The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - South Africa Isn't Doomed Yet

00:00:00.000 Hello everyone, welcome to this interview. I'm pleased to be joined by Byron Shepard,

00:00:04.080 also known as Morning Shot, a great podcaster from South Africa. And you're talking about

00:00:10.260 South African politics, but not only. Yes. So thanks for having me on the show. So I'm a

00:00:15.200 YouTuber in South Africa, Byron. I do a lot of videos around South African politics and how they

00:00:22.400 interact with the rest of the world and how the rest of the world interacts with South Africa.

00:00:25.520 South Africa is obviously a very interesting topic when looking at your own geopolitics,

00:00:31.500 because if you look at many of your own trajectories, we already had them. So if you

00:00:35.620 really want to see where the future of your country is, have a look at mine and you get a good idea of

00:00:39.760 where you're going. And that's why the people across the world should care about South Africa.

00:00:46.340 And one thing that comes to mind all the time is that most people, not our audience so much,

00:00:53.940 but most people have the idea that Nelson Mandela was elected. And after Nelson Mandela was elected as

00:01:00.760 the president of South Africa, everything was heaven on earth. And we are basically at where

00:01:08.160 the movie with Morgan Freeman left us at the end. But reality deviates from that view considerably.

00:01:15.500 Hmm. What's, could you just give us the extent to which this happens, especially from the perspective

00:01:24.320 of someone who lived there? Yeah. Okay. So the, the idea of Nelson Mandela coming in and everything

00:01:30.580 was Kumbaya is actually a very interesting story. So you have to, you have to cast your mind back to

00:01:36.320 Nelson Mandela walks free. We have the election in 94. Come 94, there's a short delay. They draft the

00:01:42.700 constitution. There's a lot of disputes over what's going to be in the constitution.

00:01:47.080 The government itself is at that point in time, what they call, what they called a GNU,

00:01:51.400 a government and national unity. It included the national party, the ANC, some other smaller parties.

00:01:56.200 So there was a lot of, um, should we call it a soft negotiation between parties? Um, what's

00:02:03.540 interesting is that at that point in time, Nelson Mandela assumes an international role. And what I

00:02:08.260 mean by that is he's, his job isn't really like local governance. It's being a global figurehead

00:02:14.480 for South Africa. Everybody wants to talk about how, you know, Mandela was a great guy who liberated

00:02:21.220 the country and look how we managed to have dispute resolution without conflict. And we had at that

00:02:27.280 time what's called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was designed to allow apartheid

00:02:33.680 individuals to say what crimes they committed under, uh, under the guise of amnesty. And that,

00:02:39.900 that was, that was the terms. You come out, you tell us everything that happened. We want to,

00:02:44.180 we want a full discussion. We'll have a cry, a hug, we'll make up and we can move on. That was the

00:02:49.440 Desmond Tutu idea. The reality on the ground was very different. You had a lot of, uh, vying interests

00:02:57.460 in the first four years, not a lot really happened apart from international power plays. So what you

00:03:04.740 found is that in the international arena, one of the first things that Nelson Mandela did, and there's

00:03:09.380 a very famous speech where he was told, he was talking with individuals around, why are you being

00:03:15.300 friendly with countries that are governed by dictators? And he said, you, you will not tell us who our

00:03:21.380 friends are. Our friends will be our friends. We will be friends with everyone, but you will not dictate

00:03:26.500 that. One of the more interesting things is if you see the people who enabled Mandela and the ANC to

00:03:32.580 thrive in the South African context was the tripartite Alliance. You had Qasatu, you had the ANC, and you

00:03:39.620 had the South African Communist Party, the SACP. The SACP's main head, head honchos, if you want to call

00:03:46.100 them that, were all Jewish individuals. They were individuals that had fled from Eastern Europe. They had

00:03:52.260 gone there with the ideas of communism, and they had fought with the ANC for liberation. One of the

00:03:58.820 first things Mandela said is, the ANC struggle for freedom will never be achieved without the freedom

00:04:05.300 of the Palestinians. Immediately, they were like, you're going to alienate the Jewish vote. He said,

00:04:10.420 I don't care. Palestine is more important to me than the Jewish individuals that helped me get here.

00:04:18.180 So you already started to see this line in the sand and how it was being drawn. That was very

00:04:24.100 early on. Come 98, we had a new election where Taubo Mbeki took over from Mandela. Now,

00:04:31.620 Mandela made it clear. He said he was old, and he wasn't the right person to govern a country. So he

00:04:38.100 said he'd do one term, and then it would be Mbeki. And Mbeki came in at a time. Now, Mbeki is a very

00:04:44.180 interesting individual to a degree because he's kind of like an African nationalist. He believes

00:04:50.900 that African problems should be sorted in Africa. But he also involved neoliberal politics,

00:04:57.060 which was a contradiction because at the same time, he was also in a tripartite alliance with the

00:05:02.500 SACP. So the SACP, being the brainchild or the policy drafters of the ANC, were telling him to do

00:05:11.700 certain things. And he's like, in terms of neoliberal politics, it doesn't really work. In

00:05:16.740 terms of neoliberal economics, it doesn't really work. So there was a bit of a power play. Now,

00:05:22.020 he puts in place a large amount of the law that would eventually become what it is today. So he was one

00:05:28.900 of the first drafters of what we call black economic employment. That's BEE. And he drafts

00:05:35.540 it. And at the time he does it, there are studies that are saying, don't do this. We understand you

00:05:41.780 want to do it as a temporary measure. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary measure.

00:05:47.140 And they say, no successive governments will ever have the guts to get rid of this law. Because once

00:05:54.660 it's there, it will become more radical. It will not soften. You will not get rid of it because it

00:05:59.620 will be a vote killer. And that's exactly where we are now. Now, Mbeki does things and we have

00:06:05.460 economic growth in the country because he's imbibing a degree of neoliberal economics. And I'm

00:06:12.020 sure you know the old adage they say on the stock market, right? Every trader, when things are good,

00:06:16.900 every trader thinks they're a genius. When things are bad and they're losing money, they must be someone

00:06:21.540 else's fault, right? So it's very easy to make money in a good market. He had economic growth.

00:06:27.620 We had a good market globally until the financial crash. Then the financial crash happens. Now,

00:06:33.300 all of a sudden, the SACP stands up and says, you know, all those neoliberal politics,

00:06:37.540 economics that you were doing, they're a bad idea. You shouldn't have done them. We told you you

00:06:41.220 shouldn't have done them. And they replace him with Jacob Zuma. So Jacob Zuma comes in on a very

00:06:47.540 nationalistic type ticket. Now, Jacob Zuma is famous in South Africa for never having really

00:06:54.820 got an education. Yeah. And we employed him, we put him as the presidency for a country.

00:07:01.860 And clearly, he didn't have the skills or expertise. That's not to say he wasn't charismatic and he

00:07:06.500 couldn't carry an audience because even today, Jacob Zuma still, at over 80 years of age, is still a rock

00:07:13.300 star in politics. He can still carry the favor of the people when he goes out into the poor and

00:07:19.860 destitute because he knows how to rile them up. Would you have him run your country? No.

00:07:25.700 He didn't know how to do it. So he gets a lot of what we now refer to as caters. He gets a lot of

00:07:30.820 individuals to come through. ANC loyalists, they come through, they infiltrate various elements of

00:07:35.540 government and they use their positions not to... Remember, the idea is that they're going to infiltrate

00:07:41.620 them to take full economic and political control of the country. Once they've done that, it almost

00:07:46.660 like cements the ANC's power. That's the theory. But the individuals don't do that. They use their

00:07:52.180 positions to steal, to loot from the fiskers. All whilst the SACP sits there going, right,

00:08:00.420 we put Jacob Zuma in power, all those neoliberal politics, all the neoliberal economics, get rid of

00:08:06.500 him. It's our time to shine. And they make a lot of the policies that keep it in place, they make

00:08:13.300 them radical. As I'm sure you know, they always say, you never draft a law with the idea that

00:08:19.940 they'll be used in the best case. You have to draft a law for the worst case. What is the worst the law

00:08:25.700 can do? You need to put the checks and balances up front. There were no checks and balances when the

00:08:30.660 original laws were drafted. So they've been allowed over time to escalate into a very negative piece

00:08:38.180 of legislation. And we can talk about how that's gone now with the drafting of now the new Employment

00:08:44.180 Equity Amendment Acts and how they've come out with just whole sectoral targets. They just basically just

00:08:50.180 it's been countering all the way down. Right. So you are describing a sort of

00:08:54.820 geopolitical alliance from the very beginning with Nelson Mandela saying that we'll get nowhere

00:09:02.020 without Palestinian liberation, which seems to me to be the indication of taking South Africa towards

00:09:10.660 a particular kind of geopolitical alliance. 100%. Right. And he was friends with several

00:09:16.820 dictators. I think he was also friends with Fidel Castro, wasn't he? Yes. Right. And this definitely

00:09:23.540 sends some signals with respect to how the country is going and what sort of direction and what kind

00:09:29.300 of world it approaches on the international scene. So would you say that the policies that generated wealth

00:09:39.940 in South Africa are the very policies that are blamed by politicians as being the cause of poverty?

00:09:47.780 And we because what she described to me seems to me like Lenin

00:09:55.940 not putting forward the NEP, the new economic policy.

00:10:00.180 I'm glad you said that because you have to remember something. When Nelson Mandela first fought the

00:10:05.940 struggle, he went abroad and studied underneath the Soviet model. He went to Russia to learn how to

00:10:14.500 struggle. He was a communist rebel, wasn't he? He was. And one of his classmates was the guy who

00:10:22.980 would eventually found the Palestinian Authority. So you have to remind yourself that all the way from

00:10:31.380 school, they were friends. They always knew each other. So that's why when he says my liberation will never be

00:10:39.940 free without Palestine. Well, when your mate in school is the guy who ends up creating the Palestinian

00:10:45.700 Authority, you can kind of see why the alliances might be skewed from day one. But you see, the problem

00:10:52.260 is that South Africa had just come out of a very turbulent times in their history. We had had sanctions

00:10:58.580 for a number of years. And what that inevitably meant is that South Africa needed forms of growth

00:11:04.420 economics. We needed it because there was high poverty and unemployment and the markets were all primed.

00:11:11.540 You lift sanctions and you should have a growth boom because all of a sudden you have money flowing in.

00:11:16.420 And South Africa has a lot going for it. We have a number of minerals that a lot of the world cannot gain access to.

00:11:23.300 So if you really want to make South Africa wealthy, you use the mineral resource, which they couldn't use

00:11:29.380 under apartheid because of sanctions. That's why I said when the world's in a good place, when the market's

00:11:35.060 in a good place, it's very easy to make money. And that's exactly what happened. You take the sanctions

00:11:40.500 off, you have economic growth. And at that time, the economic growth models were neoliberal. And so it was

00:11:49.300 like, great. The rest of the world said South Africa's got growth. They're envibing the rest of our own

00:11:56.580 policies. You had had in 1990, the Berlin Wall came down. They were like, there's no way South

00:12:01.460 Africa is going to keep up with that communist stuff. I mean, that's in the past. There's no

00:12:05.940 Soviet Union. Yeah, they got trained there. And we had all sorts of declarations. We have what the

00:12:10.900 South African Communist Party refers to as the NDR, the National Democratic Revolution, a script

00:12:17.380 effectively written for them by the Soviets. They're like, this is how you get your routes to power.

