"The idea of globalisation was that rich [colonial] countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries would make the simpler things.
You would open an iPhone box and it would say designed in Cupertino California.
Now, the implication of course is that it would be manufactured in Shenzhen or somewhere else.
But I think we [colonial countries] got it wrong...
We assumed that other nations would always trail us in the value chain, but it turns out that as they got better in the value chain, they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher..." JD Vance, Deputy President of the United States of America speaking at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington DC.
Understanding the situation you're in always matters.
You cannot properly assess your problems, let alone solve them, if you don't understand the situation you're in.
Say you're learning to become a public relations practitioner and in order to complete your college semester course, Media Law, you need to pass a test at the end of the semester.
You're told that you need to review, remember and understand eighteen chapters of the prescribed Media Law textbook, chapters covered in your daily college lectures.
Sounds reasonable.
But the test that is supposed to help you absorb the legal parameters relating to your marketing profession demands that you:
learn all legal definitions,
learn and remember the details of more than two hundred court cases, and
create and critique legal arguments, with all its nuances, in relation to each aspect of the law.
You are being asked to learn more than you need to, more than you can reasonably learn within the timeframe and to do all of this for only one of your three-to-four month courses that you're studying and being tested on.
If you ignore the situation you're in, you won't realise that you are being set up to fail.
The situation you are forced into is unreasonable by design.
JD Vance, Deputy President of the US government, like so many political and academic elites in colonial countries of late, is busy saying the ‘quiet part’ out loud.
Colonialism never ended. It got itself a makeover and that makeover was of global economic and therefore political design (because that’s what colonialism was, a global economic system).
“The US influences but [also] the European Union and the United Kingdom.
I attended as the [Sudanese] representative of the Economic Commission, the FFC, a meeting with the European Union ambassadors, all of them, chaired by the ambassador of the European Union.
They were telling us to accept the proposed policy of the [Sudanese] Minister of Finance.
We told them, you don’t tell us what to accept and what not to accept [in our own country].
Our position was not against cooperating with the World Bank and the IMF. It’s that we needed to look first at our home and reorganise it, so that when we start speaking we speak for a better position.
And they refused that.
There were many resources untapped in Sudan, which would have improved in the short term the [Sudanese] economy. However, there was no [national economic] policy to do that.
Even when we asked them to return to previous legislations organising the taxations and so on.
They refused to do that.
We asked them to organise the trade on gold. We were not asking for the nationalising of the production of gold, just the trade [conditions] on gold.
And they did nothing.”—Dr Sidgi Kaballo, Sudanese economist, academic and Central Committee member of Sudan’s Communist Party.
Colonised countries like South Africa would stay economically colonised (neo-colonised) and play their designated role of serving foreign colonising states, especially “the Capitol” of the world’s real life Hunger Games.
The colonising/colonial countries as a result would expand their wealth on the back of the colonised’s continued economic subordination and suffering:
Africa, you give us what we need and want.
Africa, you buy our products that have been made with what we took from you.
“For decades, Nigeria has been in an absurd position where it pumps oil [in Nigeria], sells it abroad, then reimports it more expensively as refined products.”—Showdown: Nigeria’s Dangote vs Global Oil Giants, African Stream, 9 Sep 2024.
Is this not corruption by design?
Is this not mass corruption?
“Since the dark days, Panem has had an unprecedented era of peace. It is peace built on cooperation and a respect for law and order. In the past weeks, you have heard of sporadic violence following the actions of a few radicals in the Quarter Quell.
Those who choose this destructive path, their actions are based on a misunderstanding of how we have survived together.
It is a contract. Each District supplies the Capitol like blood to a heart. In return, the Capitol provides order and security.
To refuse work is to put the entire system in danger,” Fictional character Coriolanus Snow, President of Panem in the story of the Hunger Games.
Interesting how truth is far stranger than dystopian fiction…
Except now, things are changing at the penthouse level. China has grown, so has India. And Russia is economically connected to both these countries.
