Picture: News 24
Queen Elizabeth II is not just a
symbolic head of state. Her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria made the
plundering of the Third World an acceptable business activity. In 1952, Elizabeth
became Head of the Commonwealth and Queen Regnant.
Under sanction of made-in-the-West
international law, her greed capitalism team re-focused profit sourcing from the
physical occupation of nations to financial colonialism [[i]]. United States dollar based
transactions under unfairly applied free trade-cum-globalisation advanced through
debt and structural adjustment programmes reduced Africa to the poorest and
least productive of all world regions. Elizabeth amassed (estimated) US $530
million, only a slice of the extended family’s US $95 billion (CNBC 1 February
2018).
How wonderful it must have been for her
to see a plan come together, knowing that as she fades Africa’s most advanced
economy is in the hands of a modern Rhodes in Ramaphosa!
By dubious means [[ii]], by doing what he is told, Ramaphosa
has banked more than energetic Rhodes [[iii]]. There is
more to come: He has been instructed to send into Elizabeth’s world four ambassadors,
folk who have themselves been well served by the greed system [[iv]], to announce South
Africa’s failing pantry is open to “investors”.
The Queen
and I
I grew up in Southern Africa, which I
saw used as an extraction depot. European businesses with supporting governments
set artificial boundaries within which they profited by building-collapsing-rebuilding-collapsing
again nation-states according to their assessment of the political fervour of
the day.
The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland
formed in 1953 to advance business interests lasted 10 short years before
dissolution because a handful of whites refused to cooperate. They threw the region
into a war financed by the fire-sale of raw resources ensuring the only winners
were Capitalism’s (sanctions ignoring) Big Businesses. 40 years of Big Business
seeking to impose its will followed, resulting in today’s devastated and
desperately indebted, but still supplying Europe with its goodies, Zambia, Malawi
and Zimbabwe continue . The US-UK alliance supported Portuguese brutality, but
when they couldn’t shift Lisbon’s closed-door trade policies, the 1974 coup
happened. The deadly mess that followed saw the alliance (mostly covertly) support
South African interference. In the end all is, in dollars and cents, fine. Destitute
Mozambique is now in the British Commonwealth while corrupt Angola’s[1]
oil is again safe with the Corporacy. But it delayed change in South Africa. Not
for the first time.
Strides (unofficial) towards racial
equality (with productivity gains) made during World War II were derailed by Prime
Minister Daniel François Malan’s profitable radical apartheid. Successor Hendrik
Verwoerd attempted to impose his will with exchange controls only to have British
and American and local English business (dominated by the Anglo-American
Corporation—AAC) respond by raising prices, threatening to leave/sell out, and
finally they began to do so.
It was John Vorster (Prime Minister from1966
until 1978) who understood the message relayed from New York and London. Apartheid had to be replaced with an
alternate that would not simply find favour with world anti-apartheid activists
but have them applauding. And it had to happen without the disruption of profit
exports.
State President Pieter Willem Botha
nearly upset matters, but his deputy, and later successor, Frederik Willem (FW)
De Klerk, suddenly a convert of management-by-money, tossed Afrikaner ideology
and led South Africa into a majority-rule-with-no-change-to-business country in
the early 1990s.
With
Ramaphosa’s help
The African National Congress (ANC) also
tossed its Charter to embrace Greed Capitalism’s motivation of maximum profit
for the favoured few [[v]].
So easy! We know why, but what of how
and when?
Some ten years before the talks began the
“Merit System” was introduced. To be applied across the board it proposed universal
workplace discrimination in that people were to be employed, trained, promoted
and paid based entirely on qualifications, experience and performance-productivity.
Colour, language, age and sex no longer counted.
In practice it was as unethical as
apartheid – a replay in reverse of the situation prevailing at the birth of the
Union of South Africa in 1910.
The Boer was struggling to become an
Afrikaner, the low class English immigrant struggling to make the new land home;
they didn’t like each other and they were in the backyard of a black population
that was three times bigger. But more important to the history of business and
profit is there was a significant percentage of blacks who were at least the equal,
by ability, of the whites, yet … Elizabeth’s great-grandfather nevertheless declared
them qualified only to labour.