00:12:21.460 They're like, no way is they going to do that. I mean, check. They've got like a liberal modern

00:12:25.620 economy. Like what could go wrong? Yeah. So many things, many things. And so what you find is that

00:12:32.500 all of the signals that they were giving globally, people just ignored. They didn't want to hear them.

00:12:37.780 Now, the reason I put all of this into perspective is because you mentioned Invictus

00:12:41.860 and the film with Morgus Freeman. And they talk about the 1995 rugby, the World Cup rugby win,

00:12:48.580 which obviously I was a kid in South Africa, so I watched it, you know, like every kid laugh.

00:12:52.100 Yeah. It was a great, it was a great experience to see that, you know, we were the underdogs and we won.

00:12:59.300 Everybody loves an underdog story, you know. So the reality is when that film was made,

00:13:05.860 a conference occurred in Durban, South Africa, same time. And in this conference on human rights and world

00:13:12.980 equality, South Africa and Zimbabwe and a number of other despot type countries all condemned the West

00:13:21.620 as being racist for invibing racial politics and how they all owed the rest of the world reparations.

00:13:30.340 It was incredibly, incredibly the first time that you just had this like onslaught of what we now call

00:13:41.860 like woke ideas, CRT. Yeah.

00:13:45.220 Started there in South Africa, in Durban. The conference was...

00:13:49.380 One of the first implementations. Correct.

00:13:51.460 Yeah. That conference was so bad in the way they talked about the West that the U.S.

00:13:57.140 stood up and walked out. They didn't even finish the conference.

00:14:01.060 So we already had those things happening behind closed doors. In the same conference,

00:14:07.220 South Africa denounced the creation of Israel. They were like, it needs to go.

00:14:11.300 The Palestinian people, everything you see now, that's like now mainstream, started in Durban

00:14:18.500 and South Africa at the conferences.

00:14:20.580 Was there a propensity on behalf of the international scene to look at these things and either ignore

00:14:28.900 them or treat them as sort of... No, they'll go away. It's just some disgruntled people who lost and

00:14:39.220 they're always going to be marginal and they're never going to become the majority of the country.

00:14:44.580 So when you have these, let's call them U.S., U.N. type events where you get lots of nations

00:14:50.260 together and they discuss, you can... It's easy to say, well, it's not just South Africa. Look,

00:14:55.060 that's why I mentioned Zimbabwe. Everybody knows the Zimbabwe story. And so from that degree,

00:15:00.260 you can kind of go, oh, you know, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, you know, it's a conference and you've got

00:15:04.660 people from Libya and wherever else. And, you know, maybe that's why it got there. At the same time,

00:15:10.820 globally, South Africa's a small country. Okay, it has global significance to a degree. It's a small

00:15:18.020 country. Like, economically, it's tiny. Like, if you look in the G20, position 19 is Saudi Arabia,

00:15:27.860 1.4 trillion GDP. South Africa's got like 426 billion. So we're not even... We're a fraction of

00:15:36.180 like position 19, but we're on the G20. Yeah. So like, you can see things, but I mean,

00:15:42.420 what does it really matter? Yeah. And at that time period, they're going, well, South Africa's,

00:15:46.740 they're selling us their minerals. They're still trading with us. We can trade with them.

00:15:50.820 You know, there's still neoliberal type economics here. Like, who cares? Right. So I think we need to,

00:15:58.180 I definitely need to ask you the following. We are talking about neoliberal economics, political changes,

00:16:03.860 people getting into power and capturing the state and minerals and economic collapse. But what I want

00:16:12.660 to ask you is, how does it seem from a first person experience? How do you experience this?

00:16:20.980 Instead of just... Because I frequently read about different countries. I read the papers. Yeah,

00:16:27.780 there isn't enough growth. Sometimes there is economic decay. There is some corruption. But on my day to day

00:16:36.580 life, most things run smoothly. How does this affect you living there as a person? How do people view it

00:16:49.460 from a first person experience? It's a very good question. And it's actually quite a pointy one. So the

00:16:56.580 reason for that is because when you saw growth, I'm going to use La Lucia in Durban as a good example.

00:17:02.580 When I was a kid, La Lucia was a rock. Like literally, it was like a beachside place where

00:17:09.460 there was like a couple huts and a rock. It's a city now. Yeah. And you saw during those periods of

00:17:16.180 growth, you saw skyscrapers everywhere going up. You saw cranes everywhere. You could see economic

00:17:23.380 development. The beachfront in Durban is a very good example. We had a road there. It used to be

00:17:30.580 called Point Road. So Point Road is like one of the main beachfront roads. We had the creation there

00:17:36.500 of what's called Ushaka. Ushaka is a big water park. They advanced hotels, casinos. Sky rises went up

00:17:45.460 all over the show. You know, they always say, if you want to see whether or not a city is doing well,

00:17:50.340 look for the cranes. Yeah. If you see cranes in a city, development's occurring. There's a kind of

00:17:55.780 momentum. 100%. And there was a momentum, which meant that that was the creation of jobs.

00:18:02.580 Jobs occurred every single sector that you have. Jobs follow. I mean, people have to be employed

00:18:07.940 and they have to work. So job creation for the average individual was pretty good. Quality of life

00:18:14.660 would look like it was going in the right direction. You don't have that now. There's no cranes in the

00:18:22.740 high-rise. The creation of what was done is going backwards. It's falling apart. So you can say,

00:18:30.580 well, look, we built all this. But it's going to ruin. Nobody uses it. It's now decayed. It now looks

00:18:36.340 like a ghost town. So Durban Reachfront. And I used it as a good example. We had Ushaka created there.

00:18:43.780 Why was Ushaka created there? Because the Durban coast is like a fantastic place to surf and to go

00:18:49.940 swim. It had always been internationally renowned, kind of like the Dubai of South Africa. It was

00:18:56.020 phenomenal. So warm waters. Everybody thinks of Cape Town as that, like, that's the type of place that

00:19:02.580 I'm describing. The waters in Cape Town are cold because it's a different ocean. So in Durban's

00:19:08.420 waters, they're warm. So if you wanted to go experience that, Durban's your place. So that's

00:19:12.660 what people did. That's why you had hotels and casinos. The government, in their infinite wisdom,

00:19:19.460 started to pump out sewerage into the ocean. You cannot swim in that ocean anymore because it's got

00:19:27.220 E.coli. You cannot swim in there. The mayor himself refused to believe it. And they gave him a challenge.

00:19:33.860 You go swim there. And he refused to do it. The water is polluted. Afri Forum had to prove it.

00:19:41.220 Numerous waters. It's dangerous to swim there. So people don't swim there now.

00:19:45.380 So they completely ruined a perfect beach.

00:19:47.620 A hundred percent. But in response, the hotel's ruined. The water world's ruined. The infrastructure

00:19:55.620 built around there, around the natural beauty and the horizons you had, they decay. Because people,

00:20:02.020 the reason you built there in the first place is because of the beach. But you've destroyed the beach.

00:20:07.540 So people can experience the degradation just from that. And you can see the way it went from,

00:20:14.340 we had this high rise growth down to the destruction of the beachfronts. The beachfronts are a good

00:20:20.340 example. And every person who's from South Africa will know this. It's internationally renowned.

00:20:26.900 At our beaches, every Christmas and New Year, many individuals used to go to the Durban beachfront.

00:20:35.460 It was like the day of many black individuals who were living in poorer locations. They would just go

00:20:41.460 there en masse. You could see the whole beachfront covered in people like ants. There were just

00:20:47.700 millions of them. And it was always on the TV. And you could look and you could be like, hey,

00:20:51.300 check all these people on TV. They're all enjoying themselves on the beachfront. You don't see that now.

00:20:56.740 Right? But those individuals that would always go there, there were certain bits of infrastructure

00:21:03.860 that was put in place. You had little splash pools on the beachfront. I grew up with those splash

00:21:09.700 pools on the beachfront. There were like funfares, you know, with Mardi Gras type feelings of

00:21:16.340 rides and stuff that was always there. But there were fixtures. They weren't like mobile ones. They

00:21:21.460 were actually built in with cable cars and whatever else. Now, that area, whilst they had private

00:21:29.300 enterprises offering these facilities to people, was municipal rented. It was owned by what you'd call

00:21:35.460 the council. It was owned by the municipality. And so they would have rent agreements with them.

00:21:41.380 When the corruption comes in, the rent agreement doesn't get extended. The lease expires. They're

00:21:46.020 like, oh, we don't know if we'll renew it or not. Maybe we want to give it to our friend. You know,

00:21:50.740 our friend would really like it. And, you know, we could do that. The pools don't get maintained.

00:21:55.540 So as a result, no water in the swim pools. They break. They crack. They fall apart. They mess around

00:22:04.020 with the lease. The park closes. The park closes. They loot the stuff. They steal infrastructure. It

00:22:10.420 falls apart. The park is gone. So you're describing what sounds to me as the leftist mentality according

00:22:17.940 to which wealth is just distributed but not generated. Machines are never maintained. They

00:22:25.220 just function perfectly. And we just have a policy here or there and we'll not implement it. And if we

00:22:35.140 do, it's going to be a bad one. The question is, is it incompetence? Is it malice? Is it a combination

00:22:42.260 of both, which I think is the most likely? What is it? Because why do they pick out of a huge coastline?

00:22:51.540 Because South Africa is not exactly landlocked. No. Why did they pick the best beach,

00:22:57.780 the beach that everyone went there to fill it with waste? And that's a very, it's a very good question.

00:23:06.580 And there are competing arguments on this. So we have a political scientist in South Africa,

00:23:12.740 Anthea Jeffries. I don't know if you've heard about her, but she writes numerous books for the IRR,

00:23:17.460 the Institute of Race Relations. And she ties a lot of this back to the SACP and the National

00:23:23.940 Democratic Revolution. The idea that in order to create a socialist or communist state, you have to

00:23:29.620 destroy the capitalist state. And once the capitalist state has been destroyed, people will cry out for

00:23:35.860 the socialist state. So she kind of has that idea, you know, you do this through the ballot box. You

00:23:41.220 don't do it through a gun, you do it through the ballot box. And maybe there's a degree of truth in

00:23:45.860 that. Other individuals will say, maybe it was revenge. Maybe it was them going into certain areas.

00:23:53.060 And you certainly hear it in some of the rhetoric. They'll say to you things such as,

00:23:57.460 you know, but look at how these people benefited from that. So a good example will be,

00:24:02.900 you know, we always see this degree of whataboutisms. So it's like, a farm murder happened.

00:24:10.260 Yeah, but during apartheid, you kill black people. So therefore, the farm murder must be okay.

00:24:16.100 It's like, there's lots of whataboutisms. And that's also one of the reasons that is cited by

00:24:21.940 people in the West, who don't want to listen about things like the farm murders. They say, well,

00:24:27.380 well, they're boys. They're the British there. They were bad to the Africans who lived there,

00:24:34.900 the black Africans. Therefore, we shouldn't care about what happened. It's a sort of karmic

00:24:40.820 comeuppance. 100%. It's either ignorance or karmic comeuppance. 100%. So you get a lot of that. And so

00:24:48.260 there are some people that say, maybe it's revenge. There's other people that just have

00:24:52.340 self-enrichment. It's like you go to an area where you have the most economic activity,

00:24:57.140 you figure out a way to use the levers of power in order to extract the wealth for personal gain.

00:25:02.900 And what I would say to you is, you said, why, why is this happening? I'd say a combination of all

00:25:06.900 three. Yeah. Right. There's, you have competing interests. And depending on who you talk to,

00:25:12.980 you'll see that different individuals are trying to do certain things with different intentions and

00:25:19.540 different outcomes intended. We saw this during COVID. Dalami Zuma, who was the, at the time,

00:25:26.340 the minister of Kogata, who's one of our cooperation, traditional affairs type ministers.