While none of these foreign countries can be truly trusted to support an African worker liberation movement, seeing that it would impact the benefits of maintaining their foreign influence over Africa, the BRICS alliance does offer African countries the possibility of trading from a basket of different currencies.
This provides some relief to political elites of colonised countries (including seemingly democratic and authoritarian governments) struggling to service their working masses and stay afloat within a colonialism economic system of economic repression and US Dollar dominance.
And it is this relief that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.
So, colonialism of old needs to be maintained through greater and direct (unmasked):
economic, and
military
force against BRICS+, specifically the RIC of BRICS+.
Russia needs to be weakened and/or corralled.
India needs to be isolated and/or distanced from the group.
And China must be destroyed through whatever economic and military means.
The “Capitol” of our world’s Hunger Games is coming to scorch the colonised earth for seeking more economic freedom (i.e. Africa and much of south America).
The more self control a country wishes to assert over its own land and economy, the more foreign control it takes from the coloniser’s hands.
The more self control a country wishes to assert, the more punished it will be, and that’s why socialist leaning countries or groups have always been seen and framed as a a greater threat in Africa.
Socialists like Thomas Sankara of Burkino Faso were uninterested in prioritising foreign interests and the interests of domestic elites over the liberation and enrichment of African working families.
This means he could not easily be made to kowtow.
And so as we watch the trailing, one-on-one US deals being made and publicly announced with countries such as:
we must know this is a show of pre-chokehold “bending the knee” to “the Capitol” or the colonial country in control of the world’s:
global economy through it’s US Dollar dominance;
biggest military, and
largest military alliance or NATO.
None of these three elements are inconsequential. Colonialism was and is always an economic system of taking from someone else for your self-enrichment.
And imperialism was always primarily the use of violence against the colonised.
You cannot separate Colonialism from Imperialism. You cannot separate the global economy from the most militarised country/countries in the world.
The deals being made amongst colonial countries under the threat of tariffs and sanctions, i.e. the US and the UK deal, and the US and France deal, are not deals being made between equals.
Both the UK and France as colonial countries (and despite their significant economic influence and control over Africa) know that they’re being pulled in to Washington to make sacrifices to serve a foreign master, even though in the UK they’re already publicly debating to what extent they should be economically subordinate to “the Capitol”:
“My favourite question over the last three years is, who owns that?
And of course, I’ve been using my Apple American computer or phone. I’ve been using Google, American owned…
When I search who owns that company, it’s amazing how often the answer is an American corporation.
To give an example we thought of during the Covid-19 pandemic, the British with AstraZeneca were the first to develop a vaccine. And yet, at the end of the time, two-thirds of the vaccines were being bought from American companies…
It’s not that we [the UK gave up our manufacturing sector], we’re still giving it up. This process of selling-off [UK] companies is happening right now. There are companies being taken over.
Two big defence companies, Ultra and Meggit were sold in the last three to four years. Darktrace in Cambridge, Wincanton’s just been sold, a big haulage company with twenty thousand staff…It ought to be a big issue in the current, general elections.”—Angus Hanton, author of Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, discussing the extent of foreign economic influence over the UK.
Like I have said before, if this were the Hunger Games in reality, western countries (colonial and settler-colonial countries) would be the “Career Districts One and Two”, enthusiastic vassals to the biggest colonial country, or in the words of Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism, they would be “willing slaves”.
This is not an insult.
It is a consequence of their history, the benefits they sought from colonialism and neo-colonialism under the US’s “rules-based”, post-Word War II order and a clinging to a generational colonising ideology that shows disregard or outright contempt for human beings being equal in their humanity on their own land, especially in places like Africa.
It is an ideology that says, Africans are the barbarians or savages of the African jungle but:
everything that can be grown and made in the jungle,
everything found deep within the soil of the jungle,
belongs to us, foreigners.