85 years of intellectual and physical
degradation for non-whites followed [[vi]].
De Klerk brilliantly followed-up on Vorster’s
perfect understanding of the New York message. And with the AAC/ANC’s Ramaphosa’s
“win”, most blacks only got a vote and an unaffordable constitution. Only a
small percentage could compete under the Merit System against the better
educated-fed-housed-healthier and better versed in business whites and invited expats.
Bottom
up black unions … Top down MBAs
Because I had inside information [[vii]] I enrolled in
Africa’s first ever Master of Business (MBA) programme specifically designed to
infuse the new way of managing the interface between business and labour even before
the convening professor had returned from his orientation training in the United
States! My special relationship over 1981-86 gave me insight into the
government and business scramble to educate leaders to introduce the Merit
System, De Klerk’s close collaboration with Big Business [[viii]] and of AAC’s hurry to unionise.
Business courses that introduced merit-based-discrimination
in place of apartheid flooded the country’s universities. By 1985, they were in
the technikons [[ix]]. Everywhere graduates
offered “MBA” certificates for courses of 6 months to 6 days, run in any hotel
with a decent buffet and students flocked in. The word of gods is for Sundays;
the new word of money and people management in South Africa was every day. Companies
were paid by government to pay us to run in-house courses.
As happened in WWII we openly, sometimes
with government inspectors’ participation, broke the law instructing mixed
classes. I taught my clients’ managers there were no more white-reserved positions
or black jobs/wages/conditions. Company policies and procedures drawn up by me
as a registered practitioner (not parliament) dictated. Remuneration levels
were set by company-industry-region surveys, jobs graded and rewards
distributed by management according to ratings – can he/she do what is needed, perform
well and without paternal mollycoddling? Fail, three-warnings and out. So
simple, so defensible for employers.
Ramaphosa
was bottom up
Desperate for world reformists’ approval,
Anglo American knew it had to produce a trade union empowered to negotiate with
– to oppose – itself. AAC (allegedly) did it the old fashioned way and seeded their
own [[x]].
The watching world saw a normal headline-making
trade union come about to take on AAC. But within critical leaders were in tune
with what AAC management required. It is probable the labour division’s [[xi]] “information services”
nudged from the rabble one to become The Man. It is what winners call strategic
planning. The Man was Ramaphosa [[xii]].
Queen Victoria and the Lords Salisbury
and Rothschild used Cecil. Circumstances allow Elizabeth to embrace Cyril … after
some 30 years of close team-business training.
Back
to normal
South Africa has always been run by men either
selected by or, with Malan/Verwoerd and Zuma [[xiii]], manipulated and used by Big
Business to extract maximum possible profit … to send overseas. That’s the
killer.
Whatever your political view, look
around, see that overseas-run Capitalism of 150 years has taken without giving.
The result, a nation so unproductive and
inefficient it has collapsed into record levels of vicious crime, poor health, Rand
and skill flight with over a third of the youth out of work.
At the macro level it is a world-damaging
disaster. At the individual level you could be the next vicious crime statistic.
But for Big Business, with a gutless ANC at the helm, opportunities to (for
example) mechanise even more and privatise everything abound.
We all understand by legal convention
business companies are required to pay owners/shareholders maximum profits. Few
seem to understand employment costs are strictly limited to pay just enough to
keep the (from professional to unskilled) workforce in place. Business needs a
Ramaphosa to entice corporate vultures to come do the things business calls
“investment” … making money by limiting costs.
Real investment only happens when we put
maximum effort and money into developing a sustainable future for our families
within a supportive community to make a winning region, regions combining into
nations.
And South Africa has to be saved. Focusing
on making money alone has blinded Big Business to the fact that as countries
fail they become super-charged climate change hot-spots. Migrating to Europe is no longer an option.
It is filling fast with failed Greed Capitalism-made refugees.
Another
world is possible
South Africa isn’t a watered, educated
and wealthy European country: Practical African ideas that take into account
the enormous problems mismanagement has brought are needed to compete against
Ramaphosa’s ambassadors.
