earn fortunes in foreign exchange exporting coal, refined fuels, hydrogen and carbon credits, as well as increasing our supply of fresh water for humans, animals and vegetation by at least 700 000 megalitres a year initially.
The increase in water supply would not entail one drop of additional rain but come from converting Eskom from coal to hydrogen. Additional hydrogen power plants would further increase our access to water.
The cost of conversion would be covered by the increase in our foreign exchange earnings, which would continue to grow, and our fuel supply would enjoy considerable hedging against inflation.
The only inflation-linked component would be the wages of the 100 or so staff of the hydrogen-extraction facility fuelled by the sun and using seawater as the only raw material.
To further reduce the cost of the hydrogen, the facility could sell table salt and oxygen. It may even be possible to extract gold from it. — S Berger, Johannesburg
In brief
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa is considering Eskom’s requested increase of 35% per year in the price of electricity for three years.
This means that in three years’ time, we will be paying more than twice as much for electricity. Yet the 283 municipalities have the fat to cushion ratepayers from electricity price hikes.
They should cut next year’s rates by 10% and not increase them for the following two years. — Frank du Toit, Ballito
skom charges City Power (Gauteng) 23c per kilowatt-hour (kWh), but the typical resident pays 94c/kWh, including VAT — a difference of 71c.
How can municipalities be made to reduce their ridiculous charges? — Dr Klaas Riemann, Johannesburg
Climate alarmists have much in common with Aids dissidents. Neither can back their arguments with science and both resort to name-calling and insults.
If you tell an Aids dissident that Aids is caused by the natural HIV virus, he will accuse you of being in the pay of the pharmaceutical companies.
If you tell a climate alarmist that changes in the climate have natural causes, he will accuse you of being in the pay of the oil companies. — Andrew Kenny, Noordhoek