The Fate of South Africa ｜ Interview with Ernst Van Zyl
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
174.67278
Summary
In this episode, I speak to Ernst Lanzell, head of public relations at Afriforum, about the current state of politics in South Africa and the challenges faced by the ANC in order to achieve their political goals.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to this interview with Ernst Lanzell who is head of public relations at Afriforum
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and I think I've probably got to clear up because we've got a lot of people outside of South Africa
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that might not be familiar with what Afriforum is.
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So it was established as an independent initiative in around 2006 of Solidarity
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and I suppose Afriforum acts as a non-profit civil rights organisation for Afrikaners.
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That's about right. That's more right than a lot of other people get it
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especially our opponents and the people that try to smear us
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they completely miss the mark in regards to what we are and what our plans are.
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It would help if they actually read our websites and all of the reports and things that we publish
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I mean we don't hide anything we spell out exactly what we are
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what we want to achieve and what our mission is.
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So the only real excuse for people out there that are trying to claim that they have deciphered
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what Afriforum and the Solidarity movement is about
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when they get it wrong they don't really have an excuse because it's all out there.
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We literally make documentaries about what our plan is.
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But if you haven't necessarily heard of Afriforum
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you might have been seen on Twitter or now X I think it's called
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the current state of governance in South Africa
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that we're going into very difficult and complex
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the dark continent because people literally believed
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very simply South African military bankrupt and
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you'll get hundreds of stories just detailing the
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financial woes of the South African military. It's in a
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horrible state. So absolutely right. That's one of the
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many fronts where you see this what we call state
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story of the past three years is state capacity
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decay where the state, as I said earlier, the ANC has
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power as possible in the hands of the government. They
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want all these responsibilities, but they simply
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electricity. I mean, in South Africa, we have electricity
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monopoly in the state power monopoly called ESCOM, which
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is supposed to provide the country with electricity. But
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for the past 15 years, well, no, actually, no, it's now
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2025 and the electricity crisis started in 2007. That means
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it's now that's 17 years. No, yeah, seven, no, 18 years. The
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electricity crisis in South Africa is old enough to
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vote. The electricity crisis started in 2008. I remember
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I was still a schoolboy at the time. I remember hearing over
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the radio on our drive to school that the government was
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announcing rolling blackouts are going to be instituted this
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evening. So around 2007, 2008, this what we call load shedding, which is
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just a euphemism for rolling blackouts, starts, and it is still a crisis
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that's ongoing in 2025. Just the other day, we had load shedding once again. So
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the government has had 18 years of grappling with this crisis and they just,
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they can't, can't solve it. And just a little bit of a fact there to put it all
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into perspective. I mean, in, in 2000, was it in 2003? I think if I remember correctly,
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ESCOM, the state power monopoly, was, was named the electricity company of the year.
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Somewhere there at the turn of the century, I might get the year by one or two years off.
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But there around 2003, ESCOM, the state power monopoly, got international award for being one of
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the best power generation companies in the world. And now, 20 years later, the,
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they've just admitted defeat almost there. They, it seems like nobody believes the state anymore
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when they say, well, they're going to solve this problem. It's one of these days, there won't be no
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more rolling blackouts. It's still, it's still a problem today. And that's not even talking about
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the power outages that we, that we experience in, in between the, the state induced rolling blackouts
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due to copper cable theft, due to infrastructure decay. The other day, electricity substation just
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caught on fire, massive explosion there. And then massive parts of the city's power just went off
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because the maintenance is not being done. And it's just everything, it's slowly decaying due to a lack
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of maintenance from, from the government side. And I don't think that, I think that's at the root
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of the problem as well, is that the word maintenance doesn't really factor into the ANC's vocabulary.
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They, they try to build very shiny things, but they don't really maintain the things that, that exist,
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like for example, key infrastructure. The other day, they did finish building a new coal power station
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that had been in construction for, I think almost 20 years now. The project, I think the pro-,
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oh well not, it was, it's around, it's between 10 to 15 years, if I remember correctly. It's called
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Madupi Power Station. And the other day it was reported that due to corruption, fund mismanagement,
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just project bloat over the years, Madupi Power Station that was finished now, I think this year,
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is officially now the most expensive coal power station in the history of humanity. And it's not
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because it is the most advanced one that humanity has ever built, it's just been one of these power
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stations that has been in construction for over a decade now and just racking up costs. But that's the,
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that's the typical, that's almost like a metaphor for the ANC's rule in South Africa,
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is all these major projects that just keep racking up costs due to corruption and mismanagement.
