Righteous flights from imperialist horrors

23 October 2016 - 02:01 By Peter Bruce

The new public protector, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, has wasted little time in setting out her stall. She's ordered that the country's only independent TV news channel, eNCA, be switched off in the institution's offices and that it be replaced by ANN7, the channel owned by the Gupta family. At least we know, without delay, who she is. At her first public appearance before parliament's justice committee on Wednesday she took a nasty swipe at her predecessor, Thuli Madonsela, criticising her for accepting a $500,000 (about R7-million) donation from USAID.Stoking the outrage from ANC and EFF MPs on the committee at this imperialist horror, she said: "It's a thing of the past ... it's no secret that I worked at the State Security Agency, I know the implications of [international donor funding]."story_article_left1Actually, the funds were part of a government-to-government aid agreement and had in fact been paid to the justice minister, who had subsequently allocated $500,000, a fraction of the total, to the public protector's office. And by the time Madonsela had left, the $500,000 had still not been transferred.So much for integrity, then. Mkhwebane presumes she's going to get all the funding she needs from parliament, a confidence that betrays her naivety. She has never yet run an investigation and will soon discover how much money a good one costs. Perhaps Justice Minister Michael Masutha should allocate the money somewhere else now Mkhwebane says she doesn't want it.The new PP isn't the only madness to grip South Africa. On Friday, news emerged that Foreign Minister Maite "Hole-in-the-Head" Nkoana-Mashabane has written to the UN giving one year's notice that South Africa plans to withdraw from the International Criminal Court.This because of the fuss last year when the murderous president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, had to flee South Africa to avoid prosecution for war crimes. President Jacob Zuma and his cohorts were quick to cry foul and denounce the ICC for predominantly prosecuting Africans.The ICC executive is made up of five people. Two are African: Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor, is from the Gambia. One of the three divisional heads, Phakiso Mochochoko, is from Lesotho.The others are Belgian, Argentinian and Canadian - hardly the stuff of imperialist conspiracy against Africans. Yet because of the Zuma administration's ideological indigestion, we must now leave an institution that brings only credit upon us for being members.Why is it that when leaders kill their own people we would want to look away? Of course there is more injustice in the world than we can possibly absorb, but instead of doing something about that we have decided to hunker down with human rights abusers of the worst kind.story_article_right2The ANC is shot through with resentment of the West. Remember the party's national general council last year and the chapter on foreign relations prepared by, among others, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma? "[Western] Imperialism has plunged humanity in a perpetual socioeconomic crisis," it moaned, inaccurately. "The high levels of poverty, inequality, unemployment, disease and underdevelopment confirm our long-held view that the capitalist market economy cannot resolve its own contradictions."China's economic development trajectory remains a leading example of the triumph of humanity over adversity. The exemplary role of the collective leadership of the Communist Party of China in this regard should be a guiding lodestar of our own struggle."That is both boring and delusional. China's economy "developed" on the back of 50million citizens killed by Mao Zedong's mad rush to industrialise. Today, civil liberties in China are more restricted than they were 20 years ago. Together, Russia and China have annexed or simply bullied their way into more foreign territory in the past five years than the West has in the past 50.The Brics, our prime delusion, are already a geopolitical sideshow. China and India can barely hide their animosity over Chinese military support for Pakistan, which New Delhi accuses of sponsoring terrorism against it.An agreement to start a Brics ratings agency to "counter" Western ones last week simply reeked of hallucination and sanctimony. China already has its own and pays it little heed.The comrades who run the government (and now also the public protector's office) should calm down, grow up and stop taking sides in an increasingly dangerous world. We're ideally placed to be a leading nonaligned power and we should not waste the political space we have on juvenile ideological pretence...

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