Xenophobia is a smoke screen: ANC politicians must remove themselves from politics

It is not metaphorically expressed to demand that the entire ANC political elite recuse themselves from the South African political space. They failed black people dismally. We are sick of their British accents, including Dr Naledi Pandor. A polished accent to show does not bring bread and butter to the general black populace. It has been a show of intellectuals for the past 32 years. To please the Johannesburg stock markets, they would even call themselves Thatcherites.

It would carry more meaning if ANC politicians removed themselves from Africa entirely.

The story began long before Tata Mandela was still on Robben Island. He vanished from prison for months; his political inmates were not privy to his whereabouts. That is when and where Mandela was conditioned and groomed in a clandestine location, so that when he assumed black political power, he would not rock the boats of globalists who have owned South African capital for centuries. Mandela should never demand reparations like the Jews in Germany after the Second World War when he left the prison gates of Robben Island.

Mandela was released from prison with a separate mandate from the rest of the comrades, including Chris Hani. He negotiated the transfer of power within defined geopolitical and economic spaces. He was successful. Indeed, South Africa got political power. Full stop. Black people can vote and never beyond voting. Mandela was okay with that; Mbeki was okay with that; Ramaphosa was okay with that. Let us leave Zuma out of this because he cannot read and write. What does that tell us about ANC and political astuteness?

Former President Mugabe laughed loud when he realised that South African independence fell short of genuine uhuru. South African independence is like a pig wearing lipstick. Nelson Mandela became a mascot, a caricature of white capitalists, paraded in major capital cities as the best president in the world. A Mandela who forgave hard‑core apartheid criminals but could not forgive his wife Winnie. And again, Africans who love praise so dearly, he caved in and became a darling of western capital, overshadowing Robert Mugabe.

The political situation has deteriorated to an all‑time low. Chasing foreigners from South Africa is a side‑show. The picture is bigger than what we can comprehend. Behind the rabble‑rousers of the moulds of Jacinta Ngobese‑Zuma and Phakelumthakathi are powerful forces. They use unsuspecting blacks to "clean" South Africa of black foreigners to remake South Africa into a white‑ruled nation once more. Blacks in South Africa are not politically astute, miseducated, with only a few elites in posh universities and colleges. They too do not realise the grand design. They do not see that South Africa will be a colony again.

When white South Africans gave in to black political independence, they were as sure as day following night that the black ANC government would not deliver meaningful independence to the majority black population. It was a trap: give blacks power to rule for a generation, corrupt them abundantly, and collapse their black government. President Jacob Zuma was corrupted; Cyril Ramaphosa was corrupted before he became president. He was already an oligarch, a good and obedient black boy of white capital.

Ramaphosa is deep into corruption. His Phala Phala scandal is not going away. He has set up several commissions of enquiry as mere shows and never about genuinely dealing with corruption. If he is corrupt himself, it does not add up. His body language does not show any signs of remorse that he was caught in gross corruption involving millions on his famous farm. He moves around at ease with presidents of China and Russia, leaders with zero tolerance for corruption in their countries.

Prince Mashele has endlessly evidenced the deep end of ANC corruption in government and local councils. Spot‑on, traceable, he offers an alternative to the ANC government, propagating a technocratic government. His premise is based on the inadequacy of ANC party and government officials who assumed administrative positions in government since 1994. Mashele is deeply concerned about the lack of requisite qualifications of ANC government and council officials who run government synergies that demand professionalism and adequate knowledge of economics. ANC service delivery is marginal and grossly incompetent. As a result, South Africa's development under ANC has never met the aspirations of the black majority electorate. If leaders are chosen from a pool of political parties only, without formal education, professionalism and a track record of occupying high offices, how will development be possible? They failed from the onset.

Prince Mashele disqualifies electoral processes of governance temporarily. He says that is where ANC leadership rot and corruption begin. He has zero tolerance for the ineptocratic governance of political parties. He argues that sound education and professionalism are crucial to political‑economic development because it is about making right decisions, a key to progress. Most ANC political leaders are miseducated, both at parliament and council levels. South Africa needs to focus on the best quality education for future generations. Education must be made a nation's priority.

