Marxist government’s land-grab policy against whites intensifies
Editor’s note: Longtime WorldNetDaily contributor Anthony C. LoBaido has made no less than six trips to South Africa in recent years and has lived, worked and traveled all over South Africa and neighboring countries.
As South Africa begins its second decade after apartheid’s dismantlement in 1994, the ruling Marxist African National Congress has rapidly escalated what some call “the Zimbabwe paradigm” – moving to more aggressively seize its white citizens’ farms, possessions and futures.
President Bush visited South Africa during his first term in office and promised to look into the plight of South Africa’s white farmers. This after being given a video presentation by Dr. Pieter Mulder of the Freedom Front Plus Party. Thus far, the president has publicly said nothing about the plight of the white Afrikaner farmers and has made Mbeki his “point man” on the Zimbabwe issue.
While Bush did sign a presidential directive calling for action against Mugabe, American and British influence on the situation appears negligible. The opposition MDC in Zimbabwe is still cowed into submission while massive socialist and quasi-Maoist agrarian and land reform schemes continue to plunge “Zim” into despair.
Now, the Marxist-Leninist cadres of the African National Congress, or ANC, fellow travelers and sympathizers, are ready to take the next and final step in the liquidation of South Africa’s whites and their wealth. Some years ago, Mbeki told the world: “Because of colonialism of a special type our victory in the national liberation struggle did not result in the departure of the foreign ruling class.”
The ANC has enacted a “willing seller, willing buyer” program seeking to transfer white-owned farmland to black South Africans, but critics have countered that plan is moving far too slowly for their liking. White farmers believe government corruption, ineptness and inertia have been the reasons why farmland hasn’t been transferred over very quickly.
Farmers claim they are charging market-related prices for their land, but the ANC has set far different values on the same land. As such, the ANC blames the farmers for slowing down their land reform project. The ANC owns lots of land in South Africa. The problem is the ANC officially doesn’t know how much land it owns.
What is known is that the ANC government could invoke the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act. This Act was passed in 2003 and clearly authorizes the ANC to expropriate land.
South Africa does not have a Bureau of Land Management, as does the U.S. Rather, the land custodians come from a troika of governmental tributaries – agriculture, land affairs and public works.
ANC-owned land most likely stands at 19.8 percent of the total surface area of South Africa. Between 5 and 10 percent of that land could be redistributed today if need be. The ANC wants to have 30 percent of all commercial farmland under black ownership by 2014. As of December 2004, 3 percent of commercial farmland had been redistributed. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that farming, including genetically modified farming, has become an increasingly high-tech venture, calling for a high degree of intelligence, training and dedication. It is one thing to hand over the land. It is another thing to keep that land fruitful and feed the masses.
Objectively, the ANC needs South Africa’s vineyards to export wine. That is a cash crop Mbeki would not want to sabotage. Also, as long as there are whites and white farmers in South Africa, the ANC will be able to cry “racism” and “apartheid’s legacy” as a cover for its own corruption. Once “the white card” has been played, as it has by Mugabe in recent years, the ANC will have to stand on its own merits. This does not bode well for the ANC, as two-thirds of South Africa’s voters sat out the most recent national elections.
Many white South Africans have fled the rape, crime, murder, HIV and all-around social disintegration of this once wealthy, anti-communist nation. Destinations like the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are now home to the de facto Afrikaner and South African Diaspora. Like the Hmong, Karen, Montagnards, South Sudanese and Kurds, the Afrikaners will continue to exist as a people but not as a nation. Because of their Calvinist background and racial and cultural solidarity, white South Africans, especially the Afrikaners, are ill-prepared for the realities of living in post-Christian and post-modern Western Civilization, where someone like Paris Hilton is not only tolerated but celebrated.
South Africa’s farmers are a special breed. The term “Afrikaner” (white African) is interchangeable with the word “Boer” which is Dutch for “farmer.” The Afrikaners fought off the British in not one but two Anglo-Boer Wars, and only lost the 1899-1902 Boer War when the British rounded up 26,000 Afrikaner women and children and starved them off in the world’s first modern concentration camps.
That battle continues today, albeit in another form. A few years back, British Labor Party Cabinet member Jack Straw visited South Africa and presented the ANC with millions of pounds sterling of British taxpayer money, part of which was used for “land reform and justice.”
According to groups like Genocide Watch, however, what is going on in South Africa’s killing fields is not justice, but genocide. There are only about 40,000 white farmers in South Africa. The 1,700 murdered from that group is the highest per capita murder rate in the world. The average murder rate is 7 out of 100,000 worldwide. For the South African farmer it is 313 out of 100,000. The second-highest per capita murder rate in the world is that of the South African police.
South Africa’s farms are also unique in that the ANC has allowed transnational corporations like Monsanto to make South Africa the world’s foremost experimental laboratory for genetically modified foods. Under the apartheid regime, only one GM permit was granted. Now they are legion.
GM or GE foods in South Africa are promoted by a group called Africa-Bio. They in turn are monitored by a group called Bio-Watch. Africa-Bio is seen, rightly or wrongly by critics, as a public-relations arm of the transnational corporations operating in Africa and elsewhere.
On one side of the farmland issue are of course South Africa’s white farmers, Agri-SA and the Transvaal Agricultural Union. On the other side are the ANC, the Young Communist League, or YCL, and a group called the Landless People’s Movement, or LPM.
As WorldNetDaily has reported, a few years back, the LPM seemed to be a poorly funded fringe group unable to articulate its own message in a meaningful way. However, according to Marge Leitner, a former South African policewoman and acute observer of the political scene, thanks to transnational leftist groups, the LPM has been “transformed” into a muscular force to be reckoned with vis-?-vis the farm issue and shouldn’t be underestimated.
