Not so much a theory as a reality

The world has been duped.

For the past almost two years a carefully orchestrated scam has been built around a respiratory illness.

Let's look at it from a layman's perspective.

Before SARS-CoV-2 and coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), very few of us on the planet knew about coronaviruses or cared two hoots about them.

We did not live in perpetual fear of getting a respiratory-tract infection that could lead to death.

Nothing changed in early 2020, except that a criminal conspiracy - for that is what this is - either opportunistically or with malice aforethought turned the almost certain lab leak of a genetically modified bat virus into a vehicle for unprecedented power and profit.

As a recently retired hard-news journalist with well over 30 years' experience, I was drawn ineluctably into questioning every aspect of this story as it unfolded.

I have read thousands of news reports and watched countless interviews in an attempt to determine what sort of risk I faced personally, but more importantly to try to establish what journalists used to strive for beyond all other considerations: the truth.

I’ll not be citing the numerous sources for my conclusion that this is a criminal conspiracy; they are too plentiful and overlapping in the information they impart.

I remember early last year as WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (who as Ethiopian health minister formed close ties with the Clinton and Gates foundations) hummed and hawed about this unusual respiratory infection emerging from Wuhan, China, supposedly from a “wet” market selling everything from fish to wild animals. The story we were led to believe was that a coronavirus, to which bats have in-built immunity, had miraculously defied accepted science and infected people.

(The web linking Tedros to the global elite lies at the heart of the conspiracy to impose “health through vaccination”. As Ethiopian health minister he was a member of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) board, where the Gates Foundation set the agenda.)

The first alarm bells sounded for me when I read about how this new disease went viral on Chinese social media, only for the ruling Communist Party to then shut down all discussion. Then I picked up that a Chinese eye doctor, Li Wenliang, who had alerted the world to the dangers of the Wuhan virus, was censured by the CCP. He would die soon afterwards from the disease.

We took Tedros at his word and when, within a few weeks, the virus had been elevated from being a mild threat to one warranting the declaration of a global pandemic, we accepted his bona fides. We would later discover that the WHO had conveniently changed the criteria for such a declaration. Previously the disease had to be widespread and causing abnormally high numbers of death for a global pandemic to be declared.

While there were a few centres of high mortality - namely in northern Italy, the UK and New York City - these were the exceptions. And we would later discover that the high mortality was due to a criminal failure to treat elderly patients with respiratory infections who were often removed from hospitals and sent back to care homes, where they infected other vulnerable people. Remember that the average age of those dying was over 80. The communities being hit were old and sickly. In Italy most were heavy smokers.

Fear was ramped up by a media which had in 2019 already decided, through the formation of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), that the major news agencies and networks, along with the increasingly powerful Big Tech social media, would conspire to censor and suppress all views and information that didn't fit the official narrative.

They would also, it became clear, not baulk at disseminating fake news to bolster a troika of agendas: ensuring Trump wasn’t re-elected in November 2020 and keeping the global population cowed and in fear of this “novel coronavirus” and preparing the world for a decade of pandemics to be fought with new-technology mRNA gene therapies, which they would fraudulently market as vaccines. The third leg is climate alarmism, another hypothesis where it is easy to falsely evoke fear and human self-loathing without presenting any watertight evidence that anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions are affecting the natural global weather and temperature cycle.

I have never had a flu vaccine. In fact, the idea of taking a vaccine for an infection my body has combated effectively throughout my life made no sense. Indeed, like billions of others, I never seriously considered taking the flu jab.

And this, on a global scale, was what upset Dr Anthony Fauci and his jab-obsessed collaborators. There should be plenty of money being made from vaccines, they believed, but they weren't satisfied with the takings. People just weren’t fearful enough of the flu, so, as we saw at a seminar Fauci attended in 2019, the vaccine industry was looking at ways to “disrupt” the regulatory system and to create “an event” which would make the imposition of a mandatory vaccine possible. This was just one of several pandemic planning meetings and expositions, including detailed scenario planning by the World Economic Forum, that occurred in the years preceding 2020. It was a conspiracy conducted in plain view – if only we had had a free and independent media to join up the dots and see what this “master race” of globalists were, and are, planning for the human race.

Dr Fauci and friends at the NIH, CDC and FDA had done the groundwork well, ensuring that vaccines, not medicines, were accepted as “preemptive treatment” in the US, despite their not having to undergo nearly as rigorous safety testing as actual medicines.