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That leads us on very nicely actually to our next question, which is, do you see a lot of this
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decline as the result of incompetence, ideology, corruption, or probably most likely a mix of
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all three of those things? It's a, it's the disgusting cake where all these horrible ingredients
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have just been thrown together. I think it's definitely a mixture of all of that. I mean,
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there is definite, one of the main issues is the corruption. I mean, South Africa just has,
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it is one of the most corrupt governments in the world. One of the funny things that happened,
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you know, Drikas Duplessis, the MMA fighter or the UFC fighter, he was doing an interview and
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he just doesn't care what people think about what he says. And he said in an interview,
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South Africa's government is the most corrupt in the world. And then the South African government
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officials took a lot of offense because South Africa is officially not the most corrupt. I think
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it's like the third or the fourth most corrupt in the world. So they wanted him to get his facts
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straight. But I mean, I've got some facts here about corruption in South Africa that I think
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paints the picture quite well. So in, in 2021, there was a poll among South Africans about corruption
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and 70% of respondents believe the government is performing fairly badly or very badly in fighting
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corruption. 20, 71% believe corrupt officials often or always go unpunished. So that's definitely one of
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the main factors there, but we can't ignore also just general mismanagement, incompetence. And this comes
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from, it's baked into the cake. So it's baked into the ANC cake through their own model of CADA
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deployment. So CADA deployment is, it forms part of the National Democratic Revolution. It's part of the
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formula, but it's, it's, it's your bog standard Marxist idea that when you gain power as a party,
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you need to then your first priority there needs to be to deploy party loyalists caders as the ANC or
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the communist vocabulary calls them into every single facet, every tentacle of the state, no matter how
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small the office, no matter how trivial the, the, the, the government apparatus there or the government,
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the, how trivial the parts of the government machine, it has to be filled by a CADA, a party
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loyalist loyal to the ANC. So for the past 30 years, they have been, again, openly, this is not, this is a
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term they use, they've been doing what they call CADA deployment, deploying party loyalists to every
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single facet of the government throughout the machine of the state. And these caders that they deploy,
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their deployment is not, the criteria for whether they are deployed to a certain position or not,
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is not based on merit or on their, their expertise or their experience. It is based on the, the amount
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of loyalty they have to the part of the, the ruling party specifically. So that's where the incompetence
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comes in. It's just people being deployed to jobs that they have no idea how to do, that they have no
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experience in doing. And then of course, lastly, and you mentioned this, it is then the third part
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of this failure trifecta is the ideological component. It's just, I know that there's a lot
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of exaggeration in our time of people just calling people they hate either far left or far right,
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anyone that disagrees with them, particularly on the left, they call anyone far right that disagrees with
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them. But the ANC is genuinely a party that has a Marxist, a Marxist foundation, a communist foundation.
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I mean, the ANC is literally in an official alliance with the South African Communist Party.
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The South African Communist Party, the SACP does not compete in South African elections because they
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are in an agreement with the ANC that when the ANC wins an election, representatives from the South African
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Communist Party are deployed to government positions. So they don't have to compete in elections. They
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have an official alliance with the South African Communist Party. It's called the tripartite alliance.
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And I mean, we've had ministers of finance in the past that were members of the South African
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Communist Party. So it's not an exaggeration when you call the South African government out for its
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Marxist and communist foundations. It is like explicit. It's not a conspiracy. It's not even,
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you have to play with the terminology to make it work. No, it's explicitly has a far left foundation,
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a Marxist and a communist foundation. And you can see it in their deployments. And you can just
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Google the tripartite alliance if you want a little bit more context there. So just to sum up,
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I think you're absolutely correct in regards to the different elements and you have to combine them
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all to really get the picture on what's going on. It's not a single element. It is the combination of all
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those just horrible influences on the South African society and government ideology, mismanagement and
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corruption. Absolutely. And one thing I'm very curious about is that we're starting to see some
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of these infrastructural failings in, for example, European countries. We actually had a case where a
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power station near Heathrow airport in London went out and half of London and, you know, several airports
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actually had to ground their flights and there was no electricity. And there's a sort of growing
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interest in what is the most sort of under acknowledged or most significant infrastructural
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failing in South Africa, because a lot of people outside of it see this as
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a template for the future, I suppose. Absolutely. I mean, it's South Africa tells
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you a lot about the nature of collapse. So a lot of people think about collapse as something that
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is akin to like an explosive going off or a bomb going off, but that's not how collapse works.
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Collapse happens little by little, like every day your country is 0.1% worse than the day before.
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You don't wake up one morning in a collapsed country or a collapsed system. That's a bit of
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the simplified idea that you often find online of people talking about the end of their society or
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this apocalyptic collapse that happens one day, just like immediately. But that's not how it works.