00:25:32.260 She's, what would be the equivalent in UK? Home secretary, maybe. Okay. And she herself said,

00:25:40.180 let's use the pandemic and the lockdowns as a way to collapse private enterprise and redistribute wealth.

00:25:47.540 You had the president at the same time going, maybe we use the lockdowns

00:25:52.260 so that we can allow the global institutions such as the WHO to help us in South Africa improve our

00:26:00.020 medical infrastructure. So then there's like a tie with a globalist agenda. And Ramaphosa is

00:26:05.300 very famous. He loves the globalist order. He loves it. So you find even in their own organizations,

00:26:13.380 it's very different objectives that they're trying to achieve. So it's very difficult to say, well,

00:26:20.100 it's the NDR in action. I think if you say that you're missing some of the, some of the pictures,

00:26:25.540 it's a combination of all three, but in specifically in terms of the Durban beachfront, why did they pick

00:26:30.580 that? Well, that was the beachfront to go to. It's like where all the economic activity occurred that

00:26:36.260 why wouldn't you go there? You know, like that's where the economic activity is. If you want to,

00:26:40.500 if you want to loot, you go to where the money is. That's where the, that's where it is.

00:26:45.300 The problem also is that because the economic activity is there and that's where the money is,

00:26:50.340 so is the infrastructure. Yeah.

00:26:52.180 So when you have things like pollution or recycling plants, of course, they're going through there

00:26:56.180 because that's the area where the business occurs. That's the business. That's, that's where the

00:27:01.540 infrastructure is. So now if you're going to bypass it into the sea, well, that's the sea it goes into

00:27:07.620 because that's where it's situated in the heartland of the economic activity. So you're going there

00:27:14.180 because that's where the money is. The money's there because the infrastructure is there. You degrade

00:27:19.380 the infrastructure. The infrastructure pollutes the water and it destroys the economy. So it's kind

00:27:24.340 of like a knock on effect. Let's call it a series of unintended consequences through what you described

00:27:29.860 as nothing more than ignorance because they don't see how systematically the different things connect

00:27:36.260 and how an impact on one might impact on the other. Right. So from my perspective, it's,

00:27:41.940 it really saddens me to hear what you're saying. And from my perspective, wealth must be generated

00:27:49.380 constantly. Machinery must be maintained and laws must be enforced. Of course. Law. Yeah. And

00:27:59.060 it seems to me just to be common sense. So my natural response is to say that when I see politicians

00:28:07.140 ignoring this, most probably they're not stupid, but they have an evil agenda, malicious agenda, because

00:28:17.540 once all this infrastructure collapses, once infrastructure collapses, that's where people,

00:28:24.420 that's where they start finding scapegoats. And they do have the scapegoat by saying, well,

00:28:30.500 the white man and white man's burden. So how does this translate into the experience of someone

00:28:38.420 who is white in South Africa? Because we spoke about there not being cranes, loss of momentum,

00:28:46.500 people not celebrating anymore in Durban Beach, the state destroying infrastructure, but also good

00:28:55.220 businesses. How does this affect you personally? How do you experience this personally?

00:29:03.940 So it's interesting because you have to kind of tie it back to then the lack of momentum. And you said,

00:29:10.500 you talked about how individuals may collapse institutions. And people don't understand what

00:29:17.620 that actually means. So I'm going to use an example of PROSA. So PROSA is the railways. We used to have

00:29:24.100 railways that connected every port in South Africa to every mining town in the country. You would go and

00:29:30.820 you'd get coal, you would go on the trains, the trains would take it to the ports, the ports would ship it. It was very

00:29:36.980 efficient. Our railways got dug up, they got pulled up, they got destroyed. Absolutely obliterated.

00:29:45.780 Whole train stations, go on Google and look it up. You can look up train stations. They looted a whole

00:29:51.220 train station. Doors, windows, you name it. Gone. It's like a zombie apocalypse. There's whole lines

00:29:58.580 where you can see where the tracks were. There's no tracks there anymore. They stole the tracks and they

00:30:02.980 sell it a scrap. And you're going to ask yourself a question. Well, why? Who did that? Well, when you

00:30:09.220 took everything off the railways, it had to go somewhere. So it went on the back of lorries.

00:30:14.500 Where did it go? On the back of lorries. And those lorries started transporting all the coal to the ports.

00:30:22.820 Who protects the lorries? So now you get this trucking mafia. The trucking mafia doesn't want

00:30:31.380 a process. They don't want a railway. That's their industry. Now the ports become inefficient because

00:30:36.980 the ports aren't designed to have 200 trucks all waiting to dump stuff on cargo ships to go out.

00:30:43.380 And that's what we have. So the ports are now inefficient because the trucking industry was

00:30:49.460 very happy to destroy the railway. Very happy because it gave them an enterprise. Same thing for

00:30:56.660 buses. We used to have buses connected everywhere. State run, state subsidized. You could get anywhere

00:31:04.340 on a bus. They started getting set on fire, degraded, looted, stolen. Why? South Africa's primary

00:31:14.340 form of motor transport outside of primary or private business ownership or personal ownership

00:31:20.820 of cars is what we call a taxi. It's like a it's like a combi. You say you have a combi,

00:31:26.740 you throw a load of people in and they drive you around to different locations. It's a huge

00:31:31.220 enterprise. It's one of the most powerful lobby entities in South Africa because now they've got

00:31:35.620 political power. There's that many of them. In 94, 95 around the original economic growth phases,

00:31:42.660 the government subsidized poor black individuals. They subsidized them with these combis or these

00:31:49.460 taxis so that they could earn an income. It was part of the black economic power strategy.

00:31:54.340 Right. So there are tons of them. Do you think they want buses? Do they want passenger trains?

00:32:01.780 Because it's a competing industry. So they will destroy the infrastructure for the primary purpose of,

00:32:08.740 well, taxi industry needs to survive. Right. Where is the state there?

00:32:13.380 Involved. The state is involved because the state, the actors inside of the state are self-enriching.

00:32:24.500 Yeah. So they're involved. Right. So why can't they be? I'm just trying to find the rationale here because

00:32:36.100 let's say if I were involved in a sort of mob-like setting, I would care for long-term efficiency of

00:32:44.340 my actions. What you're describing doesn't seem to be particularly adapt to long-term thinking. It's

00:32:52.260 incredibly short-term. A hundred percent. So what's going on there? Is it the exact type of politicians

00:32:59.300 who care only about getting reelected and have completely zero care about long-term interest?

00:33:05.060 A hundred percent. So we'll use an example right now. It's obviously a topic of interest. And if you

00:33:12.100 haven't watched any about it and you want to see how a police system can be captured,

00:33:17.860 start doing a little bit of research. So we have this thing which is currently being called

00:33:22.660 the Police Capture Commission. That's the nickname for it. I could tell you the Zulu name,

00:33:26.740 but it wouldn't make sense to your audience. So the Police Capture Commission started because in KZN,

00:33:33.380 KwaZulu-Natal, one of the big honchos in the police, he was a police commissioner, he stood up and he said,

00:33:40.420 I have got this political killing task force team. Now you had to set one up because you see in

00:33:47.220 politics in Durban, it's like cutthroat. Everybody wants to get into politics and they all want those

00:33:54.420 positions as a councillor because the position is like a councillor on a board or something like that

00:33:59.060 allows you to self-enrich. You can start getting involved in the looting and the tenders.

00:34:05.460 But because it's so competitive, they shoot each other. They kill each other. The political

00:34:11.140 killings that occur in that region for positions of power are off the charts. They're insane.

00:34:17.380 Many individuals, sometimes they get voted to positions of power and they stop crying because it's like,

00:34:22.100 my days are up. Now it's like into Mexico drug cartel regions. You ain't lasting long. You're

00:34:28.980 probably going to get shot outside your house somewhere. So they set up this task force committee

00:34:34.180 to investigate who was leading this. Was it coordinated? Was it just acts of crime, like acts

00:34:40.820 of passion? Most probably the most corrupt people. Did I get it right?

00:34:43.940 And we're going to get to the people who should be investigated. Correct. And that'd be presiding

00:34:49.140 over the committee. And so this guy came out and he said, I've got this political task force form

00:34:54.100 team. You paid me to do it. I spent the budget. It's going to produce some pretty shocking results.

00:35:00.420 And I started talking to the police minister, because we have a police minister who's in charge

00:35:04.980 of the police. He says, I went to him and he ordered me to shut down the commission.

00:35:09.700 And he says, this is direct involvement is political interference with the police investigation.

00:35:18.020 And he says, the problem is the investigation is now about to issue a report that implicates the

00:35:24.260 highest individuals in government involved in the political killings. That's why they shut it down.

00:35:30.260 And he went on TV surrounded by a bunch of guards and he did it as a rogue agent. Nobody knew he was

00:35:38.660 doing it. He called his own press conference with his own guys and he said, I need to tell the

00:35:42.260 republic this is what's happening. Now, when you see stuff like that in Africa, it's usually the

00:35:48.100 first signs of a coup starting. This didn't escalate to that. So we can kind of be thankful from that

00:35:53.540 perspective. But parliament said, we need to do a commission of inquiry now. And we need to find out

00:36:01.380 whether what he said is true and who's actually involved. And the outcome so far, the commission is

00:36:07.860 still ongoing, but the outcomes are horrendous on this police minister did this, this guy did this.

00:36:15.780 The upper echelons of governments are all directly involved. So what did the presidents of the republic

00:36:23.220 do? Well, he suspended the guy on full pay. He just said, well, whilst you're being investigated,

00:36:28.900 stay home. I'll put an acting guy in place. He'll do your job. The guy's been directly implicated 50 times

00:36:35.300 over now. So now he says, well, he's just going to step away from politics for a bit, you know,

00:36:40.100 like a sabbatical. And he's still leading all the ANC like ward meetings. They want to retire him,

00:36:46.020 basically. Not really. They want to take him away from the camera. Yeah. But behind the scenes,

00:36:51.460 he's still directly involved in ANC politics. He's still leading branches. He's still leading commissions.

00:36:56.580 He's still, he's still doing work. He's directly implicated. Yeah. In a normal functioning democracy,

00:37:03.940 he'd be under arrest. He'd be under formal investigation. He would have been fired ages

00:37:09.700 ago. South Africa doesn't work like that. The very criminals who are involved in the very,

00:37:15.860 the very forms of action. Find me a government minister that the ANC have employed that doesn't

00:37:21.540 have some formal criminal investigation against them. Find me one. You can't even say the president

00:37:27.620 because he's got pala pala. Like every single one of them has some kind of corruption scandal,

00:37:34.020 every one of them. And the reality is the ANC will never hold itself accountable. As I say on my own

00:37:43.140 podcast, you cannot ask chickens to vote for KFC. Yeah. Chickens will never vote for the, for KFC.

00:37:51.300 It's against their interest. The ANC will never vote for accountability. It's against their

00:37:55.860 interest. They'll all be in prison. Every one of them. Right. So mentioning chickens for KFC,

00:38:00.900 I'm thinking of, you know, the queers for Palestine thing. And I want to ask you about this because

00:38:07.860 we mentioned before Mamdani, right before we answered the, we started the interview, you mentioned

00:38:15.060 Mamdani and his connection to South Africa, but also the connections of his policies.