Ordinary Africans rarely understand the fullness of this situation, the situation they're in.
And that's because the situation is deliberately kept out of African mainstream media analysis and critique, which has been the case for decades.
Those in Africa that protect, defend and/or provide cover for colonialism and neo-colonialism ascend to positions of corporate and political power.
They are not protecting colonial control of their countries but rather their stake of wealth and control within the colonial system that economically enslaves their region like that of Bantustan Chief Ministers in apartheid South Africa or the deals made between the Zulu Royal family and the apartheid government.
These elites do not see foreign aid or foreign military bases and encampments as a threat to supposed African independence because a slice of the pie is better than liberation of the working class.
“President William Samoei Ruto [President of Kenya] is part of the rented leaders in the African continent that continue to advance imperialism. In fact, the crisis that we are seeing in Kenya today [youth citizen protests against tax hikes], just like in many African countries, is the crisis of imperialism…
Your viewers should know that the Kenyan government supported apartheid against the South African people. You should also know that now that we are discussing Palestine, the Kenya government gave the Zionist entity an entire airport to bomb Uganda.
This basically means that the Kenyan government has always been alienated from the majority of the Kenyan people and they don’t have a foreign policy…a clear foreign policy based on principle.
Mr William Samoei Ruto summed his foreign policy as economic diplomacy. He has no principle. He only wants to relate to any country dependent on what he can materially get from them.
He wants to prostitute our country to any person with resources.”—Kenya: A US Proxy in the ‘War of Plunder’ in Sudan, 10 Mar 2025, Breakthrough News, discussion with Booker Ngesa Omole, General Secretary of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya.
In fact, the greatest threat to these domestic elites (an upper-middle-to-upper-class crowd) is the possibility of an African people’s revolution.
A revolt of the working masses, rather than colonialism itself, is an anxiety they beg protection from and attempt to quash.
This is true all over the colonised parts of world:
“The Saudi occupiers [the government of Saudi Arabia] of the Haramayn have in recent months arrested pilgrims for displaying Palestinian symbols such as the kaffiyeh, the chequered Palestinian scarf.
The arrest and interrogation of British actor and presenter Islah Abdur-Rahman came to light when he put his story on Instagram. He had gone to perform Umrah (the lesser pilgrimage) last October. He was arrested and interrogated for wearing the kaffiyeh. It was taken away from him.
Pilgrims [to Mecca in Saudi Arabia] have been arrested in both al-Masjid al-Haram in Makkah and al-Masjid al-Nabawi in Madinah for wearing the kaffiyeh.
One is constrained to ask, whether there is any verse in the Qur’an or a hadith of the Prophet (pbuh) which prohibits Muslims from praying in the two most sacred Mosques, or any mosque in the world seeking Allah’s help?”—Hajj And The Plight Of The Palestinian People, Crescent International.
SOUTH AFRICA: WHEN YOUR OPPOSITION AND RULING PARTIES ARE MERELY A TAG TEAM SERVING THE SAME FOREIGN ELITE INTERESTS
Recently, the son of former US President, Joe Biden was said to have visited South Africa with his South African born wife and is alleged to have confirmed that South Africa is currently on an American watch list.
The elites of the USA are “watching” South Africa.
Ooooh, scary…maybe they’ll fund, provide cover for and justify South Africa’s starvation by design and carpet bombing. Yay for us!
The purpose behind the Empire’s latest Palpatine and its corporate Darth Vaders keeping an eye on African land that does not belong to them cannot ignore the trade relationship with South Africa.
“In 2023, the United States exported US$6.85B to South Africa.
The main products that the United States exported to South Africa were:
Crude Petroleum ($424M),
Planes, Helicopters, and/or Spacecraft ($369M), and
Petroleum Gas ($254M).