As a result, I discovered that children in the US are being subjected to over 70 injections from shortly after birth till the age of 21. I discovered that Robert Kennedy Jnr has been waging a sustained campaign against this reliance on a vaccine for every conceivable "threat". As an impartial outsider this strikes me as insane, given that my generation survived quite happily on two or three jabs, with polio perhaps the most memorable from my childhood .

The imposition of vaccination as opposed to promoting healthy lifestyles seems to be largely due to the powerful influence of Dr Fauci, for the past four decades head if the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, the NIAID, one of several members of the National Institutes of Health.

Fauci, the US government adviser on Covid-19, it later emerged, had bungled badly with AIDS. His record of pushing relentlessly to turn America and the world into a population of sick people dependent on vaccines is captured in an exhaustively researched book by Robert Kennedy Jnr, nephew of assassinated US President JF Kennedy. Fauci's denial of the proven fact that his organization, through Dr Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, funded gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan was the first major lie of the Covid Con.

But, as noted, we had already, in 2019 and before, seen several dry runs for the dystopia that awaited us in 2020. Bill Gates had gone from despised software billionaire to beloved mega philanthropist, as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seemed to be doing good things around the developing world.

The numerous disasters their vaccines and genetically modified grains caused were glossed over by a supine media, which itself was in the pocket of Gates and other major philanthropic capitalists like George Soros, not to mention the Chinese Communist Party with its billions of dollars in spare cash to buy off whoever it needed on its side. Gates had secured a major stake in the vaccine market through GAVI, CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and a couple of other organisations bent on imposing vaccines on the world.

The smirk on Gates's face when he proudly proclaimed that the “whole world” would need to be vaccinated to end the pandemic will become a symbol of the fiendish delight he appeared to take in asserting control over the world and in making a 20-fold profit on his investments. The same sinister half-mocking smirk was later seen regularly on Fauci's face as he made up policy and “the science” on the hoof. One day masks were useless, the next they were essential. Politicians followed suit, with Johnson, Biden, Macron, Ardern, Morrison and our own Ramaphosa and numerous others singing from the same World Economic Forum “Build Back Better” for a “New World Order” hymn sheet.

And that hymn sheet was the brainchild of WEF founder and executive director Klaus Schwab. His vision of a Fourth Industrial Revolution where you will “own nothing and be happy” and the climate alarmists’ attack on carbon-dioxide as a poison destroying the earth underpin the population control agenda the global elite are seeking. Instead of acknowledging that an advanced humanity has mitigated much of the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the global elite aim to make the suppression of CO2 the bedrock of their nefarious low-growth, job-destroying agenda – apart, that is, from in places like China, which are somehow exempt from the constraints of COP26 and its predecessors.

Red meat is another of their targets as war is declared on a way of life that has characterised human existence for millennia. Indeed, all the attributes of modern western civilization have been denigrated by these oligarchs and global bureaucrats – although you can be sure that in true Orwellian tradition, the rules that apply to the masses will not apply to them. Even gender has become a politically sensitive issue. Gender fluidity is being touted as the “new normal”. The nuclear family is disparaged as a quaint and somehow dangerous anachronism.

It’s as if, within the space of a few years, the global elite centred around the WEF believes it can transform human cultural evolution to fit its blueprint for the future.

Which brings us back to the pandemic and their most egregious plan of all: making the injection of gene-manipulating drugs, which in the case of Covid have demonstrably done more harm than good, a prerequisite for participation in the “New Normal” surveillance society they are seeking to impose.

And here we get to the biggest con of all, which gave birth to the plandemic in the first place. As noted earlier, the old people, most with comorbidities, who were the first casualties of Covid-19, died not so much due to the respiratory infection as due to an utterly irrational decision by the WHO, global oligarchs, political leaders and public health officials to prevent early treatment of symptoms.

It’s as if centuries of development in medical science were ignored as the mass psychosis manufactured around this “deadly pathogen” took hold. This suppression of early treatment was deliberate and genocidal.

So, instead of simply using tried and tested pharmacological methods to reduce viral load, the sick were told to isolate at home till they required oxygen as the pulmonary phase of Covid-19 clogged up their lungs and hypoxia set in. Then they were hospitalised and given an antiviral, remdesivir, which was administered too late to be of any use and which damaged the patients' kidneys. The ensuing water retention in turn exacerbated the lung problems. Tens of thousands of patients were placed under heavy sedation and intubated. About 80% “treated” in this way died.