00:38:19.860 What sort of connection is there politically speaking? Because from my perspective,

00:38:26.820 what you're describing is a mix of incompetence and leftist malice, according to which there is

00:38:34.820 the constant messaging for short term political gain to the population that vote for me, I'll get power

00:38:44.660 and I'll give you more stuff. And somehow without us giving emphasis upon the generation of wealth

00:38:53.140 and the process that generates wealth, the process that sustains machinery, the processes that sustain

00:38:59.620 civilization, somehow all this is going to stay the same, but it doesn't stay the same. And when it

00:39:05.620 doesn't stay the same, we start having scapegoats. And the scapegoat in the case of South Africa seems to

00:39:11.620 be the white man. Or capitalism. So what are the overlaps you see in the philosophy of Mamdani,

00:39:22.580 the democratic socialism of Mamdani and the ANC?

00:39:28.420 So you've got to, you've got to understand that many, as I started off with this, when we were

00:39:35.380 talking about it, many of the policies that you experienced in the West have already been tried

00:39:40.420 in South Africa. If you want to see where you're going, look there. People don't understand that

00:39:46.340 fully. The South African diaspora is all over the world in great numbers. It's horrifying to see

00:39:52.180 sometimes just how much they're all over the world. The roads must fall events that occurred

00:40:03.780 around the world. The toppling of statues started in Cape Town with the toppling of the road statue at

00:40:09.940 Rhodes University. The individual who led that came to the UK and many other countries and created

00:40:18.900 splinter groups of that, where they started to do it. So that's South African politics in action.

00:40:26.980 Mamdani himself, his father taught as a professor in South Africa. He says that he lived in South Africa

00:40:34.660 as a child. He claims himself, South African politics, influenced his own worldview. He's now employed

00:40:43.940 a lady to the legislator there who's got a degree or a master's degree from South Africa in Islamic

00:40:51.620 theology, Islamic liberation theology. So you have to understand, South Africa has a very influential

00:41:01.460 role for such a small country, but it has it through its number one export, people. And those people may

00:41:09.940 leave South Africa either as economic units. Sometimes they want to go to a country and be an economic

00:41:15.540 migrant. Sometimes they're political actors. I'll give you a good example of that. Let's use the example of

00:41:21.860 the ICJ case against Israel. Many individuals don't see why that's relevant to their country. It is one of the

00:41:29.220 most fundamental, fundamentally relevant things that could occur to most countries. Not because it's

00:41:37.780 Israel and Palestine, but because of the coordination of the actors and who's doing what. And what it

00:41:44.820 really shows you is behind doors, who's really my friend? Whose interests am I really pushing? You can

00:41:52.660 almost say Israel and Palestine. Yeah, it's interesting. It's important. We say sorry for all the victims

00:42:00.980 on both sides. And there's victims on both sides. We're sympathetic to it. But the power dynamics that

00:42:07.060 lead it there, very interesting. Let's use the example of Pandor. Nalandi Pandor was one of the ministers

00:42:14.420 for foreign affairs for foreign affairs. She's a Muslim lady. News was, suggestions, the conspiracy

00:42:22.980 theories. You know, you know the difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact. Roughly around six

00:42:28.900 months. Right. So it's the conspiracy theory was that she had been told to prep the ICJ case before

00:42:36.820 October 7th even occurred. Because the ANC was in financial trouble, allegedly. And so, allegedly,

00:42:43.780 they were paid in order to settle the debt. That did get settled, by the way. Couldn't forward their

00:42:48.740 bills. Somehow they found the money. So, many individuals don't understand the correlation.

00:42:56.180 Did you know that in Cape Town, we have a Hamas headquarters?

00:42:59.620 No. Sounds awful, but it's not that surprising, given what you're saying.

00:43:06.100 Right. The kind of rhetoric that Mandela had from 30 years ago.

00:43:11.060 We have a Hamas headquarters in Cape Town. Is it Hamas or... Yeah.

00:43:15.940 Hamas. No, not Palestine. Hamas. Yeah. Hamas. We also have a Palestinian authority,

00:43:23.460 headquarters, and we also have a Palestinian embassy. But Hamas itself has a branch in Cape Town,

00:43:31.780 an official branch. You can go there and have a meeting. And they do.

00:43:34.020 So, you can see the power dynamics there. And you can see how that influences people. Now,

00:43:40.260 when it came, in the case of Mamdani, he goes to New York and he starts to advocate policies.

00:43:46.820 Many of those policies sound very much like the NDR. Very much so. Give people free stuff. Vote for this.

00:43:54.340 Because what's Mamdani's real interest. Mamdani tells you what his real interest is. He's not,

00:44:00.740 he doesn't hide it. He says the reason he got into politics was to free Palestine.

00:44:06.580 Yeah. And he's telling you anything he wants to gain power. He's not even in power yet. And one of

00:44:15.060 the largest synagogues in New York every day has had protests outside it, calling for the slaughter

00:44:20.660 of Jews and globalizing the Intifada. He's not even in yet. It's already started. So,

00:44:27.140 what you have is you have the saddikization of New York. Yeah. It's going to happen. We've already

00:44:35.540 got it. We had it for a very long time. So, what does that ultimately mean for you? You said to me,

00:44:41.060 what does it mean for people on the ground? Well, what it means is that people don't understand this

00:44:46.820 about Britain itself. Let's use the example of London. London always had this degree of elitism.

00:44:54.820 If you wanted a job in London, you basically had to live in London. They didn't want to employ people

00:45:00.580 on the outskirts. If you went for a job interview and they said, where do you live? And you said,

00:45:04.820 Milton Keynes, I can get to London in 30 minutes on the train. They'd be like, oh, not really in London,

00:45:11.060 are you? Right. So, there was always a degree of elitism in London. London always

00:45:16.660 recruited from London. What happens when you take London and you replace all the people with 400

00:45:26.420 years worth of history in the town with recent arrivals? What happens? Where does London recruit

00:45:34.340 from? London recruits from London, who are now no longer local individuals, the people that recently

00:45:42.260 arrived? Where are all the primary headquarters for all the main institutions of power? In London.

00:45:49.220 So, where do they recruit from? Well, London recruits from London. So, you recruit the recent

00:45:54.420 arrivals. Those individuals go into your positions of power. Those individuals, once they get there,

00:46:01.380 they're heavily influenced by some of the ideology from the places they left in the first place.

00:46:06.740 What did I say was the number one export from South Africa? Our people. So, in the instance of South

00:46:12.820 Africa, and it's not just South Africa, there's other countries, they go into positions of power and

00:46:17.220 they start to talk about things that seem alien to a British sensibility, such as employment quotas.

00:46:26.820 Why don't we have more black representation? And you see it up and down the country. They start talking to

00:46:32.340 you about things like affirmative action. Why do we need affirmative action? Well, it's because of

00:46:36.980 the systematic oppression of people and they're less economically advantaged than a white individual.

00:46:43.940 CRT 101. Where did it originate? Well, we had black economic empowerment. What was the reason for black

00:46:50.100 economic empowerment? Because they had been deprived of economic advantages under apartheid,

00:46:56.020 and so they needed to be uplifted. Well, amazing, you've now got those very policies

00:47:01.060 in London. And if you trace them back and say, well, who was likely to have drafted those policies?

00:47:07.220 Probably a recent arrival from a foreign country. You saw it in BBC. I don't know if you remember,

00:47:13.300 the BBC had some interns. You could only apply for it if you came from an ethnic minority.

00:47:18.100 Right? A previously disadvantaged individual. Yeah.

00:47:23.300 We did that. Way before you did. Way before you did. And you may ask yourself a question,

00:47:29.140 well, why would the local British person do that? I've seen on some of the stuff here, they start

00:47:35.700 re-engineering adverts. Adverts in Britain now have a form of diversity quota applied to them.

00:47:46.020 It's not just ads. It's also shows, Netflix all the time. There's also always this social engineering

00:47:54.660 approach to oversee race relations. Because I think, from my understanding, the traditional approach

00:48:03.860 towards civil society in England and in the West is that you mostly let civil society be the main

00:48:12.020 engine for social life and progress as opposed to have a state that is going to oversee, is going to be the referee

00:48:19.780 and will intervene in order to achieve particular race outcomes as far as race relations are concerned.

00:48:27.300 And now they change according to the dynamic, to the demographic sometimes. As you said, the more London gets,

00:48:33.860 less like London of tradition and more like something different. More like South Africa.

00:48:43.220 The more it changes. But once you start having it more like South Africa, it starts to resemble South Africa.

00:48:48.900 Yeah. Right? And so that's what you find. And you may look at policies like that and go, well, why is this demographic representation occurring?

00:48:56.180 What would you do if you came into the BBC and you replaced the BBC with a lot of individuals from ethnic minorities?

00:49:05.060 And you walked around an office every day and you saw lots of people of colour, but not many white people.

00:49:10.100 And then you looked on TV and it was all white. Would you not be like, that doesn't look like my lived experience.

00:49:16.020 My lived experience where I live, there's lots of people of ethnic minorities, there's lots of different colours.

00:49:20.900 Would you not look at it and go, it looks a bit weird?

00:49:24.100 I don't know if you saw recently about the BBC, but there was a major scandal with a report about biased reporting.

00:49:35.060 And also BBC Arabic, which constantly downplayed some things, some crimes by Hamas and is partly funded by the Home Office.

00:49:46.260 Now, why does the Home Office fund BBC Arabic, which is doing pro-Hamas propaganda in several cases?

00:49:53.940 It's what you're saying.

00:49:55.460 It is what I'm saying.

00:49:56.340 Looking at it in action, in live action.

00:49:58.820 But when you're in those institutions, why would you think otherwise?

00:50:02.260 I mean, if every one of my colleagues were all from an ethnic minority and you saw something different,

00:50:09.300 would you not be like, my lived experience is that the life I'm seeing doesn't match the life that I live.

00:50:16.500 So you see, people think that London and the demographic change in London isn't important.

00:50:21.380 It's incredibly important because when individuals come in there from those countries,

00:50:27.140 you need to understand that they come through with their own viewpoints, their own ideologies,

00:50:32.420 their own education systems, their own experiences of that country.

00:50:35.380 And values and culture in general.

00:50:36.980 A hundred percent.

00:50:38.100 And they may, especially once they get there on numbers, they may transform your institutions

00:50:45.540 to something that you don't recognize because you're not from their country.

00:50:49.620 Yeah.

00:50:50.260 But for them, it seems like this is the norm.

00:50:53.140 Why wouldn't it seem like that?

00:50:55.140 It's like there's this, I'm sure you've seen in Britain, they have these arguments over

00:51:01.860 politicians that are arguing over funding for airports in Pakistan.

00:51:06.100 Yeah, in Mirapur.

00:51:07.300 And they're like, how can this be an issue for the English?

00:51:11.540 They don't understand it.

00:51:13.220 Well, it's an issue to Pakistanis.

00:51:15.620 It isn't just that, it's also a cousin marriage.

00:51:18.180 And you'll look at it from an outside perspective and say, well, this is horrendous.

00:51:22.420 Who would do that?

00:51:24.020 It's not a topic of conversation for the English.

00:51:28.260 It's a topic of conversation for the Pakistanis.

00:51:30.180 And if Pakistanis create enclaves where they talk to each other about the issues of concern,

00:51:34.500 it's like you become blinkered.

00:51:37.380 You go, why wouldn't my issues of concern be yours?

00:51:39.780 Like, we must all be saying the same thing, right?

00:51:42.900 So what we're talking about basically is the combination of leftism as a general philosophy

00:51:48.820 and temperament with multiculturalism with no breaks, basically.