Over the past 5 years, the exports of the United States to South Africa have increased at an annualized rate of 5.79%, from US$5.17B in 2018 to US$6.85B in 2023…
In January 2025, the decrease in United States's year-by-year exports to South Africa was explained primarily by a decrease in product exports in:
Diamonds ($-48.3M or -97.7%),
Refined Petroleum ($-37.7M or -98.9%), and
Coal Briquettes ($-12.7M or -88.3%).
In January 2025, the increase in United States's year-by-year imports from South Africa was explained primarily by an increase in product imports in:
Platinum ($69M or 22.8%),
Diamonds ($68.9M or 128%), and
Cars ($32.9M or 13%).”—USA/South Africa trade, oec.world.
So in a country that has its own diamonds, its own coal and can source African refined petrol, we are buying diamonds, petrol and coal from foreigners?
Sounds mighty similar to the state of things in Nigeria’s petrol industry, yeah?
This brings me to the farce of the public quarrelling between the US government (with their corporate elites) and South Africa’s “government of national unity”, a coalition government comprising of:
the African National Congress (our ruling party since 1994),
the Democratic Alliance (our major opposition party for decades),
the Patriotic Alliance (never heard of them before),
the Inkatha Freedom Party,
Good Party (who are you?),
Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (never heard of them before),
Freedom Front Plus,
United Democratic Movement,
Al Jama-ah (say what, now?), and
Rise Mzansi (Rise to tell us where did you pop out from?).
This coalition government (or GNU) of predominantly never before heard of political parties that sprang up before the 2024 election are characterised by one key shared feature:
They are all neoliberal capitalist political parties, i.e. they protect, defend, justify and serve a “trickle-down system” that South Africa has lived under since 1994.
It is neoliberal capitalist policies that ensured colonialism, made over into neo-colonialism, remained in place in South Africa.
Our central bank is privately owned by private interests of foreign countries: US, UK, Germany, France and Norway, and our industries, including the mining industry that feeds the US our platinum, diamonds and manufactured cars (and the land upon which those industries operate) is controlled by domestic corporate elites (aligned with neoliberal capitalist political parties, both the ruling and opposition party).
So before German, Indian, UK, France and US propagandist mainstream news excitedly jump on the publicity train of framing South Africa’s GNU as anti-American or anti-West (a pseudonym for “white”), someone will have to explain how that lines up with:
the trading relationship South Africa has had with the US, and, equally important,
the GNU’s current economic policies that almost perfectly replicate America’s economic policies back home.
SOUTH AFRICA IS NOT AMERICA’S FOE, THEY ARE NEOLIBERAL BEDFELLOWS CURRENTLY ELECTIONEERING TO AN ANGRY WORKING CLASS
The next South African election is in 2026. It is not the national elections but a municipal election across the country.
Even though the GNU represents the “centre” of the country’s political spectrum, I believe the political liberal-centre have always been economically right-wing.
They serve elite interests (both domestic and foreign) that ultimately results in the punishment of the working class majority who are forced to bear the costs of their corporate and political elite failures, compromised allegiance and greed.
“I stay on the border between Botswana and South Africa. It is better for me to refill my car in Botswana than South Africa. Why? Because I have to pay the fuel levy [in South Africa].
Their VAT is 14%, mine [as a South African] is 15% going toward 16%.
Their income tax is 25%, mine is 45%.
You can’t say [Minister of Finance] that you did not increase it [the VAT] and so you’re only increasing it [now]. You have effectively increased our personal income tax.
Petrol today is twenty-two Rands [per litre], let’s look in three months time, how much is it going to be?…You need to tell us the implications of increasing VAT, because it will be felt by the same people you say we are protecting from [increases to] personal income tax.
And you are not touching on the corporate tax, Minister.