It wasn’t the virus that killed them but the hospitals, doctors and nurses who followed the WHO and CDC’s directives of denying them early treatment and then, upon being admitted to hospital, failing to treat them appropriately even as they went around self-importantly in their ridiculous personal protection equipment. The psychological harm done to elderly patients isolated in ICU wards and separated from robot-like medics and their families no doubt contributed to their demise. Essentially, they were murdered.

And with every “Covid” death and every use of ventilators hospitals were rewarded with payments which, in the US, amounted to tens of thousands of dollars. Death had become a lucrative industry. As had face masks, billions of which now pollute the planet, and hand sanitiser.

But the original pretext for the pandemic was an even more lucrative scam. The inventor of the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, ruled out the use of this device as a way of diagnosing disease or infection as far back as during the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. But the likes of Fauci saw it as the perfect vehicle to manufacture a crisis out of nothing.

Having ramped up the fear with faked ICU footage of people supposedly dying horrendous deaths from Covid, and asserting there was no available treatment, they used PCR to create the impression that the virus was causing “cases” by the million based on the presence of mere fragments of viral DNA or mRNA, even if dead or dormant. Using cycles of amplification double what might legitimately identify a virus, the number of false positives was estimated by censored scientists as in the region of 95%.

It is indeed impossible to accept that any positive “cases” were identified through PCR because the existence of viral infection is only verified when clinical symptoms are present. There has also been a plethora of experts, censored by the TNI, who claim convincingly that SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated in real time. It has only ever been shown to exist in silico, a fancy way of saying as a DNA sequence coded on a computer.

So we have reached a point where a machine diagnoses a disease based on a genetic sequence that only exists as a computer code.

Under the false pretext that this was a highly transmissible and highly pathogenic virus, the world was cast under a pall of successive lockdowns of varying severity based on supposed waves of “cases”, as people were denied early treatment. All information from hospitals was carefully manipulated and choreographed to fit whatever level of lockdown was required as people were controlled using fear for their health. No statistics apart from total deaths were independently verifiable, and analyses done by censored experts show no average excess mortality anywhere in 2020 or 2021. The spike in deaths in places like New York early on in the pandemic was, for instance, followed by months of below-average mortality.

But the world had been hypnotised through group psychosis into accepting the official narrative under the naive belief that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are fully trustworthy. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that Big Pharma only has profits in mind, while most physicians refused to buck the system even as they were denied the right to treat patients with respiratory infections as they would normally do so. A small minority of mainly independent or very senior or retired medical professionals have spoken out and been threatened with deregistratration for advocating the use of early treatment. They have been summarily censored and deplatformed by YouTube and other social media. The corporate media has ignored or ridiculed them for refusing to toe the line.

With all this afoot, the path was open for the masterstroke of profiteering and cementing control: a novel gene-therapy drug falsely marketed as a vaccine.

First though, they had to get rid of, or neutralise, the opposition. And that opposition came in the shape of a wealth of repurposed medicines available to physicians following generations of treating the gamut of diseases and infections. So even early on, when hydroxychloroquine plus zinc was shown to inhibit viral replication, the global elite went so far as to publish a false paper in The Lancet claiming it was useless and harmful. The paper was later withdrawn but the media had already spread the lie and with then President Donald Trump having endorsed and used it, the treatment was lumped together with him as beyond the pale.

Next up was the antiparasitic Nobel-prize-winning generic ivermectin. Every effort has been made to spread disinformation about a drug that has virtually eliminated elephantiasis, river blindness, scabies and malaria, and has proven highly effective as an antiviral and anti-inflammatory against all phases and variants of Covid.

The global elite, via Merck, early in 2021 published a statement in which the former sole manufacturer of this 40-year-old drug claimed it was ineffective and potentially dangerous. Merck had, meanwhile, secretly been commissioned by the US government to develop an antiviral to combat Covid. In other words, a total conflict of interests existed.

Despite 3.5 billion doses having safely been administered to people over the past four decades, the medical fraternity and TNI called ivermectin a veterinary drug. Jokes were made about it being a horse dewormer. Yet for decades it has been on the WHO list of essential medicines for humans. Like aspirin and penicillin, avermectin, the original microbe discovered by Nobel prize winner Satoshi Ōmura of Tokyo’s prestigious Kitasato Institute, is an organic, not a synthetic medication.