00:51:54.660 Right.

00:51:55.060 So this seems to me to be essentially communist originated because all the social experiments

00:52:04.020 you're describing, which are taking place and have already been taking place for decades now,

00:52:10.820 in both South Africa and in the UK.

00:52:14.580 But as you said a bit before in South Africa, this reminds me of a sort of Maoist rhetoric,

00:52:22.180 according to which the problem is the imperialists, and all action needs to be anti-imperialist,

00:52:29.380 and imperialism is global imperialism, and we have this side of the imperialists,

00:52:34.820 which must be destroyed, and the side of Palestine on the other, which is also aligned with another

00:52:42.340 global side.

00:52:43.140 So how is the interplay of global powers affecting South Africa at the moment?

00:52:50.740 Because we hear a lot about Trump's intervention in South Africa.

00:52:54.980 We also hear about the intervention of several other geopolitical entities in the country.

00:53:01.780 How does this clash affect South Africa?

00:53:05.300 Yeah.

00:53:05.540 So, I mean, on the issue of Palestine, we must remind ourselves that there was a pseudo-Palestinian

00:53:12.020 state who was called Gaza.

00:53:13.220 Gaza, right, it got independence from Israel in 2005, when the Israelis had to withdraw underneath

00:53:19.220 the first peace agreement.

00:53:20.900 Now, if you actually had, if you look back in time to the 1947-1948 wars, and the other

00:53:27.780 wars that they fought against their Arab nations, when land had been conquered from Israel, it

00:53:34.740 didn't become Palestine.

00:53:36.660 The West Bank is the West Bank to the West of Jordan.

00:53:40.660 It meant the land that belonged to Jordan on the West Bank of Jordan.

00:53:45.780 In other words, it became Jordan.

00:53:48.260 It didn't become Palestine, it became Jordan.

00:53:50.980 When Gaza was conquered by Egypt, it didn't become Gaza, it became Egypt.

00:53:56.020 Right?

00:53:56.500 So, when you look at the land, you can't say, well, the primary interest is Palestine.

00:54:02.020 The primary interest has never been Palestine.

00:54:05.060 The primary interest is the fact that Israel is funded by the Americans, and they don't like what

00:54:11.300 they effectively class as American military bases in the Middle East.

00:54:16.740 That's effectively what the issue is, right?

00:54:18.580 It's like the American police force in the Middle East, except it's not the Americans that's

00:54:22.660 being funded by them, but it's kind of being done by the Israelis.

00:54:25.860 They don't like that.

00:54:27.380 So, there is a power dynamic there.

00:54:30.260 They frame it as an ideological and a point of freedom type of issue.

00:54:36.180 It's not.

00:54:37.540 It's actually a power dynamic.

00:54:39.460 Now, we have the same problem in South Africa.

00:54:42.020 You have two problems in South Africa.

00:54:44.260 The first problem is, what economic model do you adopt?

00:54:47.620 Do you have an American model of pure on capitalism?

00:54:52.340 Or do you have a Chinese model where the government is involved in everything?

00:54:56.900 As I'm sure you know, in China, you can own private enterprises, but your primary shareholder

00:55:01.540 is always the government.

00:55:02.660 You can't own a company 100%.

00:55:05.140 The government always has a shareholding, and they always have a say.

00:55:08.500 So that if they need to, they can always tell your board to do something.

00:55:11.220 I mean, speaking from experience, in Greece, before the economic crisis, the state was intervening

00:55:21.300 so much in the economy that when it basically went bankrupt, but we didn't just name it a bankruptcy,

00:55:28.740 most private enterprises went bankrupt because their prime associate was the state.

00:55:35.700 Their prime client was the state.

00:55:37.140 And we have that problem right now with what we call state-owned enterprises, SOEs.

00:55:42.420 The government gets involved in everything.

00:55:44.100 There are certain entities in South Africa where they actually collapse the industry

00:55:47.380 with the specific intention of nationalizing the industry, right?

00:55:52.100 So there are numerous policies that get put in place in order to deliberately collapse that industry.

00:55:58.180 Estela Mitchell is a really good example.

00:55:59.620 That's a smelter and a steel manufacturer.

00:56:02.340 They were literally destroyed through government ineptitude.

00:56:06.500 Government didn't put any form of protections in place.

00:56:09.300 First question the government asked when they said they were going to close,

00:56:11.940 they were the last steel smelter.

00:56:13.140 The government said, oh, we'll nationalize it.

00:56:14.420 It'll be fine, right?

00:56:15.380 So there's almost a degree of deliberation in that.

00:56:18.100 But the question is, what economic model do you want to follow?

00:56:21.380 An American model, pure on capitalism, aligned to principles,

00:56:27.300 or a Chinese model where you have states' interference.

00:56:31.780 The ANC wants states' interference.

00:56:33.540 Are there other forces that don't?

00:56:36.900 Because, I mean, you mentioned the American model, and it's not exactly pure capitalism.

00:56:43.060 There are some state interventions here or there, but definitely not to the degree of the CCP.

00:56:49.060 So they like the Chinese model because it allows the state to be relevant.

00:56:55.540 Yeah.

00:56:55.780 If the state is relevant, it's an easy way to self-enrich.

00:56:59.380 Once the state is there, you can be like, I'll let you do X, but you must give me a kickback of Y.

00:57:04.260 Right?

00:57:04.580 So, but on a pure capitalistic system, government can't do that because it can't really get involved.

00:57:09.220 It's like what I do in my private life is what I do.

00:57:11.860 So they like this idea of the Chinese model.

00:57:15.060 Plus, China has a very annoying thing that they like to do.

00:57:19.140 And that is, they'll do things with you economically.

00:57:21.700 They'll invest in you economically.

00:57:23.220 And what you do politically, not their problem.

00:57:25.540 If you kill all your people in your country, they don't care.

00:57:28.100 Do they make money?

00:57:29.220 Yes or no?

00:57:29.700 That's all they care about.

00:57:30.660 Right?

00:57:31.380 China doesn't take that slow.

00:57:33.140 Let's call it a human rights perspective.

00:57:35.860 China never goes to another country saying, you know, you're not doing very right by your country.

00:57:39.540 They just say, you do what you want to do.

00:57:41.620 We'll trade.

00:57:42.420 We'll do business.

00:57:43.220 You do what you want to do.

00:57:44.100 We do what we want to do.

00:57:45.460 America doesn't do that.

00:57:46.900 America tries to use principles-based, like diplomacy, and they tie that to their economic policy.

00:57:53.460 They could say, well, if you do lots of really good things to your people,

00:57:58.660 we'll trade more with you.

00:58:00.500 If you have good democratic systems, we'll trade more with you.

00:58:04.260 China doesn't do that.

00:58:05.540 Right.

00:58:05.780 So I'm a bit puzzled with this because it seems to me that before Biden and Obama,

00:58:12.900 they did have this rhetoric.

00:58:15.940 They did have the rhetoric of human rights, but it seems that they, and Trump comes along,

00:58:23.940 he didn't have that rhetoric, but he seems to be a bit more interested than they were in

00:58:29.300 about what happens in South Africa.

00:58:31.060 A hundred percent.

00:58:31.700 So, and there's a reason for that.

00:58:33.460 What's going on there?

00:58:34.260 Because again, if you understand, like the Americans are like,

00:58:37.140 they want to do this principle-based economics trading, where they use political power to get

00:58:42.980 you to do things right, and there's the economic reward.

00:58:47.460 So that's how America works under Obama and Biden.

00:58:51.860 No one checked whether they were doing the political stuff.

00:58:55.780 Were you doing right by your people?

00:58:58.020 Were you doing good things in your country?

00:59:00.260 It became purely economic, basically what the Chinese do, right?

00:59:04.820 They don't care what you do to your people, as long as you just, it's making them money.

00:59:09.620 Obama, Biden, same, didn't care.

00:59:12.260 Trump comes along, he goes, I care.

00:59:15.380 Did they not care because they also had the same philosophy, according to which,

00:59:21.700 the woke CRT philosophy, according to which the straight white man is the worst

00:59:27.780 individual on earth, worst type of man.

00:59:30.020 And you need to extract resources from them in perpetuity in order to-

00:59:36.740 But did Obama not have the same policies?

00:59:38.820 Yeah.

00:59:39.460 So did Biden.

00:59:41.140 They had the same policies.

00:59:42.900 So you can't go to South Africa and say, we're a principle-based order,

00:59:46.500 we don't like the things you're doing.

00:59:48.020 Because all South Africa would do is say, you did the same thing.

00:59:50.980 Yeah.

00:59:51.620 We did the same thing.

00:59:52.420 So there's no disputes there.

00:59:54.660 Trump comes along and you know he doesn't like CRT, he doesn't like the woke stuff,

00:59:58.180 he doesn't like all this redistribution of wealth,

01:00:00.900 he doesn't like all the job reservations.

01:00:02.980 He goes, you can't do that.

01:00:04.900 Right.

01:00:05.540 And if you don't stop doing it, I'll penalize you economically.

01:00:10.420 Yeah.

01:00:10.900 And that's where he is now.

01:00:12.500 Well, he's threatened them, but his primary mode of economic

01:00:17.780 penalties at the moment is the tariff.

01:00:19.620 Yeah, the liberation tariffs.

01:00:21.060 That's right.

01:00:21.620 So we had tariffs imposed on South Africa, I think, between 30 and 40 percent.

01:00:27.860 And it immediately crippled some industries.

01:00:29.860 Like those industries are all reliant on the US.

01:00:32.740 Right.

01:00:33.060 But aren't these industries already crippled by the ANC?

01:00:40.020 Because if the roads that take, that are required to transport goods from the factory to the port

01:00:47.620 are destroyed, just coming along and say, I'm going to put tariffs on your maritime exports,

01:00:53.940 for instance, it's already...

01:00:56.180 Now you're dead.

01:00:57.140 Now you're dead.

01:00:57.620 You were struggling before, but you got on, the tariffs on there, finished, forget it.

01:01:02.100 Yeah.

01:01:02.660 And that's exactly what's happened.

01:01:03.700 We've had car industries, we have a Mercedes plant in East London.

01:01:08.500 They just stopped making cars.

01:01:09.860 Right.

01:01:10.100 So what is the extent of anti-white racism in South Africa?

01:01:16.660 So you were talking about the political power dynamics just before we move on from this.

01:01:20.820 So, yes, there is a huge play between the West and the East.

01:01:25.300 The ANC likes the East.

01:01:27.860 And they like the East because they allow them to do whatever they want.

01:01:30.980 And it's just like economic.

01:01:32.500 They can do what they want.

01:01:33.700 They like the Eastern model because it allows them to tie themselves into the system.

01:01:37.060 But the primary export country they work with is America.

01:01:43.060 Yeah.

01:01:43.860 So I'm sure you know this.

01:01:45.380 Like economies you can effectively break down into two types.

01:01:48.820 You have an export economy and an import economy.

01:01:51.220 That's effectively what they are.

01:01:52.740 Import economies buy stuff, export economies sell stuff.

01:01:55.940 Right.

01:01:56.740 America is a buying country.

01:01:57.940 It's an import country.

01:01:59.540 It buys stuff from abroad.

01:02:00.820 It doesn't manufacture a lot anymore.

01:02:02.420 And that's obviously one of the things that Trump's trying to reverse.

01:02:05.700 South Africa sells stuff.

01:02:06.900 We don't import.

01:02:08.100 We are manufacturing.

01:02:09.220 We've got mineral resources.

01:02:11.140 We've got farms.