It [corporate tax] was 29% previously. It was reduced by your own government to 27%…
This corporate tax has gone down. Yes, we agree that there hasn’t been much economic activity and companies are not doing well but what about illicit financial flows? What about tax avoidance?” Omphile Maotwe, Treasurer General of South Africa’s socialist party, the Economic Freedom Fighters of southern Africa criticising South Africa’s GNU Finance Ministry for cutting taxes to corporate elites while suggesting that VAT (a tax on goods and services bought and sold in South Africa) should be increased.
Now, to all American foreigners to South Africa what does this sound like?
Yes, you guessed it, this is neoliberal capitalism in 2025.
And if a coalition government headed by both your country’s ruling party and its biggest opposition party (with their never before heard of allies in governance) have no problem with tax benefits for the rich and cost burdens for the ordinary, were they ever in opposition to each other?
I personally think not.
So, when you read about the:
expulsion of a South African diplomatic ambassador from the US;
de-banking South Africans as a politically-motivated punishment for their identity as South Africans;
critical words about working class foreigners, white supremacy (the ideology supporting white supremacist capitalism), sexism or contempt for the LGBTQ+ community,
please consider this all to be an electioneering distraction.
Like I have said before, the system and institutional policies, practices, processes and chosen inactions more produce the outcomes of a society than individual choice.
And when the system is a neoliberal capitalist “trickle-down” system, then the focus of whether a country is:
economically liberated from foreign control (neo-colonialism),
economically liberated from “elite lives matter” control (a corporate-owned and corporate serving country), and
equitably and collectively enriched,
boils down to the system’s design, its operation and all the choices made at the highest levels of power.
In that regard, South Africa’s:
austerity (government spending) cuts since 2011;
deindustrialisation soon after 1994;
company mergers and acquisitions and its relationship with poor job growth and job loss in the country;
workers being paid (for years) below the national rate of product and service inflation;
the monopolistic nature of companies operating across major sectors of strategic importance;
the high pay gap between company executives and average South African workers (in 2018, South Africa ranked as having the world’s 4th highest pay gap);
the increasing gig work born of South Africa’s corporate sector,
the reliance on outsourced, contract-based work (rather than employing staff) within the public and government sector;
the non-existent innovation and inventions made by and within the corporate sector to bring us into a space of global competitiveness,
the increased privatisation of:
education,
land for corporate commercial use,
beaches,
the terms and conditions of bilateral trade agreements that economically enslave African workers and prevent globally competitive industries from within Africa;
the use of the Investor State Dispute Settlement system to threaten developing countries like South Africa;
illicit corporate financial flows primarily by abusing tax avoidance measures;
widespread dependence on foreign aid including to the extent of compromising our political parties, “independent media”, university research centres, NGOs and corruption watchdogs;
the now lowering of corporate tax; and
the now increasing of VAT,
means that the national system born of 1994’s agreed-to “trickle-down” has not changed, is not changing and is unlikely to change while in the hands of the GNU political parties. Worse, the democracy through its system design, policies, processes, practices and chosen inactions does not reflect the true will of the people, most of whom are ordinary workers.
The design that produces our inequitable outcomes and its resultant poverty, crime, trauma and starvation is not changing and will not change, because it wasn’t meant to change.
It was meant to serve elites and the foreigners that have control over the global economy.
With that being said, what’s being focussed on at the moment, is a performance for voter entertainment, distraction and emotional debate.
It’s political PR’ing of the most superficial kind.
The US government know it, otherwise they would have sanctioned South Africa already like the economic colonial bully that they are , and the neoliberal capitalist GNU know it otherwise they would have nationalised the central bank ten, twenty years ago.
These two are not enemies.
They’re pals, pretending not to be before South Africa’s 2026 elections.
The argument that private ownership maintains South Africa’s central bank “independence” from the elected executive ignores the problem that:
foreigners, and
South African elites,
that both hold vested interests in the country’s,
industrial manufacturing,
agricultural,
mining sectors, and
the trickle-down that floods upwards for them,
own an entire country’s central bank.