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It's one extra piece of graffiti on the road that you walk to work. It's an old lady getting mugged
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on a street where she was usually safe to walk down. It's a gravestone that's been vandalized. That's
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that's what collapse looks like. All these little little cracks just accumulating and accumulating
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on top of each other. And infrastructure in South Africa is particularly where you see this come to
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the fore. I mean, I've mentioned the electricity crisis, but it's all the infrastructure. It's
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it's not just electricity. It's the road infrastructure. It is the bridges. It is the
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the sewage infrastructure. It's the water infrastructure. I mean, South Africa is currently
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entering, to add insult to injury, a water crisis where our water infrastructure all across the
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country just can't support the population anymore. An increasing amount of communities are suffering
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water outages, water that's not fit for human consumption. We've had major incidents over the
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past few years as well of communities. The water quality getting so bad that you have
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mass deaths of people getting cholera and all these horrible diseases from drinking water because the
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infrastructure is just collapsing. The water infrastructure, government induced collapse of
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the infrastructure because the the authorities just aren't maintaining these this infrastructure
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and the population keeps growing. So you just have this increase in pressure on an infrastructure that's
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like decades old. So and specifically sewage as well. There's major problems. A lot of sewage is just
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being dumped into our rivers and dams and into nature here in South Africa because the there's just not
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enough plants to refine it or to clean it. So that's again, I think the thing that South Africa teaches
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you about collapse is that it is not something that happens overnight. It's not something that happens
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suddenly. It is just increasingly you notice the quality of the society around you starts deteriorating just
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little by little by little. And increasingly socially you realize South Africanization entails your country
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also just increasingly becoming lower and lower trust society in regards to the type of behaviors that you
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that you notice around you just start deteriorating morally as well. And that and that's a that's one of the
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the memes that I often mock a lot of people in America and the United States with is that whenever
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their social ills just keep increasing and at one point they're going to have to make peace with the
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fact that they are now living in a low trust society. They better start believing in low trust societies.
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Oh, yeah, I don't. I know it's very much getting that way in Britain as well. Certainly parts of it. And
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I think that people took a lot for granted both in South Africa and Europe and North America that
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things would always stay that way and it's not necessarily the case. But yeah, and it's a simple
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criteria for what a low trust society is a low trust society means that if a stranger is this is not some
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some scientific gauge is just my own little gauge is that you know you live in a low trust society when a
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stranger approaches you in the supermarket or in the streets in a or in a safe environment let's say in
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a supermarket and your first instinct is to think why are they be lining for me are they trying to
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exploit me in any way are they trying to hoodwink me in any way are they trying to harm me in any way
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then you know you are in a low trust society when someone approaches you directly a stranger and your
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default instinct is not a positive one but a negative one a negative association with the stranger
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that then you know you're in a low trust society seems perfectly reasonable to me because of course
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the key component of trust is is feeling safe and if your initial reaction is to feel threatened then
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it must be that surely so zooming out a considerable amount here what do you think of the ANC seemingly
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further aligning itself with countries like Iran China and Russia and the the recent conflict with the
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United States and the West more generally I suppose so there's a right there's a there's a fascinating
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divide there as well because on the one side if you look at South Africa just political why or like
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political rhetoric wise and vibe wise you you as an outsider looking in you would just see oh well
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they're parts of bricks they're very free increasingly friendly with Russia and China and Iran of course
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this country is realigning themselves but then you then you zoom out a bit further and you look at the
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bigger picture the economic picture and then you realize that South Africa is still incredibly dependent
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on Europe and the United States for trade but to a very large extent which means that when it comes