01:02:12.340 We've got numerous things that we'll export.

01:02:17.140 Fruits, vegetables, meat, cows, produce.

01:02:21.220 So we're an export economy.

01:02:23.380 China is an export economy.

01:02:25.460 You can't have two export economies that trade with each other

01:02:28.500 because they're both going to sell each other stuff.

01:02:30.260 Who's buying?

01:02:31.540 Yeah.

01:02:31.780 So they like the models.

01:02:33.860 They like the economics.

01:02:36.660 Someone's going to buy.

01:02:38.260 Now, what's slowly happening over time is that South Africa

01:02:41.780 is being de-industrialized in order to allow it to become a buying economy

01:02:48.020 because it's working so much with China because of the power plays.

01:02:51.780 And China's like, we want to sell you stuff.

01:02:53.460 South Africa's like, I suppose, okay, we'll buy.

01:02:55.780 But, you know, we're trying to do stuff here mutually.

01:02:59.060 It's destroying local infrastructure in South Africa

01:03:02.420 because I've got nothing to sell.

01:03:04.740 The only country that was buying, I can't sell to.

01:03:07.940 And the country I want to trade with wants me to buy their stuff.

01:03:11.620 So I'm buying it.

01:03:12.500 But I've got all my stuff now and I've got nowhere to go.

01:03:15.380 So that's where they are.

01:03:16.820 Now, what happens when that happens?

01:03:19.060 Well, people get poorer.

01:03:20.260 People lose jobs.

01:03:21.940 But now I have to explain, why are people losing jobs?

01:03:25.700 Who's losing jobs?

01:03:28.020 What's the causes of those jobs?

01:03:30.820 And what the reality is, in an export economy where the majority of your stuff

01:03:34.900 is based on manufacturing or farming, it's usually low paid workers.

01:03:40.020 Who are the majority of the low paid workers?

01:03:41.780 They're going to be the majority of the workers full stop.

01:03:45.300 Who are black.

01:03:47.860 So then you go, okay, well, it must be the white guys fault, right?

01:03:51.380 Must be.

01:03:52.580 Like, the white guys are still living lives of luxury.

01:03:55.860 You guys are losing all your manufacturing jobs.

01:03:58.660 Now, we've heard that rhetoric before.

01:04:00.180 It's the proletariat.

01:04:02.180 The proletariat being exploited by the capitalist.

01:04:06.100 Isn't that what it is?

01:04:06.980 It's a zero-sum game mentality.

01:04:09.780 And also the mentality that doesn't focus on the kind of trades that must be rewarded

01:04:15.700 for the generation of wealth.

01:04:17.460 I'm coming back to it because this is the most fundamental thing.

01:04:20.340 Yeah.

01:04:20.820 It's...

01:04:21.540 So we've had that before.

01:04:23.540 You go, well, the proletariates are pushing down the poor individuals.

01:04:27.780 And if only we could nationalize the means of production.

01:04:30.020 We could give all you people, like, some wealth.

01:04:34.260 Vote for ANC.

01:04:35.220 Like, we're it.

01:04:37.380 Now, you can't say the proletariat.

01:04:39.060 Although there are individuals in our government that use that language.

01:04:43.060 Ramaphosa himself was actually once on, during a parliamentary debate,

01:04:47.940 the Freedom Front Plus, the leader of that, asked him,

01:04:50.260 how long will we continue with apartheid levels of racial classification?

01:04:56.020 And he said, why do you people...

01:04:58.660 Why do you people...

01:04:59.700 He's talking to a white person.

01:05:01.380 Why do you people...

01:05:02.500 So now you've alienated them and other them.

01:05:05.140 Why do you have a problem with black people owning the means of production?

01:05:08.740 His exact words.

01:05:10.340 So you can see where the ideology comes from.

01:05:12.580 But to the average individual, you can't start talking about proletarian or whatever else.

01:05:16.260 So it's easy.

01:05:17.060 You have to define what that is.

01:05:18.500 Well, it's white people.

01:05:19.940 You say, well, why?

01:05:21.140 Well, they'll say, well, the majority of farmland is owned by white people.

01:05:25.140 So the reason that the farm industries are suffering is because who's making those

01:05:29.860 individuals unemployed must be white people, right?

01:05:32.740 So who owns that land and must be benefiting from it must be white people.

01:05:37.140 Okay.

01:05:37.460 Well, who owns the factories?

01:05:39.060 Well, they're American owned and American must be white as Western.

01:05:42.180 So white people.

01:05:43.780 So what you end up doing is you create first your, your boogeyman.

01:05:48.820 And who's, who's doing well, what who's doing bad blacks.

01:05:54.260 Therefore, you must create late racial legislation that says whites need to transfer that money

01:06:01.540 to the black individuals.

01:06:03.380 And they must do it through the force of the governments, because the open market have allowed

01:06:11.300 them to exploit the labor and the resources of the country for their personal benefit to the

01:06:19.540 disadvantage of the black individual.

01:06:21.700 And that's how we end up with the racial position we have now.

01:06:25.700 And that's where we are.

01:06:27.620 Right.

01:06:28.020 Could we flesh out this?

01:06:30.420 What is it?

01:06:31.060 Because I've, I've read from MAFRE Forum that there are more than 140 racial laws.

01:06:36.580 I think there's 143, 143.

01:06:40.020 And one of the most difficult things to get across this is that there is such a thing as

01:06:46.500 anti-white racial bias in this.

01:06:50.580 And what is interesting is that wokeness is explicitly that because it says white people

01:06:57.140 are oppressors and they need to become second class citizens until further, further notice.

01:07:05.140 And further notice never comes because once they put up a policy of discrimination

01:07:11.860 that many people profit from, as you said in the very beginning, revoking it will be an electoral

01:07:17.620 disaster.

01:07:18.420 Correct.

01:07:19.220 So it's incredibly difficult to communicate that idea to most people and it's hidden in plain sight.

01:07:26.340 So what is the price of that ignorance?

01:07:29.460 What is the price of ignoring what is, what is hidden in plain sight?

01:07:37.300 I'm going to use the argument issued.

01:07:39.140 So Jonathan Sachs, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs is a, obviously was a British intellectual,

01:07:43.940 and he used the argument when he referred to it.

01:07:47.060 He said that underneath a liberal system, when an individual talks to you about injustices,

01:07:53.140 when they're being persecuted, when they're a victim, he said victim narratives.

01:07:58.900 In a liberal democracy, the victim is an individual.

01:08:03.460 So what you really want to do is you want to take that individual and you want to say,

01:08:06.820 what am I a victim of?

01:08:08.820 And you try to outlaw that so that the victim is no longer a victim as an individual.

01:08:14.420 And so as an individual, they can grow and thrive.

01:08:18.180 Underneath a neo-Marxist idea, you reframe victims as groups and you reframe them and not say,

01:08:26.580 right, I'm stopped from living my best life because of this law.

01:08:31.140 And if you remove this as an individual, I will excel.

01:08:36.580 No, Marxist systems say something different.

01:08:38.980 They say you have the repressed and the repressor.

01:08:42.500 However, the repressed of being repressed by these people, if only we can repress those people,

01:08:51.780 you can pull them and have a degree of equality.

01:08:55.220 So you don't uplift, you downtrodden.

01:08:58.980 In a liberal system, you uplift, you don't downtrodden.

01:09:04.660 It's important to understand the distinctions, because that is the distinction that the ANC has.

01:09:10.180 As of right now, is there any legislation in place, one, that downtroddens a black individual?

01:09:21.860 None. Not one.

01:09:24.340 So what they will say is, okay, why then are they still repressed?

01:09:30.740 We know who we think the repressors are.

01:09:33.620 They're the people with money.

01:09:34.900 They're the people that own the wealth.

01:09:38.340 They're the landowners.

01:09:39.540 They're the capital owners.

01:09:42.340 And you'll say to them, well, how are they repressing individuals?

01:09:46.740 And this is important to understand, because we'll talk about what those laws are.

01:09:49.940 But you first need to understand why it's a problem.

01:09:52.260 And then you can see how they're trying to address it.

01:09:54.580 They'll say, well, if you own land, land can be used for the purposes of creating stuff.

01:10:01.780 Whether it be farming, or cows, or agriculture, or whatever.

01:10:06.180 Right?

01:10:06.740 So they own land.

01:10:08.740 They're utilizing the land for their own self-interest.

01:10:12.420 And because they own the land, and these guys don't own the land, you have a haves and a have-nots.

01:10:18.740 And it's the haves that are downtroddening the have-nots.

01:10:21.940 So what you need to do is you need to somehow redistribute it.

01:10:26.980 Then you say, okay, well, how come the people that are on employments with high college

01:10:32.900 educations, high university educations, the white people, they're employed.

01:10:38.020 And the back individual doesn't have those.

01:10:40.900 And they're not employed.

01:10:43.620 You would say, well, is there any barriers of entry to the university?

01:10:46.820 You'd say, no.

01:10:47.780 They go, no, that's not good enough.

01:10:49.060 You need to downtrodden the white person so that these individuals are not square.

01:10:52.820 Right?

01:10:53.540 And so forth and so forth.

01:10:55.620 You have to understand that mentality.

01:10:57.300 And then you go, okay, so AFRI Forum says there's 143 racial rules.

01:11:01.780 What does that mean?

01:11:04.500 Very important.

01:11:06.660 First thing is, who are those race laws being applied to?

01:11:12.260 When we talk about race, what does race mean?

01:11:17.220 Well, the government doesn't have an answer to that.

01:11:19.540 They go, well, what did apartheid say?

01:11:22.500 What did the apartheid government say?

01:11:25.300 What were the races?

01:11:27.060 Well, under apartheid, there were three races, or four races, if you want to be specific.

01:11:32.260 We had whites.

01:11:33.780 We had blacks.

01:11:35.380 We had Indians, because we've got a large population of Indians outside of India.

01:11:39.380 So even if you were Pakistani, you were still classed as Indian.

01:11:42.660 Right?

01:11:43.220 And we had what they called colored, which is an official category in South Africa.

01:11:47.780 I understand to a Western mind, you hear that and you're like, that's derogatory.

01:11:51.300 That's actually an official category on the South African systems.

01:11:54.420 It means mixed race.

01:11:56.020 Okay?

01:11:56.260 So those are them.

01:11:57.060 They were all put in place by the apartheid government.

01:11:59.540 We still have those.

01:12:00.820 So that's one of your 143 rules.

01:12:04.340 It's a categorization of what does it mean to be a different ethnicity, a different race.

01:12:10.260 It's defined, actually, by apartheid, and we still have apartheid classifications in the rules.

01:12:15.300 So now you say, okay, let's start to extract that.

01:12:19.220 Now we have the races.

01:12:20.580 What does that mean?

01:12:22.500 What it means is that white people own all the land.

01:12:26.420 So they come up with a new form of rules.

01:12:29.940 I'm sure you've heard about expropriation without compensation,

01:12:32.580 where they could effectively take some of the land and redistribute it.

01:12:36.660 Right?

01:12:36.900 And you have all these kind of things that they talk about.

01:12:40.420 That's not racial.

01:12:42.020 But they just put a rule in place that every single time a new land property or a property

01:12:46.900 gets registered on the title deed, you have to say what type of race owns that.

01:12:51.300 So now we're directly linking the ownership of land to the race of the person.

01:12:57.460 Why would you do that?

01:12:58.580 Well, we know why.

01:12:59.460 Well, you have the government that wants to do social engineering and oversee race relations.

01:13:06.180 And you know what they'll be able to easily do now.