The suppression of these treatments paved the way for the novel gene-therapy mRNA injections to be granted emergency use authorisation. 

Even though traditional vaccines take many years to develop and even longer to be granted regulatory approval regarding safety and efficacy, the “pandemic” was used to justify rolling out these experimental drugs to billions of people at “warp speed”. Revelations from whistle-blowers have been made about major flaws in Pfizer’s trials.

A year on and these “vaccines” have proved totally ineffective at preventing infection or transmission while causing mutations of the virus and potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of injuries.

Yet the more the jabs have failed in the most vaccinated countries, the more governments have doubled down on mandating them and the booster shots, which censored experts warn are only adding to the build-up of coronavirus spike protein which the mRNA jabs cause the cells to manufacture.

Politicians, particularly in Australia, Austria and New Zealand, have used this opportunity to usher in totalitarian medical apartheid and lockdowns that are little different to those that are standard practice in Communist China.

The ultimate aim seems to be to introduce a global “social credit” digital passport to place every individual under surveillance, as occurs already in parts of China. Refuse to accept the latest jab “for your health” or use too much fuel and you can be ostracised from society.

Is this what you want for a virus with a 99.7% survival rate even without treatment with ivermectin and associated medicines?

Every step the authorities take must be contested and treated with the contempt it deserves. 

But as I write this there is a glimmer of hope that the entire edifice is crumbling. It is reported in today’s Herald in Port Elizabeth that the co-chairs of the Covid advisory committee in South Africa have recommended that contact tracing and quarantining of so-called contacts be abandoned. This process of incarcerating healthy people on the basis of “tests” that have even given “Covid positive” results to watermelons and Coca Cola will now, hopefully, be abandoned.

Then they need to be honest and accept that the PCR and other testing mechanisms were frauds. The entire basis for closing down the global economy was based on a lie, just as their threatened closure of the global economy based on fake climate alarmism is a lie. In the US and Europe, as winter bites, the leftist woke ideology imposed by the Biden administration and the Eurocrats is backfiring spectacularly. With soaring energy costs, it hasn’t taken long to expose the anti-CO2 campaign as being as corrupt and unscientific as the anti-ivermectin campaign.

Who knows, by this time next year we may have a world returning to a better normal, where the woke agenda has been thoroughly discredited and philanthro-capitalists like Gates, Soros and Clinton no longer dictate global policy on anything.

Biko's legacy betrayed?

Black consciousness leader Steve Biko and Daily Dispatch editor Donald Woods, who was banned by the apartheid government after Biko's death in detention in 1977.

BOOK REVIEW

Was the implementation of race-based affirmative action and black economic empowerment necessary after the advent of black majority rule in 1994, when the ANC won the first non-racial elections?

Or did this new form of racial engineering, in a bid to redress the effects of apartheid, have precisely the opposite effect to what was intended, boosting white entrepreneurship and making black people increasingly dependent both on white business and on the state?

John Kane-Berman, for decades chief executive of the SA Institute of Race Relations, in his recently published memoir “Between Two Fires – Holding the Liberal Centre in South African Politics”, makes a persuasive case to show that it did the latter.

He does so just as the debate intensifies around so-called white monopoly capital and the supposed need for “radical economic transformation”.

Seen from the viewpoint of black youth, where unemployment is at record levels, the growing clamour for radical action on the economy is understandable. Any objective observer will note that clearly, in the private sector anyway, white people continue to rule the roost. They are the main owners of businesses that generate jobs, create wealth, contribute tax revenues and drive what little growth there still is in the economy.

But it need not have been like this. Kane-Berman explains what went wrong and why. In a chapter titled “Race and redress”, he writes:

“Apartheid was so pervasive and so destructive, as I myself had described in countless articles and speeches over so many years, that there was powerful appeal in the argument that only interventions by the state on a similar scale in the name of ‘transformation’ could reverse its effects. But even before the change of government and constitution in 1994 I questioned this. The real alternative to apartheid, we said, was not another form of social and racial engineering, but a society which prized economic as well as political freedom and which was founded on equality before the law. This ruled out racial discrimination in the form of affirmative action. Given the Institute’s history and who we were, the decision to oppose affirmative action and other racial legislation was the most important taken while I was running the organisation. Nothing has altered my conviction that this was the right decision.