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to specifically the bigger picture I think the ANC very if this was an a real-time strategy game the the
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ANC would have loved to just realign with the click of a button with the the BRICS countries trade-wise
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military-wise political-wise but it's not that simple South Africa's economy is heavily tied to the
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United States economy and the European economy the economies of Europe which means that that realignment
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is again even if there's a lot of will from the ANC side to want to make it happen
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no amount of will is going to make that happen overnight or very quickly
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they're trying their damnedest they're trying their best to realign South Africa increasingly with
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the nations of China Iran Russia all that entire sphere but it's taking a lot of time
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and the other thing that's also important to note is that the ANC is aware of this they're not
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uh they're not oblivious to the fact that South Africa is increasing not in South Africa is still
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heavily reliant on trade with the West um because they're trying to to play this double personality
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on the split personality very schizophrenic of them on the one side they're very pro uh BRICS countries
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in their rhetoric abroad and the antics abroad but then at the same time when they do visit the United
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States when they do visit European countries they're also trying to smooth up everyone that
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they meet they talk about this important relationship that we have with these countries
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and we want to strengthen that relationship they're not always openly they're not always openly taking
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one side even though they have have have made some incredibly just reckless blunders the past few
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months particularly to almost actively sabotaging the relationship between South Africa and the United
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States the past two months can be described as nothing else than a diplomatic crisis between the
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Trump administration and the South African government but I mean there's a reason why on the one side you
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have literally the author of the art of the deal saying come to the negotiating table let's make a deal
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and on the other side you have the ANC the art of the no compromise the art of the double down
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saying no we're not going to compromise on anything in their words we will not be bullied well you're
00:25:39.520
the you're one of the smallest kids on the playground and you're taking on a six-foot child
00:25:45.440
you're going to get bullied there you can't just scream in his face I will not be bullied
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you're gonna have to you're gonna have to make another plan so when it comes to the the bigger picture
00:25:55.280
there to sum up I think politically the ANC wish they could realign the country immediately with the click of a
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button uh with the brick sphere but economically it's it's like it's not gonna happen overnight
00:26:08.400
economically South Africa for the foreseeable future is going to still be heavily target uh
00:26:13.600
tied uh to the United States and uh and to Europe and the western sphere
00:26:19.760
so um I'm not entirely sure whether they've actually gone ahead and effective but I have heard
00:26:26.400
uh the US talking about sanctions on South Africa um so this would probably stand to have a very real
00:26:33.840
effect then and would give the United States a fair amount of leverage to influence domestic
00:26:39.200
politics and and I suppose geopolitics as well because if you have that amount of power over a
00:26:45.440
country's economy then you know this is how the United States sort of its soft power empire works is that
00:26:52.320
they apply economic pressure and if South Africa is so dependent on them as well as Europe who I
00:26:59.040
don't think will necessarily stand in their way when it comes to South Africa then Trump's intervention
00:27:06.480
is quite significant and what what do you think um is likely to happen there yeah so Trump holds a lot
00:27:13.440
of cards in his hand I mean this is not a this is not an even match up between I mean that's it's
00:27:20.000
bizarrely how the ANC are trying to cope with the situation by saying well we need you and you need
00:27:25.280
us I'm like not really um economically the United States uh imports a lot of products from South Africa
00:27:33.040
luxury products and the fruits and other agricultural things and raw raw materials that it does need
00:27:39.840
but it can live without um economic sanctions from the Trump administration on South Africa would be
00:27:46.160
catastrophic to put it lightly um and the Trump administration and the South African government
00:27:52.240
know that they're not oblivious to that fact um on AfriForum's side I mean we're going to get into
00:27:58.000
AfriForum a bit more in detail in a moment but just a quick note on that we don't want to see South
00:28:04.480
Africa as a whole sanctioned by this by by the United States because that would punish the regular
00:28:10.320
citizens and normal people of South Africa our whole stance is that if sanctions are put on South
00:28:16.320
Africa those sanctions need to be targeted laser targeted on those politicians pushing these
00:28:21.520
destructive policies inciting violence against minorities those politicians that are actively
00:28:26.880
destroying South Africa those politicians need to feel the pain but not the the regular citizens of
00:28:32.880
South Africa are already punished by their foolish and uh policies and destructive policies of the ruling
00:28:38.400
party um they don't deserve a second punishment but you're absolutely right both the United States
00:28:44.640
and South Africa are very very intimately aware of the fact that the Trump administration holds all
00:28:52.000
the cards in their hand when it comes to negotiation negotiation especially if you have the economic
00:28:58.160
nuclear weapon of of economic sanctions that would be absolutely devastating for the South African