“The Landless Peoples Movement, that radical grouping who, even as recently as two years ago, were comprised of the rubbish that roams the streets, has suddenly evolved into a group with quite a bit of clout,” Leitner told WorldNetDaily. “Suddenly they have speakers who are literate and reasonably articulate. I became suspicious of this and did some digging and lo and behold, guess what I found out? There is massive international (leftist) support for the LPM. One needs to keep this in mind as well. Once again, outside forces, in addition to the leftist Marxist lot here, are involved in the destabilization of this country. They are definitely in the mix.
Continued Leitner: “This will be a battle for survival! Agri-SA as well as the TAU are standing firm at this point. The Communists of course are calling for the nationalization of all land in South Africa.”
Specifically, those Communists are working toward amending the Constitution to allow for all land to be nationalized.
South Africa’s Constitution is unique in that it is the only constitution in the world that grants legal rights for homosexuals and abortion advocates. HIV/AIDS is not a “gay” issue or perceived as such in South Africa, as compared to the U.S. Gay rights are accepted as the norm. The land issue however, is another story completely.
David Masondo, the chairperson of the YCL recently stated there must soon be an end to the “sunset clause” – granted to the white remnant by the late, white ex-KGB colonel and ANC leader Joe Slovo – that gave constitutional property and land rights to individuals.
“Even if it means invasions, we need some kind of review,” Masondo recently told South Africans. The league’s national secretary, Buti Manamela, pitched in with: “We believe there should be no private ownership of land in this country.”
These Communist resolutions are part and parcel of the YCL’s national policy and strategy.
Leitner told WorldNetDaily: “This is what is going on with our farmers. Zimbabwe is in our face! The rhetoric and the hate propaganda have gone up quite a few notches. It is quite clear from what the Transvaal Agricultural Union is saying, that they just used the land summit to drive home the demand for the expropriation of land, irrespective of any counter-arguments presented by the farmers. All of this will lead to South Africa joining the ranks of this famine-stricken continent rather sooner than later.”
Because of the pressure exerted by so-called “landless” groups, the ANC has said it will review its land-transfer policy. The ANC’s agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza said in July at the national land summit in Gauteng (the former Transvaal): “What it means is that the state must come up with a mechanism.”
The abandonment of the “willing seller, willing buyer” program for Zimbabwe-style land invasions would have national and global repercussions for South Africa, the rand, for South Africa’s exports and the willingness of the socialist Labor Party in the UK to continue funding Mbeki’s Nepad (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and the African Union, or AU.
The AU seeks the economic, political, monetary and military integration of the African continent as a sub-block of the emerging world government. Mbeki has designs on leading the AU and/or U.N. (he recently purchased a 600 million rand plane) though he will continue to micromanage South Africa long after he leaves the political scene through a web of committees, all which report directly to him.
The stakes of this grand game have not been lost on the Afrikaner farmers. According to the TAU:
The newspaper headline ‘Land Shock’ encapsulated in essence the cumulative hot air, socialistic demands and racist resentment which characterized the land-reform summit held over five days at taxpayers’ expense during the last week in July this year. The results of the summit were pre-ordained – we knew the minister of land affairs would ruminate on abolishing the “willing seller, willing buyer” principle – the linchpin of rural property security in South Africa – that the chattering land-grab classes would reiterate their ideological claims, and that the commercial farming sector would present logical and reasoned arguments to a summit which was clearly not listening.The conference can be seen as a prelude to more and more assaults on the commercial farming sector in South Africa. The reiteration of clauses in the communist-contrived “Freedom Charter” of 50 years ago (the land shall belong to those who work it) was given prominent play, and it is clear the summit was to prepare South Africa for a Zimbabwe-style grab of productive commercial farms in the not-too-distant future.
The most ominous revelation was Thabo Mbeki’s statement – reported on the BBC’s website (but not widely disseminated in South Africa) – that the Zimbabwe land grab was delayed “so that negotiations for South Africa’s liberation would succeed.” Mbeki said that when South Africa was negotiating its “transition to democracy” (at the time Zimbabwe started its land grab), the Organization of African Unity had asked Zimbabwe to stop the program as it would “frighten the apartheid government in South Africa.”
In essence, Mbeki is telling us that the wholesale land theft which was to proceed in Zimbabwe was put on the back burner so as not to frighten South Africa’s whites who were in the process of surrendering their sovereignty on the false premise of power-sharing. This masterful sleight of hand worked, of course, and it is evidence of Mbeki’s supreme self-assurance that he would tell the world of this now, when his own government is relentlessly harassing and hobbling South Africa’s commercial farming sector.
The summit revealed the stark chasm which exists between the realists and the ideologues in South Africa, the last country in Africa to produce enough food for its own people. Given the vivid examples of Africa’s inability to feed itself – Zimbabwe, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Angola, Mozambique are but a few – one would think that those governing South Africa would be more sober in their land-reform goals. But logic in the Western sense plays no part in the thinking of a government which is prepared to hand over R6 billion of taxpayers’ money to the heinous tyrant now destroying his country, Zimbabwe. This lack of logic could be seen in the ludicrous demands, vicious accusations and lying propaganda which emanated from the land summit.
Will the world sit by and allow those in power to destroy the last remaining working country in Africa? Does the world want another Zimbabwe, another Niger? South Africa’s commercial farming sector appeals to the world to wake up and monitor the deliberate efforts by the SA government and its cohorts to drive South Africa’s white farmers off their land, thus bringing the spectra of famine ever closer.
How of all of this will shake out is anyone’s guess. Will the world come to the aid of the South African farmers? What is certain is that the Afrikaners have been on their own for over 100 years, independent of the emerging, Western-led, transnational, multicultural, globalist system. And like the Amish and Mennonites, they’ll probably be on their own for at least 100 more.
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