“That conviction has been strengthened as it has become clear that the racial policies being pursued by the ANC go far beyond the affirmative action contemplated in the Constitution. The National Democratic Revolution described in the previous chapter of this memoir seeks not merely redress for the past, but to impose an entirely new doctrine of demographic proportionality on the country. Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy president of both the country and the ANC, has thus said that ‘race will remain an issue until all echelons of our society are demographically representative”. I commented: ‘Given the country’s human needs and its skills profile, this can only have dire consequences.’ “

Kane-Berman said the Institute “opposed affirmative action legislation in its entirely, including the two most important statutes, the Employment Equity Act of 1998 and the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act of 2003”.

“The main objective of the first was to require employers to use ‘preferential treatment’ for blacks (as well as women and disabled people) to bring about ‘equitable representation’ at all levels and in all occupations in companies with more than 50 employees or annual turnovers above certain thresholds […] within successive five-year periods. The main purposes of the second were to get companies to hand over 26 per cent of their equity to blacks and procure 70 per cent of their goods and services from firms which had done the same.”

Kane-Berman says the first of these was gazetted as a bill in 1997. “When we denounced it the labour minister, Tito Mboweni, accused us of orchestrating public confusion.” Kane-Berman’s colleague Anthea Jeffery was labelled a racist when she spoke out against it at a labour law conference in Durban. Veteran anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman, however, said it would “deter foreign investment”. Press reaction was mixed.

“Our opposition to the Employment Equity Act meant that from very early on we were fundamentally at odds with the ANC on a key component of its package of policies. We were also at odds with Cosatu and the SACP, as well as with most business chambers, the media, and civil society. We still are.”

Then he cuts to the chase.

“Right from the start we took the view that racial discrimination, even if now supposedly designed to promote equality rather than maintain white supremacy, was still wrong in principle. It violated the maxim of equality before the law.”

Earlier in his book, Kane-Berman talks about how, in the 1970s and 1980s, “the industrial colour bar had broken down during the ‘silent revolution’ when shortages of white skills forced employers to train and promote blacks despite the apartheid laws designed to prevent this. The way to speed up this process of erosion in the post-apartheid era was to speed up the rate of economic growth. If there were not more blacks in skilled and managerial jobs, this was the result not of a shortage of demand for them but a shortage of supply. This in turn would have to be remedied by repairing the country’s education and training system.”

Remember talk about “black diamonds”? These were, and still are, any black people with a decent tertiary education who are in such demand they can command ludicrously high salaries. Kane-Berman explains how that came about:

“A survey had shown that nearly two thirds of companies experienced ‘poaching’ of black professionals, while salary premiums paid to such professionals were further evidence of both their scarcity and the demand for them. Even before the employment equity legislation was enacted, a firm of human resources consultants had said a third of companies were already paying up to 50 per cent premiums on white salaries to get top black personnel. We said it was absurd to require that Africans should comprise 50 per cent or more of top management when only 3 per cent of Africans had tertiary qualifications and only 25 per cent fell within the 35 to 64 age cohort from which managers were usually drawn.”

He explains how the imposition of these racial quotas aimed at achieving “full demographic representation across all levels” was enforced on pain of fines which started at R500 000 for a first offence, but under amended legislation has risen to fines of up to R2.7-million or 10 per cent of turnover.

This first negative impact had been on service delivery.

“Though we criticised the legislation right from the start, we actually underestimated the harm affirmative action would do to the public as opposed to the private sector. The latter operated under the constraint that poor appointments risked damaging businesses. No such constraints applied to the public sector, where affirmative action has been applied without regard to cost or consequences. Large numbers of skilled whites, including teachers, have been retrenched, posts left vacant rather than filled with whites, and plenty of people promoted or appointed for reasons of race alone. The police, the defence force, provincial education departments, public hospitals, local authorities, sewerage systems, and Eskom are among dozens upon dozens of public entities that fail to work properly. The ANC has eviscerated large parts of the civil service on which it relies to implement its policies. This has done as much damage to the state and to the ANC’s own supporters as to the whites who have lost or been denied jobs.”

But what of the impact on economic growth and black self-esteem and self-reliance?

“Our critique of BEE was essentially twofold. In the first place the funding of BEE deals would come at the cost of funding new investment in plant and equipment, and so be detrimental to growth. The second problem involved a paradox. Instead of promoting black entrepreneurship, BEE required white companies to do things for blacks. What was being measured was not black success but white success. This was a strange form of liberation.

“As long as this approach continued, BEE would fail to capture the critical component of entrepreneurial success. Twelve years later, the ANC itself bewails the absence of black industrialists – but fails to acknowledge that BEE created the wrong incentives.”