00:29:04.560
economy as I said to put it mildly mm-hmm and I think the thing that that kicked all of this off was the
00:29:11.200
land expropriation bill which um to the audience if they're not familiar it allowed the South African
00:29:17.760
government or the ANC to seize any property without justification really um in and they say that
00:29:26.800
they can use the criteria of uh of public interests but I mean that's so subjective exactly yeah it's so
00:29:34.320
subjective that it's not really a proper justification and they can do this without providing any compensation
00:29:40.400
and so it's basically the eradication of property rights and um as many people understand it would be
00:29:47.520
targeting the white minority in South Africa and when I've been covering this I've seen a lot of people
00:29:53.360
outside of South Africa saying well the persecution there is so bad they've seen um things about the
00:30:00.560
farmland murders and things like that and a lot of people say well it's so bad that why aren't people
00:30:07.680
leaving why why are people there in the first place and I think one of the important things here
00:30:13.920
is understanding the the character of the the political persecution of the white minority in
00:30:19.840
South Africa and and how would you perhaps explain that to someone who's not experienced it firsthand
00:30:26.160
right so I'll give the short answer and then the long answer the short answer is a Moroccan saying
00:30:31.120
that goes my country is my country even when I'm um treated unfairly there um and you have to if you
00:30:37.840
understand the the character of the Afrikaners and the white minority in general but specifically in
00:30:43.760
particular the Afrikaners you'll understand why there is not just uh why it's not as easy a decision
00:30:49.680
just to to leave I mean let's just take my own case study personally I mean I'm the ninth generation
00:30:55.920
of my family living in South Africa my first ancestor came here in 1688 um I mean that's that's before
00:31:02.720
the United States was a country um I challenge your audience to think back what was happening in in
00:31:08.560
Britain in in 1688 I mean that's that's a long way ago that's a long time ago and I mean
00:31:15.360
that's the story of almost every Afrikaner family we've been here for eight nine ten eleven generations
00:31:22.240
most of us uh my wife's family as well have been here since 1707 um so when it comes to particularly
00:31:28.720
the Afrikaners it's a rootedness it is a tied to a place uh uh uh an element of your identity that you
00:31:36.800
can't really put a monetary or material value on so I think that kind of helps explain why it is not just
00:31:43.360
as simple of a decision of leaving um there are many that have left I think there has been hundreds
00:31:50.640
of thousands of Afrikaners white South Africans black South Africans as well that have uh that have
00:31:57.360
emigrated over the past decades from South Africa um those people I'm not going to attack or shame them
00:32:03.600
it's a deeply personal decision uh that's something you yourself personally make you make the best decision
00:32:10.160
for your family I personally have decided to stay um for the reasons I set out the fact that
00:32:17.040
it feels like uh it doesn't seem like the right uh end to the the epic story of my family here at the
00:32:23.920
southern tip of Africa just to to leave but that's my own personal reasoning and also there's a lot of
00:32:29.520
other factors in there as well I've written extensively about it in my own personal capacity um but now I
00:32:35.440
I mean that's the the element of um uh whether to stay or leave really comes down to at the end of
00:32:42.160
the day millions of the white minority in South Africa either can't leave or do not want to leave
00:32:49.200
um it's not as simple even if uh with Trump's refugee program on the table the details have not been
00:32:55.760
have not been made clear they're still we're still waiting to get all the full details and criteria of
00:33:01.040
that resettlement program so I mean any conversation in that direction would be pure speculation but even
00:33:06.800
with that on the table millions of white South Africans will still be here next year and the year
00:33:12.560
after that and the year after that um and they are there's complex reasons for that but I mean the main
00:33:17.920
reason they on the one side it's not as easy to just pack up and leave there is physical and material
00:33:24.000
reasons for it but then also there is non-material spiritual reasons for it as well being rooted in a
00:33:30.720
place um being the 9th or 10th or 11th generation of your family somewhere not having any other home
00:33:38.560
um I think that's the difference particularly between the Afrikaners and many of the the British
00:33:43.200
subjects throughout Africa when colonialism ended is that they had a home to return to or to flee to
00:33:50.080
or to be ordered back to um Afrikaners didn't have that type of home uh Afrikaners are a mix of Germans
00:33:58.160
French Dutch and also many of the British peoples as well the Anglos also intermixed there too um so we
00:34:05.840
don't have and it's it's it's it's there's not one of those genetic or ethnic influences that really
00:34:12.160
dominates which mean or majorly dominates which means that we don't have an external home to Southern
00:34:18.880
Africa this is the place where our culture was formed where our language was formed
00:34:23.280
and our language of Afrikaans I mean our culture and our language are both named after the continent
00:34:28.160
that should tell you everything you need to know Afrikaners and Afrikaans both contain Africa
00:34:34.720
so there's also a part of the puzzle but to sum up in regards to whether to stay or leave
00:34:42.160
it's not as simple everyone will have a different answer but it's it is a deeply personal
00:34:48.000
matter and it is a complex matter I can't really talk for everyone I can't really um
00:34:53.600
give you access to everyone's heart and what's going on in there but from my own personal experience
00:34:58.800
it is very much non-material reasons spiritual reasons uh things that you can't put a value or
00:35:06.080
a monetary uh a monetary value to I understand perfectly because I've had people from the United
00:35:12.160
States saying why didn't you come and move over here there's nothing in Britain for you anymore
00:35:16.160
look at it it's becoming worse and I've said to them that as much as I appreciate that and it's a
00:35:21.440
very kind thing to say um I believe that a culture um shapes the land and therefore the land shapes
00:35:30.640
the culture in return there's this exchange and it gets to a point after I think in our globalized
00:35:36.320
world we've lost I think in our globalized world we've lost uh some sight of the importance of place
00:35:42.560
so I'm glad to hear that you also feel that connection I think it's an important aspect of our
00:35:47.360
humanity that people have we've kind of ignored for a long time in the in the increasing globalized world