It’s lazy intellectual reasoning to presume these two things are not in serious conflict; that the power of foreign and domestic elites over South Africa’s central bank does not serve their elite profiteering interests at the country’s expense, irrespective of the constitutional mandate the central bank is bestowed:
“[JD] Vance argues that there’s no contradiction between working class people [and their interests] who supported [Donald] Trump and billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley and big tech corporations…
and he’s arguing that the US will reindustrialise by imposing very high tariffs and cutting taxes on the rich and on corporations…
Vance and the Trump administration is trying to separate the neoliberal [capitalist] economic policies of people like Ronald Reagan because they support those policies like:
tax cuts for the rich,
privatisation, and
deregulation…
In fact, JD Vance’s former boss, Peter Thiel published an article in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Competition is for Losers’.
And he proudly argued that Silicon Valley corporations don’t want competition in free markets.
They want monopolies.
They want to entirely dominate their industries because that’s the way they’re most profitable. If you have lots of competition, then profit margins are reduced over time.”—This Speech Accidentally exposed the Truth about the US, Geopolitical Economy Report, 21 Mar 2025.
SAVE US THE SONG AND DANCE AND STICK TO THE REAL CAUSE
Whatever our thoughts on Ukraine’s duplicity in relation to colonised and neo-colonised Africa, especially their admitted actions undertaken within the Sahel region, and however we may doubt the honesty, extent of complicity and/or credibility of Ukraine’s President since 2019, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, the fact is that the workers class of Ukraine have suffered.
Ordinary working families of Ukraine (like those of Russia) have suffered tremendously since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s territory.
You don’t have to trust the Ukraine government and whichever NATO strings were pulled to get them to show complete disrespect of Africa’s rightful claim to economic freedom, nor do you have to trust or fully respect the country’s executive team to accept, honour and acknowledge that our global class of workers and their families should not have to suffer, don’t deserve to suffer and are suffering from war in Ukraine.
Brothers, sons, husbands, grandfathers, uncles, male and female cousins are dead. In all likelihood they are not from the upper classes. They are ordinary people. Ordinary, trusting workers as are most of us are around the world.
Your heart must go out to the ordinary working class. It must bleed for the awfulness:
of displaced ordinary families to foreign countries,
of living under martial law and conscription police,
of crushing labour rights affecting 70% of the workforce in Ukraine,
of the arrests and detainment of ordinary people who merely criticise the war,
of fear and anxiety over the future,
of war trauma,
of loss of land and potential loss of mineral wealth, and of,
death…
it is a river of nastiness overshadowed only by the tsunami waves of blood flowing from an ocean currently colonising Palestine, parts of Lebanon and, through neo-colonial force and/or control, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Somaliland, Congo, Niger, Mali, Burkino Faso, Venezuela and now Syria.
Humanity is humanity.
People are people.
And ordinary working people deserved better than this.
They always did deserve better than colonialism and its makeover, neo-colonialism.
They certainly deserve better than all the violent and economic imperialism needed to keep colonialism and neo-colonialism in place in this our version of the world’s Hunger Games:
“Early reports of summary executions of Alawites [in Syria] were in the area around Jableh, as well as the village of al-Mukhtareyah, al-Shir and al-Haffah. Since then reports have HTS troops rounding up men in cities like Baniyas and killing them by the scores. Alawites are being dragged from their shops and shot in the streets. There have also been reports of security forces looting homes and businesses and setting fires.
Most of the slain civilians are believed to be adult men, but a number of women and children have been confirmed to have been executed…
Syrian state media has leaned hard on the narrative that the Alawite militias are ‘remnants’ of the former Assad government, who the HTS ousted in December. Reports from the state media are also playing up the idea that the civilians being killed are Assad loyalists.
Some of the militias may indeed hold loyalty to former Assad-era Maj. Gen. Suhayl al-Hassan, but the claim of the hundreds of civilians being loyalists stretches credibility. Indications are that the executions aren’t being done on the basis of any loyalty test, but rather that any Alawites in the Alawite-heavy region are the target.”—Thousands reported killed in Syria as HTS-allied forces attack, execute Alawites, Antiwar dot Com and the GrayZone, 11 Mar 2025.