Kane-Berman spelt out these likely effects of BEE in a speech to the Johannesburg Rotary Club in 2009, entitled “Empowerment that disempowers”. It is worth quoting at length from this speech, which really captures the lunacy of BEE. He said:

“About 10 years ago the Institute hosted a panel discussion about affirmative action. One of the speakers was Temba Nolutshungu of the Free Market Foundation. He predicted that the main beneficiaries would be whites. Formerly protected white youth who found that the Employment Equity Act limited their job prospects would be forced to turn to the technical trades or become entrepreneurs. Young blacks, on the other hand, would be channelled into ‘low-risk soft-option’ positions. This would reinforce white dominance and blunt the entrepreneurial spirit among young blacks.

“Another factor undermining black entrepreneurship relative to white is that so many blacks have been absorbed into the public service. Whites displaced to make way for them have been forced to set up their own businesses. Professor Lawrence Schlemmer […] observed in April 2007 that the number of small businesses owned by whites had increased very rapidly because of the exodus from the public service.”

Kane-Berman continued, tellingly, in that 2009 speech, which he reproduces in his book: “BEE is more about white than black achievement. White-owned companies are given ratings for doing things for blacks. BEE empowers white firms to get contracts from the black government. Black individuals benefit, but do they have to perform in a competitive marketplace? What are the government’s priorities: making backs independent or whites compliant?

“Brian Molefe, CEO of the Public Investment Corporation, complained in August 2007 that whites were not doing enough to develop black talent. But how much are blacks doing to develop it? Given its record in education, the government is certainly not doing very much. Nor is ‘transformation’ doing much. This is because the focus is on making white companies harness blacks, rather than on creating new black or non-racial institutions.”

Then the crux of the argument, which brings in a struggle hero from the 1970s.

“I wonder what Steve Biko would have thought. Professor Sipho Seepe, at the time president of the Institute, wrote in September 2007: ‘Given Biko’s emphasis on self-reliance, it is reasonable to assume that he would have great discomfort with affirmative action and the current form of BEE. These forms of intervention discourage self-reliance and self-actualisation. They perpetuate the victim mentality and discourage an enterprising spirit. They also encourage a debilitating sense of entitlement.’ “

Note that here Kane-Berman was quoting a prominent black academic. He then addresses another key factor:

“It is sometimes suggested that BEE requirements are not very different from the policies used by Afrikaners to build up their economic power. But there is a difference: in the 1930s the savings of tens of thousands of individual Afrikaners were mobilised to start financial institutions. Why have the savings of the burgeoning black middle class not been similarly mobilised to create black financial institutions?

“Joel Netshitenzhe, until recently a top man in the president’s office, said that apartheid had crushed the entrepreneurial spirit among blacks. But the present government’s policies are doing little to liberate that spirit. Quite the reverse. Vincent Maphai, chairman of BHP Billiton, commented in July 2009: ‘Under apartheid people were most creative and the community flourished. People did not sit back and think what will the state do for me? They were empowered by apartheid but ironically disempowered by liberation.’ ”

Then Kane-Berman tackles the impact on foreign investment:

“BEE requirements have almost certainly deterred foreign direct investment (FDI), in the mining industry in particular. Lower FDI has meant lower rates of economic growth, so BEE has retarded the generation of jobs. So we can reconfigure President Thabo Mbeki’s old ‘two-nations’ divide. Instead of rich-and-white versus poor-and-black, we have a growing divide between whites who have to look after themselves and blacks who are becoming increasingly dependent on the state. This is profoundly disempowering. As Professor Achielle Mbembe of Wits wrote in April 2007, ‘It risks codifying within the law and in the minds of its beneficiaries the very powerlessness it aims to redress.’

“What will all this mean for race relations?” asks Kane-Berman. “In May 2002, Tim Modise wrote: ‘One problem with seeing ourselves as permanent victims is that it makes those who believe they are racially superior feel vindicated.’ In August 2008 Professor Jonathan Jansen, now rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State and also president of the Institute, said that affirmative action ‘perpetuates the myth among white people that black people are inferior’.”

So the next time the likes of Black First Land First, and other racially obsessed groups vent their anger against white journalists currently exposing Gupta-Zuma corruption or “white monopoly capital”, they might want to reflect on the view that it was the ANC’s own policies, implemented over the past two decades, which have, according to the above evidence, disempowered the very people they were meant to empower.