01:13:08.020 They can easily take the title deeds because they've registered the race of the person has done it.

01:13:12.500 And they go, look, we've got 100 properties here.

01:13:15.140 80 are owned by whites.

01:13:16.420 20 are owned by black people, whatever.

01:13:18.740 You're showing your skewed pattern.

01:13:20.580 We have a new law we put in place, expropriation without compensation.

01:13:23.380 We need to readdress this.

01:13:24.260 We need to rebalance it.

01:13:25.940 So you can see where it goes.

01:13:27.780 That's one of your rules.

01:13:29.700 We have now what's called the Employment Equity Amendment Act.

01:13:32.340 This all started many moons ago underneath Thabo Mbeki.

01:13:38.180 We're going back to the original thing.

01:13:39.700 He said, what we need to do is we need to make sure that the work patterns in the workplace

01:13:44.180 are representative of the demography of the country.

01:13:48.580 They said, well, how are you going to do that?

01:13:49.860 Because you can't come into my business and tell me what to do.

01:13:52.340 That's not very neo-liberal of you, is it?

01:13:55.620 He said, okay, well, what we'll do is we'll apply it to the government,

01:13:58.740 but we won't apply it to your sector.

01:14:00.340 So what you slowly but surely found is that all the government departments that were

01:14:04.660 under apartheid, all staffed by white people, the civil service.

01:14:08.500 Obviously, when you change a government, you never change civil service.

01:14:10.660 You change your cabinet ministers, but your civil service is a civil service.

01:14:13.780 Same in the UK.

01:14:15.780 So what they did is they adopted this rule, got rid of all the white people in the government positions.

01:14:22.580 It's very difficult now to go to any state-owned enterprise or government department

01:14:26.260 and try to look for a white person.

01:14:27.700 Not really going to find it.

01:14:29.140 And interestingly enough, the pendulum has now swung the other way,

01:14:33.300 where they're going, actually, you know, from that racial categorization you put in,

01:14:36.900 where we're supposed to have the X amount percentage, you don't have that.

01:14:40.900 So you're actually in violation now of your own rules because it's 100% black and now like 0% white.

01:14:46.660 But it's amazing how that's never an issue.

01:14:49.220 It was an issue.

01:14:49.860 It was an issue when it was 100% white and they had to transform it.

01:14:53.140 And they've transformed it very successfully.

01:14:55.540 And that's collapsed certain enterprises.

01:14:57.780 Now, if you go for a job in a government sector, nine times out of 10, the front page of the advert will say,

01:15:05.380 affirmative action higher.

01:15:07.140 You can only get that job if you're a black or from a previous disadvantage.

01:15:13.140 Now, that in itself becomes interesting because that's encoded in a law.

01:15:17.540 Yeah.

01:15:18.260 That's in a law.

01:15:19.540 Now, the government took it one step further and said, right, we've transformed the private sector with the public sector.

01:15:25.060 We need to now start talking about the private sector.

01:15:28.420 So what they did is in the last Amendment Act, they came up with what they class as sectoral targets.

01:15:36.020 And it's like the most ludicrous thing you'll ever see in your life.

01:15:39.060 They took industries and they said, right, mining.

01:15:44.020 We've got senior manager and middle management and the guy on the ground.

01:15:47.540 We've got, here's our four categories of people, white, Indian, colour.

01:15:51.380 We've got male and female.

01:15:52.340 We want to see 20% black female, 40% black male, 10% Indian, Indian male, 2% Indian female.

01:16:03.380 This was literally like this.

01:16:06.100 Like, who cared whether or not those people worked?

01:16:08.420 And then you got mandated by government law that the mining sector should have people in the shafts

01:16:15.460 of like 20% black woman.

01:16:17.540 You ever seen a black woman in a mining shaft mining away and like picking at a wall?

01:16:22.100 I ain't.

01:16:23.540 Because they don't, they don't, typically people, females don't do that job.

01:16:27.860 It's a, you know, they can say, well, there's no differences between sexes until they have to

01:16:32.580 go out on the oil rig.

01:16:33.700 And then there's very much a distinction between sexes.

01:16:36.420 And that's the primary example.

01:16:38.260 So it's like, how are you going to do this?

01:16:41.460 On what basis did you did it?

01:16:43.060 Well, it was like pie in the sky.

01:16:44.900 We just feel that that's what we should have.

01:16:47.220 That's a race law.

01:16:49.060 We have what's also called BEE.

01:16:52.020 So BEE is basically means back economic ownership.

01:16:55.540 It's like, what I mean by ownership is when a company is owned by a certain individual,

01:17:00.340 you can't say, well, you know what, you're a white guy, you own this company 100%.

01:17:04.740 They'll say, you can't do that.

01:17:07.860 You need to give it to a black individual for economic uplifts purposes.

01:17:11.060 So you need to give 25% of your business, 50% of your business, sometimes 50, 51%,

01:17:16.820 so that you, the white person who's setting up the business, are the minority shareholder.

01:17:20.500 So they, black person, now has the voting rights on your board.

01:17:24.100 And if you don't do that, we won't grant you a license to trade.

01:17:30.340 Yeah, they're blackmailing, blackmailing.

01:17:34.260 And that's caused economic problems.

01:17:35.940 I'll give you an example.

01:17:36.820 Elon Musk cannot set up Starlink in South Africa because he refuses to give away,

01:17:41.700 like, 25% of Starlink.

01:17:44.820 He don't even own 25% of Starlink now.

01:17:46.900 Obviously, with shareholdings, I'm sure you know how that works.

01:17:49.060 Like, you're giving 25% away of an international PLC with billions.

01:17:53.860 Like, you can't do that.

01:17:55.380 The government's like, you can't do it, you can't get the,

01:17:57.220 you can't get a license to trade on low-orbit satellites.

01:18:01.460 So you can't set it up, right?

01:18:03.300 Because of a racial law.

01:18:05.860 They'll say, well, those laws don't exist.

01:18:07.620 Well, there's another example.

01:18:09.140 I'll give you another example.

01:18:10.580 If you apply to lease land from the government, I'll show you the application form.

01:18:15.460 I've got it on my phone.

01:18:16.260 I'll show you.

01:18:16.740 It tells you, line one, to lease government land, only available to black, Indian, coloured.

01:18:26.340 Yeah.

01:18:27.540 So if you're white, you can't apply.

01:18:29.700 So now you'll say to them, well, why are you doing this?

01:18:32.820 University places.

01:18:33.300 University places.

01:18:34.020 If you go to university, remember those, those sectoral targets?

01:18:38.340 You want to go get a university position to go study, I don't know, medicine.

01:18:43.220 Got to be representative.

01:18:44.900 Yeah.

01:18:45.460 Right?

01:18:45.780 You've got to have so many black individuals, so many white individuals, so many Indian individuals.

01:18:50.420 Well, what happens if all the applicants are stupidly bright white people who you really

01:18:56.260 want to be a doctor's, but they're not going to fit the quota?

01:18:59.220 Well, they're not getting any positions.

01:19:01.460 Now, individuals will say, well, that sounds horrific.

01:19:03.700 Who would live in a country like that?

01:19:05.540 Well, Americans would, because that actually happens right now in Harvard.

01:19:09.620 I'm sure you can guess where they got the idea from.

01:19:11.540 If you're Jewish in Harvard, do you know that the number one racial category or the number

01:19:16.580 one group of people that apply for law school in Harvard, it's Jewish.

01:19:21.860 Harvard right now has a quota on how many Jewish individuals they will accept into law school.

01:19:25.380 They will only accept 20, like 20, 25% of people that are from a Jewish background.

01:19:31.300 They will not do it more than that because they say it's over-representative.

01:19:34.260 South Africa has no universities to a much greater degree.

01:19:37.060 And it's not just there saying Jewish.

01:19:38.740 It's there against white and black individuals.

01:19:40.420 So you'll say, well, on what basis are you going to do it?

01:19:42.820 Well, there's another law.

01:19:44.580 So think about this from a different perspective.

01:19:47.380 We're going to now apply that to a normal day-to-day life.

01:19:51.460 I'm an individual.

01:19:52.740 I'm born in 2000.

01:19:55.220 Apartheid ended six years ago.

01:19:57.060 I'm born in 2000.

01:19:59.780 I hit 2018.

01:20:01.380 I'm 18.

01:20:02.260 I want to go to university.

01:20:04.660 Can I go?

01:20:07.540 Very difficult.

01:20:09.060 Because the positions are all going to be positioned.

01:20:11.140 Remember, we've got racial categorization.

01:20:12.980 We've got racial splits.

01:20:14.820 I then decided, okay, I can't go to university.

01:20:16.660 So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go apply to maybe lease some government land

01:20:19.940 and go become a farmer.

01:20:21.300 Can I apply for that?

01:20:22.740 Can I apply for the farming license?

01:20:24.580 Probably not.

01:20:25.620 So I go, okay, you know what I'm going to do?

01:20:27.460 You know what I'm going to do?

01:20:28.740 I'm going to call up Uncle Elon.

01:20:30.580 And I'm going to say, I'm going to start up a factory in, I don't know, Cape Town.

01:20:36.340 I'm going to set the company up.

01:20:37.300 I'm going to start up a factory.

01:20:38.260 Can I set up my company?

01:20:40.260 Not unless I give away 51% to someone else.

01:20:42.900 51.

01:20:44.500 Which means that you don't own it, basically.

01:20:46.500 It's more someone else's than it is yours.

01:20:48.740 But I'm setting it up and I raise the funds and I'm going to run it.

01:20:50.980 Yeah.

01:20:51.860 But that's the rules underneath Black Economic Empowerment.

01:20:54.740 That's your BE rules.

01:20:56.500 And even if I do set that company up, can I then just employ whoever I want and just

01:21:00.420 try and make that business a success?

01:21:02.420 No.

01:21:02.660 Because the government told me how many people I can hire and who I can hire.

01:21:06.420 So you then go-

01:21:07.700 And it's not about competence.

01:21:09.060 It's about race.

01:21:10.180 Racial being countering.

01:21:11.140 Yeah.

01:21:11.380 A hundred percent.

01:21:12.820 So the government will say, well, these laws, they don't exist.

01:21:15.540 There's no racial laws.

01:21:17.540 I've just highlighted to you a real experience that you could have right now.

01:21:20.660 Right.

01:21:20.900 So I suppose my last question is, we can understand so many ways in which things can go south in

01:21:30.740 a bad direction.

01:21:32.580 Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel?

01:21:36.260 And if so, what kind of avenue would that be?

01:21:41.860 Right.

01:21:43.620 It's actually an important point for a British audience.

01:21:46.980 I like South Africa because it's not Britain.

01:21:51.060 Let me explain that.

01:21:52.100 And I know that's actually a hard thing to explain.

01:21:55.380 Nothing in my country works.

01:21:57.940 Nothing.

01:22:00.260 We removed all the skill and expertise from ESCOM, our energy provider.

01:22:05.140 We have rolling blackouts in our country.

01:22:08.260 Which, by the way, you removed all the skill and expertise from your coal power stations

01:22:11.780 here, and they are threatening blackouts every so often in Britain.

01:22:15.860 I'm sure you know.

01:22:18.260 We started that.

01:22:19.220 We called it load shedding.

01:22:20.980 You guys called it grid reduction.

01:22:23.140 You were like, nah, load shedding, that's not good PR.

01:22:26.020 Load reduction.

01:22:27.060 That sounds better.

01:22:28.100 By the way, we've just rebranded our load shedding, load reduction.

01:22:30.740 So thanks for that.