00:35:53.840
I think in many ways uh because Great Britain's so parochial that um it's a lot easier to make those
00:36:01.920
sorts of arguments because um even within England alone there are parts where you don't necessarily
00:36:08.560
feel as at home like I grew up in Devonshire in the southwest outside of that it doesn't necessarily
00:36:15.200
feel as much like home because the the land shapes who you are and I think that um the the cost there
00:36:24.240
is that were you to move you've lost a little bit of yourself in a sense that's the way I see it and
00:36:30.640
it seems like we're coming at it from the same sort of direction there absolutely I mean you are a
00:36:36.880
product of your of the place that that you grew up in that you were formed by and that place often is
00:36:42.400
not just the physical attributes of it it is all the other unseen elements as well there in where you
00:36:48.160
grew up the school that you went to the families in the street that you grew up in the types of values
00:36:53.840
that you were exposed to the little nuances of that makes humanity interesting I mean that's that's
00:37:00.320
unfortunately the time that we're living in is the fact that I mean humanity is this just metaphorically
00:37:05.600
this rainforest of just different peoples and cultures and that's what makes it amazing and
00:37:10.880
interesting but there's people out there that want to reduce it just to a a pine tree plantation where
00:37:16.480
all the trees are planted in in nice little rows they all look the same it's a sterile forest and it's
00:37:22.080
perfect to be just cut down and pulped uh for for industrial use and I mean that there's the
00:37:27.760
africana philosopher impier van wijk lowe sounded up beautifully when he said that humanity is is an
00:37:33.680
orchestra of different languages and cultures the orchestra of god and if you are worked and there
00:37:38.960
are people out there there are forces out there that want to reduce it to a single instrument to a
00:37:43.520
lonely flute and those people are genuinely evil and they want to reduce this beautiful orchestra of
00:37:49.440
humanity all the different cultures and peoples out there just to one homogenous like gray goo
00:37:55.760
and that's that's incredibly evil I mean that's that's what we're up against is they that little
00:38:00.960
those little nuances that you were mentioning there as well the place that you grew up in
00:38:05.200
they want to the the people that think in this way the globalists and the the people in that sphere
00:38:12.080
genuinely don't want that difference they want to wipe out all those little nuances everything needs to be
00:38:17.040
i mean the best word word for it would be standardized everything needs to be standardized humanity needs to
00:38:23.040
be standardized um as my friend uh russell lombardi says uh humanity needs to be made legible for all
00:38:30.800
the different states that are going to administer it or the mega state that's going to administer it and
00:38:35.680
cultural differences linguistic differences ethnic differences that all gets in the way of this
00:38:41.040
this machine that wants efficiency and legibility and standardization i 100 agree with that um so
00:38:49.680
moving on to what's actually being done in south africa um to push back against some of the the bad
00:38:56.400
things happening i suppose we may as well get on to afro forum and the solidarity movement and would you
00:39:03.520
be able to outline roughly what they do because i think many people are unfamiliar and um how does
00:39:10.480
afri forum's sort of core mission differ from the broader solidarity movement as well because of course
00:39:16.240
it's independent um but linked as i understand it at least right so afri forum and the solidarity
00:39:24.880
movement is the other side of the coin of the story that we've been talking about now for this episode
00:39:31.280
um on the one side of the coin you have the story of state capacity decay of slow motion collapse the
00:39:38.400
just think of like a video of a car just slamming into a wall in ultra slow motion that's south
00:39:44.160
africa some parts of it may be worse than others in regards to the collapse but that's on the one side
00:39:49.680
of the coin the other side of the coin is but this void this power vacuum is being created and
00:39:55.680
something has to fill it just as nature abhors a vacuum politics and power also abhors a vacuum
00:40:01.920
and that vacuum can only be filled by one of two factions the good guys or the bad guys the bad guys
00:40:08.640
are organized crime good guys are communities organizing and south africa is a place where both
00:40:15.760
of those are flourishing organized crime and communities that are organizing so and there's a
00:40:20.640
a reason for it because there's this vacuum being created so on the organized crime side we have
00:40:26.400
we have a water mafia we have an electricity mafia we have a construction mafia we have just
00:40:33.120
south africa is a playground for organized crime the most from the most advanced organized crime
00:40:38.240
operations you'll find anywhere in the world and another and then also the good guys are the
00:40:43.040
communities organizing and that's where solid the solidarity movement and afri forum come in so solid the
00:40:48.400
solidarity movement starts in 1907 as this a solidaritate solidarity a africaner christian
00:40:55.760
labor union but a labor union not from the leftist tradition but from the christian tradition i think
00:41:00.640
there's just a little bit of homework maybe for your audience that's very curious go look into the
00:41:05.280
christian tradition of labor unions in europe as well that's what inspired um that's what inspired the
00:41:10.480
solidarity movement uh to form and that labor union started growing and then it realized well we want
00:41:18.880
to expand into other areas that labor union doesn't really have any business in being in so the solidarity
00:41:25.680
solidarity labor union uh then or trade union then starts creating different organizations in a network
00:41:32.640
that all specialize in different facets of trying to build a future for africaners at the southern tip of
00:41:38.880
africa so they start afri forum in 2006 afri forum the civil rights organization or constitutional rights
00:41:45.440
in the south african context and then also uh community-based solutions so afri forums whole
00:41:51.600
model is a membership based model so afri forum is the largest community-based solutions organization
00:41:57.680
on the african continent based on membership but membership not in the sense of you like a facebook
00:42:03.040
page or fill in a form and then you're a member you have to be an active donating member
00:42:08.160
every month to be considered a member so afri forum has 315 000 members and we use the funds from those
00:42:16.560
members to do various things so on the what we're basically filling that void that i described earlier
00:42:22.400
from all as many angles as possible so on the one side we have our branches so afri forum has over 170