Clearly a major policy shift towards a more liberal, non-racial democracy is long overdue if we are to prevent the already badly holed ship of state from sinking completely.

* “Between Two Fires” by John Kane-Berman is published by Jonathan Ball

Changing colonial-era names

It may have escaped most people’s notice, but the ANC government is back to its name-changing obsession in the Eastern Cape.

The latest example, reported in the Weekend Post (March 5, 2016), is the changing of Queenstown to Komani.

Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa has given the go-ahead for this change to “its original African name”, as the report puts it.

According to the February government gazette, Mount Frere will also be renamed KwaBhaca, Elliot will become Khowa and Mount Ayliff will be eMaXesibeni. Lady Frere will be renamed Cacadu.

As a fifth generation white South African whose great-great-great grandparents came out with the 1820 British settlers I take serious offence at this decision.

And I do so as an individual who opposed apartheid throughout his adult life.

Queenstown, like all the others mentioned, is a product of the hard work of the early settlers, in conjunction with the labour of black people in the area.

The town was founded in early 1853 under the direction of Sir George Cathcart, who named the settlement, and then fort, after Queen Victoria. Work on its railway connection to the port city of East London was begun by the Cape government of John Molteno in 1876, and the line was officially opened on 19 May 1880

The genesis of Queenstown, famous for its school, Queen’s College, was replicated along similar lines for every other town and city in this country.

Bizarrely, when I was growing up in East London, the psychiatric hospital in Queenstown was called Komani. It still is. So immediately you also have a rather sad connotation attached to the name.

Why does this renaming fetish offend me, when I was part of the anti-apartheid struggle from my teenage years when I first started writing letters to the editor of the Daily Dispatch attacking apartheid? When I worked as a volunteer for the Progressive Federal Party of Helen Susman, and later as a poorly paid organiser for the party in the politically unfertile terrain of the Border district? When I became a reporter on the anti-apartheid Evening Post at the start of the 1984 United Democratic Front-led uprising, working closely with veteran township reporter Jimmy Matyu? When I reported daily for the Post, and later the Eastern Province Herald, on the morally indefensible policy of apartheid, as UDF leaders were rounded up by security police?

I oppose these name changes simply because I abhor the idea of trying to erase history. What happened in the past, in the long process which led to the formation of South Africa as a single, unitary state, was a complex, multifaceted process.

I am all too aware that this land we call South Africa was occupied by the San, Khoi and various black African tribes when the Europeans first arrived. It is a long, often sorry history of exploitation which really began when ship’s surgeon Jan van Riebeeck led the first settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Initially all the Dutch East India Company wanted to do was to establish a small refreshment station (Company gardens were developed) to supply their ships heading to India and the Far East.

But over the next two centuries, the Dutch and French Huguenots who later joined them, gradually spread eastward, taking land as farms and establishing towns along the way, including as far east as Graaff-Reinet and Uitenhage, both of which feature wonderful Cape Dutch architecture. But they also subjugated the Khoisan, either taking them on as indentured labourers, or pushing them to the periphery of habitable territory.

The British settlers and the 1857 German settlers in East London and the Border area extended this process, occupying the land and going about the business of what they were sent out to do in the first place: establish a buffer between the Xhosa territories to the east and the Cape Colony and open up the country to trade and industry through the establishment of infrastructure like ports, railway lines, roads, electricity, dams, and so on.

Meanwhile, mainly Scottish missionaries established the first western schools and colleges for black people, with Nelson Mandela being a prime example of the sort of education such people received.

Which is an appropriate point to draw attention to one of the great hypocrisies of this name-changing obsession.

If colonial names are so hurtful and abhorrent to black South Africans, why on earth is there not a clamour from the ANC to change the name of Fort Hare University?

As Wikipedia notes: “Originally, Fort Hare was a British fort in the wars between British settlers and the Xhosa of the 19th century. Some of the ruins of the fort are still visible today, as well as graves of some of the British soldiers who died while on duty there.”

Wikipedia tells us further: “Missionary activity under James Stewart led to the creation of a school for missionaries from which at the beginning of the 20th century the university resulted.” Fort Hare University was established exactly 100 years ago this year.

The only demand for Fort Hare’s name to be changed has come, I believe, from the PAC, which wants it named after its founder, former student Robert Sobukwe.