Prince Mashele dismisses elections in South Africa to give time and space for a reset of about 15 years of exclusive technocratic administration. There must be a link between sound education, ethics and politics in leadership. His ideal of a political shake‑up starts from the office of the president going down: technically competent, thinking beyond politics, sound economic background, ethical, talented, of renaissance character, introducing a market economy to fine‑tune with global economic forums.

A lot makes sense in his ideas. However, questions must be asked why he is heavy on ANC but silent on South African white capital that is still floated in foreign stock exchange markets — New York, London, Frankfurt. He openly wants to ally with South African and foreign oligarchs who will finance his ideas for a "better" South Africa. "Decent accommodation for an average black South African is building two‑roomed houses for millions of black Africans as an alternative to shake‑shake houses." It sounds as if black South Africans are dished and thrown about from pillar to post, from one globalist to another.

It must never be about which capitalist is better than the other. Mashele says he is inviting the Elon Musks of this earth and several other finance capitalists to promote his ideas about a South Africa for all, factually making black South Africans vulnerable to perpetual white capitalist oppression. He does not talk about land expropriation to blacks, where the power and freedom of an African lie. His idea about a future South Africa is one where blacks will be collectors of wood and water, providing menial jobs inadvertently making Elon Musks and the rest trillionaires.

Prince Mashele has made it abundantly clear how thankful he is to white people who brought western civilisation to Africa. Are the civilised standards he is showcasing any different from what ANC has been doing all along — sapping crumbs of white capital? I do not see much difference. I would be tempted to think that Mashele is in the pocket of yet another cluster of South African oligarchs whose sole aim is to recapture South Africa through him, using him. Mashele, in his wisdom or lack of it, does not realise the danger. The man is clinically naive.

Xenophobia is a side‑show. Those Africans who have been chased away from South Africa must not cry much; they must call it a blessing in disguise for what lies ahead in South Africa. The children of those who marched through South African towns and cities, half‑naked, holding sticks and machetes, "weapons of mass destruction", will sooner or later regret their parents' actions. Google does not forget. It captures everything. South Africa exposed the crudeness, horrendous methods of dealing with human beings, putting lives of their sisters and brothers on the line, exposing them to the deepest recesses of a human heart — deeply apolitical, crude, barbaric, uneducated and clinically stupid.

When Prince Mashele says he is grateful for the western civilisation white people brought to Africa, that civilisation he is talking about was evident when half‑naked men holding sticks and machetes started chasing black foreigners literally on the streets of South African towns and cities. Mashele must be told that before white people colonised Africa, we had our own civilisation he does not know and does not appreciate. How many young people around his circumference are going to consume deep insults against Africans generally? When Mashele speaks this language about primitive Africans, it is the whites who will clap hands. They have found a puppet in him to use to finish their agenda, to recapture South Africa back from black hands. Before they capture South Africa again, there must be zero black foreigners in South Africa, chased away by black South Africans.

So many revolutionary stalwarts perished before and after South African independence. Comrade Steve Biko died in apartheid prison. Comrade Thembisile Chris Hani was murdered by elements in the ANC party when he started talking about implementing the Freedom Charter in South Africa's new dispensation. All ANC elite must tell us at whose behest Chris Hani was murdered. It is not enough to tell us he was gunned down by a Polish young man. Before they die, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma must come clean: who was responsible for the death of Chris Hani? Serious introspection must be done to reset South Africa to its revolutionary glory.

My essay is not complete if I do not mention President Mugabe, who had a good laugh when Mandela failed to achieve true freedom — uhuru — in South Africa. When Robert Mugabe was released from prison in 1975, he had, together with Emmerson Mnangagwa, a mandate from Rhodesia's Ian Smith and the South African apartheid government to derail freedom in southern Africa. Indeed, these are signs of the times. We are living in an era where we realise only now that the freedom of southern Africa was undermined long back by white supremacy, white capital, with the assistance of African leaders, appendages of white supremacy. It pains even more to think that Mandela was part of it.