South Africa

They view the ANC as an elite project

In 2021, at the age of 24, Chad Louw became South Africa’s youngest ever mayor. Then a member of the governing African National Congress party (ANC), Louw was elected in Oudtshoorn, a town in the Klein Karoo region of the Western Cape. This is a sparse, dusty world of open expanses, straight highways and dramatic mountain ranges. In the early 20th century, it supplied a global fashion for ostrich feathers, a boom period that endowed Oudtshoorn with a crop of stately colonial mansions known locally as ostrich palaces. Today, these buildings give the town a quaint character that sits uneasily amid the signs of poverty and unemployment.

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They were shadow people, moving beyond the light of small fires on a winter dawn. There was no hint then that I was about to encounter one of the most extraordinary sights of my time in South Africa.

In this part of the country, winter is a cold, dry season that burns the veld brown. The ground is hard like flint and when the wind blows across the plains, dust covers the squatters and all that they carry.

I could hear digging, and coming closer I saw a woman hacking at the earth. Nearby other men and women were doing the same thing. They had old garden tools, machetes, pieces of stone, anything to make holes into which they placed pieces of plastic, tin and wood.

I asked the woman what she was doing. “We are hiding our shacks,” she told me.

Brace yourselves. Absolutely disgusting. pic.twitter.com/M1rwrZpMji

— Mufasa007 (@Mufasa0062) March 4, 2024

From the outside, Johannesburg does not look like it is doing well.

Roads littered with potholes. Broken traffic lights not repaired for months. Rotting rubbish in the streets.

But from the inside, the scale of the problems facing the biggest city in South Africa and the richest and most industrialised in the continent is even worse.

From taps regularly running dry to daily four-hour power cuts – known locally as load shedding – life for many people in Jo’burg has declined dramatically.

The WHITE ghettos that blight South Africa

Addressing South Africa’s parliament this month, President Ramaphosa tried to describe the progress made by his party, the African National Congress, through the experience of a fictitious young black woman born 30 years ago, as the country moved from apartheid to democracy.

That woman, he told sceptical MPs, had lived a life her parents could only have dreamt about. She would have received a child support grant, free healthcare, lived in a house built by the state, with free water and electricity. College education was also free, and the government’s affirmative action policies ensured she landed a well-paying job, or even started her own business.

But what the president was saying, as the opposition was quick to point out, was a figment of his imagination.

The self-appointed civilian army patrolling the streets in South Africa’s Soweto Township had one aim only: To drive out foreigners. A mob made up of people supporting the anti-immigrant group Operation Dudula stormed into so-called Spaza shops run by foreigners in the village of Diepkloof, where they harassed owners — inspecting the sell-by dates on their products and threatening to close the shops.

Victress Mathuthu, who is from Zimbabwe, was one of those targeted by xenophobic Black South Africans. “If the members of Operation Dudula are dissatisfied with foreign nationals being granted licenses to run small businesses, they should address the government or the relevant ministry.

An anti-migrant vigilante organisation in South Africa has registered as a political party and plans to contest seats in next year’s general elections.

Operation Dudula, whose name means “to force out” in Zulu, wants all foreign nationals who are in the country unofficially to be deported.

The party, which first emerged in Johannesburg’s Soweto township after riots in 2021, claims to have widespread support, with a formal presence in seven of South Africa’s nine provinces. It claims to be planning to stand candidates in 1,500 of the country’s 4,468 voting districts.

They came at breakfast time to murder Theo Bekker, smashing an iron bar stolen from his own farmyard into his skull before slitting his throat so he bled to death.

His four teenage attackers then tied up his wife, Marlinda, and put a plastic bag over her head before she slipped into unconsciousness. Mercifully, she survived.

In South Africa, where the murder rate is soaring, the killing of 79-year-old Mr Bekker on July 30 still had the capacity to horrify. This week at the Afrikaans Dutch Reformed church half a mile from the Bekkers’ cream-coloured farmhouse, Minister Johan Bouwer told the Mail: ‘The couple came here to Sunday services. Marlinda was a regular every week; Theo would attend if he was not busy on the farm.

Rising rates of extreme poverty have driven the homeless to occupy unsafe properties across Johannesburg

Walking past the old Presbyterian church in downtown Johannesburg is an assault on the senses.

Damp sewage spills out onto the pavement near the building’s wooden doors, which are permanently bolted. Many of its windows are broken, with clothes left to dry within the empty frames. There are no hymns to be sung here.

Several individuals are said to be living inside, both men and women, without any access to water or electricity. One resident, who claims to have been a professional boxer, says he has called the church home for 21 years.

Malema could become deputy president in next year’s elections

“Shoot to kill! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Brrrr! Pah! Pah!” These were the words chanted in fine voice by Julius Malema to a rapturous crowd of 100,000 at South Africa’s biggest stadium in Johannesburg on Saturday July 29. Malema was celebrating the tenth birthday of the EFF, the political party he founded and leads.

Confession time! I did something last weekend that I’ve never done before: I read a business book.

It’s called Truth To Power, and it’s the memoir of André de Ruyter, who led the troubled South African power monopoly Eskom for three years, before resigning in early 2023. Over his short, fraught tenure, he uncovered criminal networks stealing from the company, allegedly with the collusion of partners high in the ruling African National Congress. On his way out the door, someone in his office tried to poison him with cyanide. Quite a business climate South Africa has these days.”

‘Shoot to kill! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Brrrr! Pah! Pah!’ These were the words chanted in fine voice by Julius Malema to a rapturous crowd of 100,000 at South Africa’s biggest stadium in Johannesburg on Saturday 29 July. Malema was celebrating the tenth birthday of the EFF, the political party he founded and leads.