00:42:30.080
branches all across the country in south africa and south africa is a massive place we haven't even got into
00:42:35.360
that yet south africa is the size of western europe without spain um so when you look at that massive
00:42:42.880
area there's 170 afri forum branches all across it and they do everything from well firstly they
00:42:49.040
organize communities but they organize communities to address the particular issues that those
00:42:54.160
communities are affected by in their vicinity in their immediate place so those are planting trees
00:43:00.160
cleaning up rivers picking up rubbish um uh maintaining infrastructure uh filling potholes as i said
00:43:08.480
earlier we talked about the the just falling apart of infrastructure potholes are rife in south africa
00:43:15.440
so afri forum falls thousands of potholes every year all across the country and then there's the safety
00:43:22.080
side of it so we've got 175 neighborhood watches all across the country as well and these aren't your your
00:43:28.560
your grandma's neighborhood watch with pepper spray and binoculars these are well-trained well-equipped
00:43:34.160
people keeping their community safe in a very hostile environment but all within the confines of
00:43:39.760
the law they're not vigilantes that can just be judged jury and executioner um they actually work
00:43:45.200
quite well with local police uh in regards to keeping their community safe uh our friction with the
00:43:50.960
government is that is at national at the high level that that's where the most friction we encounter on a
00:43:56.880
local level the local police chief just is just completely overwhelmed by the the crime wave that
00:44:02.640
they have to deal with understaffed under resourced here comes afri forum and says we've started a new
00:44:07.440
neighborhood watch do you want to cooperate share intel uh do operations together local police stations
00:44:13.520
are just like yeah get on board here here's some work for you to help us out with um so on a local
00:44:19.680
level there's cooperation very good cooperation between the police and our neighborhood watches as well i did a
00:44:24.960
uh uh episode on my youtube channel my conscious caracal youtube channel um where i specifically
00:44:31.520
went on a on patrol with an afri forum neighborhood watch to show people what it's like um and to show
00:44:37.120
you what uh what's going on there so that's the the community solutions side and i mean all of this
00:44:44.000
is done through volunteers so it's not people get paid to do this it's communities coming together
00:44:49.360
the afri forum helps on the organization side the equipment side the resources side uh but the the
00:44:54.800
people that are running these branches the people that are volunteering at these branches aren't earning
00:44:59.440
a salary they're doing it because they have to otherwise their communities are going to fall apart
00:45:04.240
slowly but surely so um we've got i think our whole model is based on about 11 000 volunteers on the ground
00:45:11.600
actively every month uh being uh being organized and taking part very very explicitly in their communities
00:45:19.520
um and that's on top of the the 315 000 donating members that give money every month so that we can
00:45:26.000
do these community-based operations but also we have the the court case side as well so we've got
00:45:33.200
the civil rights side uh where we take the government to court for uh abuses of power laws that target people's
00:45:40.080
private property rights laws that abuse uh minorities laws that target minority communities on
00:45:45.680
land base of language race or culture but then also just uh cases that benefit all south africans where
00:45:52.880
we we fight for basic constitutional rights like freedom of association freedom of religion uh
00:45:58.160
freedom of expression um these types of cases we take on as well so that's the legal side of what we do
00:46:04.400
as well but i mean that's the the rough overview and then just the last point on the solidarity
00:46:09.600
movement itself it has now expanded to a network it's now at in 2025 a network of 50 plus organizations
00:46:16.880
and institutions all specializing in different fields to build that future for africa ensure a
00:46:23.280
future for africaners at the southern tip of africa where we are safe and free um but also it's a it's
00:46:30.080
an initiative where many other communities uh in south africa also benefit the whole of south africa
00:46:35.680
benefits from less potholes safer streets safer neighborhoods uh maintained infrastructure and
00:46:42.240
planted trees rubbish pickup uh initiatives and then afri forum has other projects that we are pioneering
00:46:49.040
at the moment as well they're still in a in an early stage but we're already stress testing them in
00:46:53.520
reality a private uh firefighting unit that's been very successful a private rubbish removal uh initiative
00:47:01.360
where we have a rubbish removal truck and everything in bloomfontein a city here in south africa and
00:47:08.480
that's a major success as well and we're going to expand it to other cities um and then there's also
00:47:13.520
if we have time we can get into it but there's also all the other different organizations within
00:47:18.400
the solidarity movement that have their own focus so just to name one or two um we have soltech which is
00:47:24.720
our technical college that we crowdfunded it's a technical college campus that has
00:47:30.000
almost 3 000 students at this time uh educating uh the the plumbers builders electricians the tradesmen
00:47:37.600
of the future in afrikaans and that campus was built through solidarity the solidarity labor union
00:47:45.120
asking its members whether they are willing to give one a 10 rand extra per month i think that's that's
00:47:52.160
less than 50 cents in in pound terms um per month to a building fund so they can then invest those funds
00:48:00.720
and save them up to build a technical college campus which was then built and finished under time and
00:48:06.720
under budget in 2020. um so that's another aspect of uh of the solidarity movement is building our own
00:48:13.760
educational institutions where people can where where the youth can be educated in their mother tongue of
00:48:19.760
afrikaans which is also under attack from the south african government in primary school level high
00:48:25.440
school level and especially at university uh level so um my next question was actually something that
00:48:33.040
you've uh addressed slightly and one thing that um has been a major question of mine is that um with a
00:48:42.160
a lot of the solidarity and afri forum actions um they've seen such successes um and it's grown so
00:48:49.520
much that um i've seen certain people describe it almost as like a parallel government and i would have
00:48:56.720
thought that um the anc and the state would be a lot more punitive of such things because this might
00:49:04.320
just be my my british mind you know we we uh can't really even build so much as a shed without the