To ensure every citizen gets a better
crack at life’s one chance, to see national renewal, there needs to be total
rejection of conventional European/American led Capitalism.
A year ago in “Zuma’s Not Junk, He’s
Just Lost Our Marbles” I looked at how South Africa has lost her capacity to be
an independent state. I followed up with comment on Rand manipulation and with
ideas on saving our water for ourselves.
The private banking situation is ridiculous.
Citizens work hard making money for their bosses to buy a family home and the
interest they pay to buy the home goes … to Big Business! Taxation has to
happen in a fairer way but more important than simple fairness, it must be
overhauled if we want to lift our neighbours out of beggary. The budget process
too must change – to riot over Zuma’s state capture and ignore successive ANC
ministers borrowing from overseas in overseas denominated money is to accept
the ANC is part of the greed machine. That’s nation surrender.
The development of our last true asset, tourism
and the wild animal base, must be expanded and protected before it is too late.
Policing and correctional services must change: We’re manufacturing criminals
and letting the naturals go free. Building more hospitals before spending real
money on women’s emancipation, on basic home health and living improvements, and
on education and, last but definitely not least, training, is either dumb or seeing
things through greed capitalism’s chaos prism: the more things fall apart, the
more things need redoing and the more redoing there is the more money there is
to make out of the hopelessness. It is nonsense but that’s what business calls
investment.
Fixer
Ramaphosa
The president broke off his visit to Team
Senior Elizabeth at South Africa Private Limited’s Head Office in London because,
we were told, he was to defuse the outbreak-of-upset in the North West province
way [[xiv]]. It is just
another world headline carried by the Corporacy owned media who have decided on
behalf of all South Africans that South Africans will know and accept he is indeed
a caring president, and that Big Business knows deepening “pro-corporate
neoliberalism and austerity” is the only way [[xv]]. They’re so wrong.
The change needed is impossible for
Ramaphosa unless he violates London’s Rule No 1 - maximum-profit-no-matter-the-cost.
When he was the Chief Negotiator representing all Africans he didn’t. He danced
to Greed Capitalism’s tune, became a billionaire. His total disregard for
people and place he carried into the well-documented Marikana Massacre [[xvi]] and
subsequent Lonmin dealings.
As long as South Africans believe the
way things are the way things should be, they’re sunk. I’ve an idea to accommodate
that too. Burglary without violence is next.
Endnotes
[ii] https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/south-africa-ramaphosa-talks-left-walks-right
and https://www.straitstimes.com/world/africa/cyril-ramaphosa-from-trade-union-activist-to-multi-millionaire-to-south-africas
[iii] Apply UK inflation to
£2,276,000 … http://www.rhodes-caribbean.com/
[iv]
https://www.fin24.com/Economy/ramaphosas-five-findoctors-meet-the-team-tasked-with-selling-sa-to-investors-20180418
[v]
http://www.douglasschorr.com/2017/05/zumas-not-junk-hes-just-lost-our-marbles.html
[vi] The missed train @
http://www.douglasschorr.com/2018/03/winning-communities.html
[vii] My Awakening starting
at “Dodo”.
[viii] [viii]
Big Business must be understood to include the “Afrikaans half” plus all the
government departments and parastatals. The businessman De Klerk was powerful.
The National Party leader element secondary.
[x] A massive example.
Ian Smith started the council system.
[xi] Mine Labour
Management was likely more powerful than Bantu Administration and Development.
[xii] “He founded the
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1982” … https://www.straitstimes.com/world/africa
[xiii]
http://www.douglasschorr.com/2017/05/zumas-not-junk-hes-just-lost-our-marbles.html
[xiv]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-politics/south-africas-ramaphosa-flies-in-to-try-and-quell-northern-protests
[xv]
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/south-africa-ramaphosa-talks-left-walks-right
[xvi] The striking miners
“were treated by police as “dastardly criminals” at the explicit (emailed)
request of Cyril Ramaphosa, who was the London firm’s main local owner” …
https://www.pambazuka.org/emerging-powers