Surely the sort of scenario we have in Port Elizabeth is the best solution. By calling the metro Nelson Mandela Bay, you pay tribute to a great conciliatory leader from the Eastern Cape (who, paradoxically had few links with PE), while retaining the names of the original settler towns of Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage.

But why did they change the name of the Market Square to the Vuyisile Mini Square? Mini was a struggle hero, killed brutally by the apartheid regime in 1964, as were the Pebco Three and Cradock Four in 1985, at a time when I was identifying closely with their struggle.

But why not instead erect a monument to Mini on the Market Square?

The Market Square in Port Elizabeth literally grew out of the dust and dung of the town’s origins as a small port from which products, most notably merino wool and ostrich feathers farmed in the Karoo in the 19^th century, were exported abroad. In so doing, the port integrated this part of the nascent South African state into the global economy.

Similarly, Main Street grew organically as the town developed. It is as old as Port Elizabeth, that is 194 years, and there was no need to rename it after the late Govan “Oom Gov” Mbeki, the gentleman communist party and ANC leader who release from Robben Island I reported on for the Evening Post when he was freed in Port Elizabeth on November 5, 1987.

Each and every town and village with a European name (and many in the former Transkei with Xhosa names) is not a product of a deliberate policy called colonialism so much as the creation of the hard work and ingenuity of the settlers who developed them – obviously with the help of cheap black labour. But at least that labour was gradually becoming integrated into the first-world economy, a process which, however, was set back decades by the apartheid policies of the National Party when it came to power in 1948, particularly as far as social and residential integration is concerned.

Our history is too interesting, too nauseating, too wonderful and too terrible for place names like Queenstown simply to be wiped off the map in the name of political correctness.

The ANC, to its credit, decried the recent attacks on colonial-era monuments like the Queen Victoria and Horse Memorial statues in Port Elizabeth. But the hatred inherent in removing names like Queenstown and Mount Ayliff is little different to that which motivates people to attack monuments that have been around for more than 100 years.

What it says to white people in this country is that their familes’ centuries of contributing to the westernisation and development of this land as a first-world economy is totally of no value and to be condemned. We’ll just pretend, they seem to imply, that all the advances we see on the southern tip of Africa occurred as if by a miracle.

The reality, as we all know, is totally different. I’ve said it before, but it seems it needs repeating. Without the European settlers we would not have modern infrastructure, including a road and rail network, dams and irrigation schemes, harbours and airports, towns and cities, schools and universities, electricity and treated water.

We wouldn’t have engineers, doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, physiotherapists and so on. We wouldn’t have cars and tractors, radios, computers, television and cellphones, nor the internet and all that goes with it.

I, as an individual, can take no credit for any of that. But I do know that all these things are the product of Europeans settling across the length and breadth of this land, as well as further north in what are now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia, as well as, to a lesser extent, in Angola and Mozambique.

In fact, renaming these towns is, in my view, tantamount to hate speech and should be investigated by the Human Rights Commission on that basis.

It bears all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing, in that it seeks to eliminate from the collective memory the contribution of hardy, enterprising settlers who, in the case of the 1820 settlers, were literally dumped, like today’s squatters, in the inhospitable Albany district, there to eke out an existence with the minimum of support from Britain and under the constant threat of attack by Xhosa and Khoikhoi.

I urge the HRC to investigate this Orwellian attempt to expunge hundreds of years of our history from the country’s collective memory.

There can be no quibble with combining isiXhosa names, like Makana, with that of Grahamstown, as currently is the case with most overarching district municipalities and metros. Surely that is adequate recognition, along with some appropriate statuary, as suggested for Port Elizabeth’s market square?

Like Rhodes University, Grahamstown has become a brand name, as have all the others.

Eliminate those widely recognised brand names and the Xhosa names will simply be lost and forgotten in a global economy which will be none too keen to try to get its head around the Xhosa clicks, as beautiful and intriguing as they may sound to those of us who grew up with them.

Remember that Fort Hare is just such a brand name, as is the historic Port Elizabeth township of New Brighton. Are they going to be eliminated too?

Where will it end? Already university art works and historic collections are under threat.

Will they start burning books with western links? If so, the entire scientific output of the Western world since the Renaissance, arguably mankind’s greatest achievement, will have to be eradicated.

They may as well get rid of their computers and smartphones, too, since they are also a product of western intellectual endeavour.

Surely from these examples the lunacy and hypocrisy of such selective iconoclasm becomes more than self-evident?