South Africa's new president wants to redistribute land from white farmers (user search)
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  South Africa's new president wants to redistribute land from white farmers (search mode)
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Author Topic: South Africa's new president wants to redistribute land from white farmers  (Read 4066 times)
Filuwaúrdjan
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« on: February 27, 2018, 11:04:52 AM »

Meanwhile the great heroes of the DA have done such a bang-up job of running Western Cape that Cape Town is about to run out of water.


Cyril Ramaphosa is many, many things. That is one thing he is absolutely not.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2018, 02:42:05 PM »

I am tempted to call this horse dung because of what we know about Ramaphosa and because of what the non-insane SA press has been reporting about his arrival in power.

Yes. He is, I think it's fair to say, not exactly on the radical wing of the ANC. This BBC profile of him isn't bad.

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The ANC also has a long history of talking a good game over the land issue and then, curiously, doing very little about it. Zuma was particularly notable in this respect.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
United Kingdom


« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2018, 02:51:31 PM »

In rhetorical terms, the ANC wants to "kill the boer, kill the farmer". In practice, the ANC is filled with corrupt Afrikaners from the National Party and is on friendly terms with powerful Afrikaners.

And is therefore significantly more likely in practice support gunning down striking platinum miners (to pick an entirely hypothetical example) than that, yes.

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The sad part is that this is a much better deal than what the DA has on offer: i.e. water shortages in major metropolitan areas.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
United Kingdom


« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2018, 06:48:56 PM »
« Edited: March 02, 2018, 06:52:59 PM by Filuwaúrdjan »

So what about this? (I know it's RT and I hate it.)

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The key word is 'allow' - whether anything will actually come of this isn't certain and if anything does it may not have been intended. Because of his business interests and... erm.. actions... Ramaphosa is vulnerable to attacks from a radical direction in a way that Zuma (for instance) wasn't - his cabinet has already been criticised by elements on the ANC Left and its youth wing for being too conservative and too business friendly etc - and he seems to have calculated that backing an EFF motion on the land issue is a way of negating the threat they pose to the ANC in its strongholds. If the issue gains serious momentum then he will have miscalculated (the very last thing he wants is to spook investors, to cause capital flight etc), but we shall see.

Basically politics in South Africa is extremely ugly and entirely racialised, but given its history that has to be seen as inevitable. The political settlement reached in the 90s is best seen as an attempt to regulate that and has done a decent job of keeping the peace so far. The problem is that as it has been rather less effective at spreading the benefits of economic growth to the townships, which over the long run risks weakening the stability of that settlement - Malema is a more marginal figure than usually presented in the foreign media, but that doesn't mean that he (and more importantly what he represents) is not seen as a threat.
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