01:22:32.820 Right.

01:22:33.220 So you can see how this works, but nothing in my country works.

01:22:37.940 You put a digital currency in place because you want to control people.

01:22:41.940 We don't have electricity.

01:22:43.540 How are you going to have a digital currency?

01:22:44.740 Like no one's going to trade.

01:22:46.980 You're going to put cameras in place.

01:22:50.660 The infrastructure falls apart.

01:22:52.020 People steal it.

01:22:53.940 What cameras are you going to put in place?

01:22:55.780 Like where I live, there's no speed cameras.

01:22:57.940 You put a speed camera up, someone will steal it by the afternoon.

01:23:01.300 So there's a degree of like madness in that.

01:23:05.540 But whilst the state retreats and does,

01:23:08.740 private sector has to step in and take the position.

01:23:12.340 Our private medical care in South Africa is world class.

01:23:16.100 World class.

01:23:17.780 NHS here has nothing on our private sector.

01:23:20.500 I understand we pay for it.

01:23:22.260 Got it.

01:23:23.380 We have private security industries in South Africa.

01:23:26.500 The private security industry makes the police service look like a joke.

01:23:31.300 There are 60,000 policemen employed in South Africa.

01:23:34.420 There are 250,000 private security officers all carrying firearms.

01:23:39.140 Who would you trust your life with?

01:23:40.340 Police or private security?

01:23:42.020 Oh, the latter.

01:23:44.660 The police stations have private security.

01:23:46.900 It's the funniest thing in the world.

01:23:48.420 The local police station like protected by ADT.

01:23:50.980 It's hilarious.

01:23:52.580 But that's a real thing.

01:23:53.940 There is freedom in the chaos because the government cannot.

01:23:59.780 The government is dictatorial in the type of things it says,

01:24:02.900 the rhetoric it says, unable to enforce it because the government is so inept.

01:24:09.220 They've stolen to a degree.

01:24:11.620 They've collapsed their own infrastructure to a point.

01:24:14.340 They couldn't possibly even apply their own rules.

01:24:18.340 It's just impossible.

01:24:19.140 They don't have the ability.

01:24:21.300 The SAP system, the police system is so internally corrupt.

01:24:25.060 You couldn't rely on it.

01:24:26.340 And there is a degree of freedom on that.

01:24:28.580 Contrast that to the UK.

01:24:31.460 Everything here still works for now.

01:24:34.660 I say for now because the South Africanization of Britain will occur.

01:24:38.420 It's happening every day.

01:24:40.980 And we discussed that about the trains even before we got here.

01:24:43.540 Like we've seen it firsthand.

01:24:45.540 Yeah, I was immersed in infrastructural collapse myself this morning.

01:24:49.380 Yeah, you know what I mean?

01:24:50.580 So like we've experienced it.

01:24:52.740 So we know.

01:24:54.500 And sometimes it's easy to see that because I can tell you how crime started in South Africa.

01:25:00.100 I can tell you as a kid how we started to experience it.

01:25:03.300 Do you know how it started?

01:25:04.740 Stabbings.

01:25:06.100 What's the number one crime that happens now in London?

01:25:08.660 Stabbings.

01:25:09.300 Do you think it stays with stabbings?

01:25:10.740 Do you think it stays with knives?

01:25:12.260 Or does it graduate to nine millimeters and pistols and shotguns and then AK-47s?

01:25:17.540 I mean the less law enforcement there is, the easier it gets for people to get firearms in countries where they are banned.

01:25:24.980 You have a thousand boat people are rocking up at the shores every day.

01:25:28.980 Do you know what they're rocking here up with?

01:25:32.100 Any ideas?

01:25:32.980 I don't.

01:25:34.100 You don't.

01:25:34.500 The number one way South Africa gets illegal guns is from the border.

01:25:39.860 We don't have a border like it collapsed because the government didn't maintain it.

01:25:43.060 There's no officers there.

01:25:44.500 We import all of our illegal guns from Mozambique and Namibia.

01:25:50.580 So they come through the border.

01:25:52.180 They don't steal them locally.

01:25:53.220 I mean, obviously when the government talks about firearm control, they'll say, oh yeah, civilian ownership.

01:25:56.900 It's not.

01:25:57.300 So do you think that eventually the things will get so bad that the government will have to see sense and allow more freedom to the private sector?

01:26:09.700 It's already in that position, which is why in the last two or so years they have had to privatize the railway.

01:26:17.380 They've had to privatize the energy generation.

01:26:21.060 We haven't had load shedding for two years, but that's not because the government got better.

01:26:24.420 So everybody just moved their houses off grid and put solar.

01:26:28.020 Yeah.

01:26:29.300 In the UK, they tell you how much solar you can put, where you can put it, somebody's going to come through and inspect it, then you need a license free for a compliance certificate.

01:26:38.580 In South Africa, we get a guy, I get a letter, he goes on, he just chucks some stuff on the roof and puts an inverter in and you're done.

01:26:46.980 Because there isn't the same level of control.

01:26:49.380 The state can't apply that control.

01:26:51.540 So the light at the end of the tunnel actually is that the government does.

01:26:58.340 That's the light at the end of the tunnel.

01:27:00.020 Right.

01:27:01.380 And you don't think that there are enough forces there to lead to an even worse outcome.

01:27:08.740 Because frequently when there is total collapse of the state, there is chaos of the bad type.

01:27:15.860 Where you have, because if you have for decades this kind of anti-white racial rhetoric and people find a scapegoat and people are already brainwashed with an ideology that if chaos occurs,

01:27:31.700 I mean, it's not an if, they already do, they always blame the white man for everything.

01:27:38.580 Isn't there a huge risk of sort of armed conflict or conflict of that type?

01:27:45.940 You know, and it's a very important topic for South Africans because many South Africans from very liberal backgrounds have this fear and they've had this fear.

01:27:57.380 And Afrikaans called Swat Gewehr, it means like fear of the black man.

01:28:02.100 They've had that Swat Gewehr for a very long time.

01:28:04.980 And what it means is that since 94, there's always been this worry that we'd have like a repeat of, I don't know,

01:28:12.180 some African despot that rises up and kills whole sections of their population, like Rwanda, you know, and like the white people are going to get killed.

01:28:19.460 It was like Nelson Mandela's coming in, oh, white people are going to get killed, you should immigrate.

01:28:23.940 Then it was like when he died, oh, white people are going to get killed, you should immigrate.

01:28:27.140 Then it was when Julius Melima started singing Kill the Boer.

01:28:30.340 A chance, yeah.

01:28:31.220 You know, then it was, oh, we're going to, never happens.

01:28:33.780 We've actually had an event in South Africa that could have led to that.

01:28:37.380 It was actually in 2021, it was the Durban protests.

01:28:40.820 So if you've never watched any videos on that, you really should.

01:28:44.020 It's like, if you want to see what an actual country looks like when it starts to tear itself apart,

01:28:48.900 July 2021, horrific, but it didn't pull itself apart.

01:28:53.620 Private citizens with their own individual gun ownership were able to stop mobs going absolutely ballistic.

01:29:00.980 It's the number one reason why a country should never give up its personal or private ownership of their firearms.

01:29:06.900 You can actually see it in action.

01:29:08.500 If you want a case study of why you should have private ownership, go check July 2021, Durban.

01:29:14.660 The police were having to go through to private individuals saying we've run out of bullets, can we have yours?

01:29:19.540 If the private individuals didn't have bullets, the police would have been overpowered and would have been overrun.

01:29:23.620 But the reality is the individuals' crimes weren't crimes of racial origin.

01:29:29.220 South Africa is very weird because we have two things.

01:29:33.860 Most countries, let's use the example, even in Saudi Arabia or something like that, what you typically find is that most countries,

01:29:45.220 the people have a will and the government tempers it.

01:29:50.340 The people like in Saudi Arabia might be really anti-Israeli, but the government like sees practicality.

01:29:55.780 They're like, we've got to we've got to trade with them.

01:29:57.860 We need to be when they're out, you know, they're one of our neighbors.

01:30:01.060 They're a nuclear power.

01:30:02.100 We need to we need to be nice here.

01:30:03.780 Like, let's just we'll trade with them.

01:30:06.100 We get the people don't like you, but we'll make nice, right?

01:30:09.940 There's lots of instances of this.

01:30:12.500 I'm sure you can think of numerous countries that trade with parties that the population don't like.

01:30:17.940 But South Africa is the reverse.

01:30:21.780 The general population don't have the problem that the government do.

01:30:25.620 A good example is that if you took a consensus of people in South Africa,

01:30:30.020 most of them are pro-Israel.

01:30:31.940 The government is anti-Israel.

01:30:34.180 Most individuals on the ground say they don't experience racial prejudice.

01:30:37.860 And they don't have a problem between white and black people.

01:30:40.740 The government?

01:30:41.380 No, there must be racial conflict everywhere.

01:30:43.780 So the government is actually the radical agent in South Africa.

01:30:47.540 And you're starting to see.

01:30:49.620 And it's collapsing.

01:30:50.340 And it's collapsing.

01:30:52.100 So and when you're starting to see that repeated in places like England, where the government's will is not that of the people, the people have a drastically different opinion.

01:31:03.060 You've seen it in Europe.

01:31:04.980 There was an instance in Canada or Australia.

01:31:08.660 Australia went and declared a Palestinian state.

01:31:11.300 The actual people in Australia didn't want them to.

01:31:13.300 They said this isn't our will.

01:31:14.500 You're starting to see the governments in the West going the way that our government went.

01:31:19.940 And when the government stops reflecting the will of the people, it does collapse.

01:31:23.620 But when it collapses, does that mean that you have to invoke the spirits of Swat Gvirt?

01:31:31.060 Does that mean that the black guys are going to go kill the white guy?

01:31:34.100 No.

01:31:35.620 We had the prospect of that in 2021.

01:31:38.340 It didn't happen.

01:31:39.860 But there's always a fear.

01:31:41.940 It's the world.

01:31:42.580 You can't predict anything.

01:31:43.700 Like, life's love.

01:31:44.660 Africa can also be Africa.

01:31:46.340 And Africa has a history.

01:31:47.460 You can't ignore that.

01:31:48.740 But we did have the prospect of it before.

01:31:51.380 And when you actually talk to the average individual on the ground, your average individual, you said your lived experience.

01:31:57.780 The average lived experience in South Africa does not sound like the retro cut of a politician.

01:32:04.820 The politician sounds very out of touch.

01:32:06.740 But the problem is the politician is in seats of position that they can influence the legal frameworks and the laws.

01:32:13.300 But what he's often doing doesn't match the lived experience of the people on the ground.

01:32:17.940 I really like, I think, I really like what you're saying.

01:32:21.380 And I hope that we can end up on this optimistic note.

01:32:25.460 Barron, thank you very much.

01:32:26.660 My pleasure.

01:32:27.220 We have the link.

01:32:28.740 Click on Morning Shot, your YouTube channel.

01:32:31.060 Yeah.

01:32:31.540 Great channel.

01:32:32.340 Definitely check it out.

01:32:34.020 And it has been my pleasure.

01:32:35.780 And I hope all the best for you and for South Africa.

01:32:39.060 Thanks so much.

01:32:39.620 And thanks for having me on the show.

01:32:41.300 It's been a pleasure.

01:32:42.980 Right.

01:32:44.580 Hope you enjoyed it.

01:32:45.700 Thank you.

01:32:46.180 And goodbye.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 03, 2025

South Africa Isn't Doomed Yet ｜ Interview with Morning Shot

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