For those of you who think that this forum is doinated by SA haters, read the following article, published in the UK Mail on Sunday, by Peter Hitchin - a renowned UK journalist. And when you have read it, maybe, just maybe, you will wake up and smell the coffee. The full transcript can be found by following the lnk at the bottom.

By PETER HITCHENS
Last updated at 3:21 AM on 29th March 2009


Imagine how you would react if Gordon Brown opened and closed his election rallies by bursting into a song called Bring Me My Machine Gun, swaying and jigging to the hypnotic chorus of this menacing ditty.
And how would you feel if the Prime Minister were alleged to be taking campaign money from Colonel Gaddafi; faced 783 counts of fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and corruption which somehow never came to court; and had been acquitted of rape while his fearsome supporters mobbed the courthouse?
Then ponder how you would despair if, despite all these things, Mr Brown’s party was certain to win the election whatever he did or said.
If you can picture all this happening here, then you have an inkling of the horrible process South Africa is now going through. Except it is much, much worse.
This fast-approaching catastrophe is a source of shame and apprehension to millions of honest people, white and black, in South Africa itself.
It is also a tragedy for Africa as a whole, a continent hungry for any reason to hope. And it is grave news for the civilised world, which needs no more failed states.
Yet I can promise you I will be accused of alarmism and pessimism for saying so, and quite possibly of ‘racism’ too.
Why? All the soppy admirers of Nelson Mandela - especially the BBC - gave the new South Africa a free pass when apartheid ended 15 years ago.They wanted to believe this complicated and important nation had become a sort of heaven on Earth where all tears were dried and all problems solved.

Mr Mandela himself, personally decent but politically ineffectual and naive, served as both figurehead and figleaf for the new order. The world ignored or forgave his continuing friendships with the world’s worst despots, and the fraudulent bungling that surrounded him.

Once, South Africa dominated the nightly news for weeks on end. Now the liberal media barely mention it. Why not? Because post-apartheid South Africa is a failure.

You don’t hear about the terrifying crime. You don’t hear about the pestilence of corruption, or the absurd purchase of needless submarines and aircraft for a country with no serious enemies except its own elite.

There is a little about AIDS, but nothing like as much as there should be, given the acres of graves that commemorate the government’s moronic policies, of denial and folk remedies (including beetroot).

Electricity blackouts - the invariable sign of a country on the slide - are now frequent.

In the coming weeks, South Africa seems to me to be taking several definite steps towards its cold, shocking awakening - as a full member of the Third World.The man who will lead it there is called Jacob Zuma. Remember the name. You are going to hear a lot more of it.

On April 22 he will become President of one of the world’s most important countries. Comrade Zuma, as his supporters know him, certainly is not dull. And South Africa will not be dull either when he takes over.

Many fear it will rapidly become a lawless kleptocracy when he comes to power, which he will do after a hopelessly one-sided and rather crooked election

A picture dated 14 February 2003 shows Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, ex-wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela, in Cape Town. Winnie Madikileza-Mandela, was found guilty 23 April 2003 of fraud and theft involving about one million rand (131,000 dollars / 119, 000 euros)

The grisly Winnie Mandela, a convicted fraudster with a creepy past, is number five on the ANC’s parliamentary election list, despite the fact that as a criminal she is legally banned from being an MP. She is expected to be a minister in any Zuma government.

Zuma’s old friend and business partner, Schabir Shaik, has just been released early - on medical grounds, although almost nobody believes this - from a 15-year sentence imposed in 2006 for fraud and corruption, including a payment to Zuma himself.

Jackie Selebi, the National Police Commissioner, is famous for asking, ‘what’s all the fuss about?’ when taxed with the country’s appalling levels of crime and violence.

He is currently suspended, accused of having - yes - a ‘generally corrupt relationship’ with a convicted drug smuggler and also ‘defeating the ends of justice’.

The once-admired Scorpions, a police anti-corruption squad symbolising the country’s determination not to follow the rest of Africa into corrupt squalor, have been disbanded.

So the approaching enthronement of this sinister, populist one-time Zulu herd-boy really ought to mark the moment when South Africa has to stop dreaming about rainbows and miracles, and recognise that experience is usually a better guide to the future than hope.

Zuma is attractive in some ways. He has made his way up from utter poverty. He is a fighter, a keen and hypocrisy-free lover of women and a cunning charmer.
He makes no pretence of being Westernised, and delights in wearing traditional Zulu dress, leopardskin, loincloth and all. He has an excellent singing voice, as I can testify.

South Africa’s largest tribe are a proud fighting people, and Zuma will not be a mild leader, as Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, his two forerunners, were.

At first sight he is the jovial double of the Michelin man, bald, bespectacled and wide-mouthed. As he campaigns, he wears a Nelson Mandela T-shirt (his aides sport Jacob Zuma shirts) and a bizarre black leather cowboy hat.

I watched him electioneering in and around the bleak and stony town of Springbok, in South Africa’s remote and conservative North West.

He arrived for a carefully staged visit to Elizabeth Cloete, a 49-year-old who dwells on an arid hillside in a hovel made of plastic sheets, and lives by scrabbling through rubbish dumps looking for saleable scrap - a trade that brings her about £6 a week.

Her neighbourhood is the bitter end of rural South Africa, many of whose inhabitants exist, in a permanent haze of cheap drink or drugs, defeated and without hope.

Zuma must know that places like this, and their still crueller and more violent urban equivalents, are evidence of the ANC’s failure, in 15 years of unrestricted power, to keep its ambitious promises to the poor.

He actually admitted later that day: ‘We came here to see the conditions. The conditions are extremely bad.’

But when I tried, courteously, to speak to him on the spot, having failed to obtain an interview over several weeks, he brushed me aside. Worse, I was menacingly reproved by an ANC apparatchik, outraged that I should dare to question the next President.

I was also upbraided by a smug, dreadlocked member of the Johannesburg Press corps who sneered at me, ‘This is Africa, man, we do things differently here.’ They certainly do.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worl...rticle-1165473