LAND REFORM IN SOUTH AFRICA MEANS LOSS OF UNREASONABLE ENTITLEMENT TO SOMEONE ELSE’S LAND FOR BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC ELITES
What the US government is really up in arms about, in cahoots I suspect with both corporate and neoliberal capitalist political elites in South Africa, is the possibility that the socialist party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of southern Africa might win an election.
Because if the EFF win an election, it means the coming to an end of neoliberal capitalist trickle-down that actually floods upwards and out of our country.
It would mean corporate and political elites (both domestic and colonisers) would not be able to easily eat our resources on the cheap and then sell it back to us for a profit or as manufactured goods that we should rightfully be making in our own country with our own resources.
US President, Donald Trump and his allegiant Sith do not care one fig leaf about racialised white people in South Africa.
Don’t kid yourself that this is about the human experience of people that share a colonising/colonial identity with him and all the unreasonable entitlements that identity has entrenched in their minds.
This is about neo-colonialism. It is about white economic control of an African country on an African continent, where almost all African people, most of whom are working class, have been racialised as “black”.
This is about neo-colonialism’s domestic elites (an upper-middle-to-upper-class) that keep it in place in South Africa by maintaining neoliberal capitalism and the vast private property ownership that ensures mining land and production is never controlled by an elected government that is answerable to the majority working class.
This is about Anglo-American, Glencore, De Beers, Total and Monsanto interests amongst many foreign interests within an African state.
The US does not give an ish about people called white in Africa. Because like the Bangladeshi LGBTQ+ that Republican interest groups were funding in order to influence national policies, colonialism in a modern world needs a combination of:
narrative cover,
entrenched localisation of media stories, and
smear campaigns.
But the full truth just as the full picture will not be hidden anymore.
“I came here not to please anyone. I am here to speak the truth, whether you like it or not…
I represent a non-racial organisation but we do not fight for ‘white’ people. Why?
What do white people want? When you say you are fighting for all in South Africa, black and white, what do white people want? Except to remain in a position of privilege. That’s what they want.”—Julius Malema, leader of the EFF, discussing the political agenda of many racialised white people of economic power in South Africa, which has nothing to do with living in a country of great inequity and poverty but rather their fierce protection of their control of the economy and their wealth interests.
For example: Please note a minimum wage for working families racialised black was first instituted around 1999, almost a hundred years after the unification of settler colonising states to form “South Africa” (to benefit colonisers (British, Dutch and their descendants)):
According to predominantly racialised white political elites and their followers, the predominantly black working class deserve jobs at any cost…to them.
Would this be the case in developed, predominantly white racialised countries?
Would political (and corporate) elites dare be so brave to place minimum wage in opposition to inclusion in the economy?
South Africa is not being led by ambassadors for the people.
They’re being led by desperate economic side chicks pretending to be angry at their foreign sugar daddy. And while words have value, they can also be used to distract, minimise and/or justify a colonial status quo in Africa and around the world:
“Israeli murderers are called ‘commandos’. Arab commandos are called ‘terrorists’.
Contract killers are called ‘freedom fighters’.
The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore. They ‘neutralise’ people.
Or, they ‘depopulate’ the area.
The government doesn’t lie, it engages in ‘disinformation’.
Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins.
It’s as simple as that.”—George Carlin, American comedian, also racialised “white”.
What we are seeing is a performance for the South African crowds hoping the masses forget about neoliberal capitalism, monopolistic business and foreign economic control and who holds those reins inside and outside the country (at the intersection of class and race).
2026 will be an interesting election.
Competition is for the losers, they say, well, let’s see if South Africa’s class of ordinary workers have something to say about that…we can only hope that they do.
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