00:49:10.400
government say so and planning permission and the likes and i always joke 1984 could only have been
00:49:16.800
written by an anglo no other parallel universe exists where a non-anglo wrote that novel that's
00:49:23.120
very true we love our bureaucracy for some reason but um i've got basically two questions here um the
00:49:31.600
first of which is is quite simple is that um it seems like it's simply necessity um that a lot of
00:49:40.160
these things aren't challenged obviously you've got the political realm the national realm where
00:49:44.400
there's a back and forth but i was under the impression that um for the coordination with
00:49:50.800
the united states um wasn't afro forum branded treasonous at some point right yeah so that's i mean
00:49:59.760
that's one of the common questions that we often get is that why why are you building even bothering to
00:50:05.280
build anything isn't the state just coming going to come and smash it at one point and that's a
00:50:09.920
a question we often get but i mean uh flip base the head of the solidarity movement has a fantastic
00:50:15.440
quote that he always uses when he gets that question where he says on the one side yes there's always
00:50:20.320
there was always going to be a risk in trying to build anything with a hostile state hovering over you
00:50:26.160
but the the other option was to do nothing and then defeat is certain um so we're taking uh that risk
00:50:32.240
but i mean at the same time there's also a more pragmatic side to it and that's the fact that
00:50:37.760
we're not breaking any laws we're not uh doing anything illegal there is no way that the south
00:50:43.680
african government could for example really prosecute us for anything because there's no
00:50:49.040
laws being broken are they the the treason uh investigation into afri forum and the the delegation
00:50:56.320
that we sent to the united states is concerning but i mean there's no basis for it south africa's
00:51:01.280
uh legal system or our judiciary um is still relatively functional i mean there are a lot
00:51:08.240
of ideological creep has happened i mean as you see in the united states as well a lot a lot of
00:51:12.960
ideology seeping into it increasingly but it is still relatively reliable as it is in the united states to
00:51:19.920
some degree so uh there's not really a legal route for the anc to take on afri forum or the solidarity
00:51:26.400
movement because we're not breaking any laws and at the same time we have a support base of well
00:51:32.320
official membership base of 315 000 the solidarity movement has over 600 members if you combine all
00:51:39.360
the members of all the different the 50 different institutions and organizations that's an awful lot
00:51:44.560
of people and i mean that's uh when it comes to particularly the the state challenging anything that
00:51:50.000
we're building i mean what what do you do in that situation well then you defend it and uh when it
00:51:55.840
comes to specifically afri forum and the and the solidarity movement we built up to this point a
00:52:02.480
capacity to be able to defend ourselves legally constitutionally but also physically in regards to
00:52:08.720
our uh if any of our communities were to be threatened by just random violence or targeted violence
00:52:15.120
uh we've got a a community-based security network all across the country of over 175 neighborhood
00:52:22.080
watches that are well equipped and well and well trained the people that are i mean we had a stress
00:52:27.120
test of what if south africa were to be hit by mass waves of anarchy what would happen with your
00:52:32.560
security network how would it perform well that happened in 2021 in 2021 south africa was subject to
00:52:40.080
subjected to the worst riots and looting that the country had seen since 1994 hundreds of people
00:52:46.240
dead billions of rands of damage and looting happened and what we did in that situation was
00:52:52.160
we sent out a message to all of our neighborhood watchers all of our community safety networks
00:52:56.560
to secure their communities make sure that it's safe all the points of entry are safe and that if they
00:53:02.080
were to be the target of these looters and rioters that they can use their capacity as community-based
00:53:08.720
security structures to with cooperation with alongside the police secure their neighborhoods
00:53:14.320
and all the neighborhoods where our neighborhood watchers were active and securing them were
00:53:19.920
came out on the other side um so i mean that was a major stress test for this model of ours and we we
00:53:25.840
passed it with flying colors so at the end of the day the future is unpredictable i can't sit here
00:53:30.960
and say everything that we build is guaranteed safety there will not be challenged or sabotaged or attacked
00:53:36.960
in any way of course that of that option always exists but then there's the two-pronged uh response
00:53:42.560
to that on the one side is the fact that well the other option would be to do nothing um and just accept
00:53:49.280
that everything is futile and uh i mean we're not going to be doing that because then defeat is certain
00:53:54.800
then on the other side i always use the metaphor of uh the the the porcupine strategy where so in south
00:54:02.000
africa we have and i think this will tie it up nicely in regards to what we are doing uh our
00:54:07.840
philosophy of a porcupine philosophy to a certain extent so we have got a massive nature reserve in
00:54:13.200
south africa called the kruger national park and it's the size of a small country it's a massive
00:54:18.080
absolutely massive and it's filled with any type of major african predator that you can imagine lions
00:54:23.920
leopards hyenas everything but it's also filled to the brim with badgers and with porcupines but
00:54:31.440
how can that be it's it's filled with predators that can munch these little critters anytime they
00:54:35.840
want well those a lot of these smaller animals have adapted and have amazing defense asymmetric
00:54:42.240
defense strategies and mechanisms to keep themselves safe so i mean that's what afri forum into the
00:54:47.440
solidarity movement is metaphorically doing is we are increasingly becoming what we call state proof in
00:54:53.520
regards to our initiatives but then also we are following a porcupine and a badger strategy by
00:54:59.200
making sure that we have spikes to defend ourselves and that we have a thick skin like a badger and then
00:55:05.040
the the proof of concept that you just have to check out is go look on youtube badger versus leopards or
00:55:10.880
porcupine versus lions or porcupine versus leopards and you'll see that even though it's a much smaller
00:55:17.040
animal the asymmetric strategies nature is full of successful asymmetric strategies um the asymmetric
00:55:25.520
defense strategies and that's uh that's the i think the lesson from nature that we are philosophically
00:55:30.720
taking as afri forum and solidarity as well as that it is and not just nature human history is filled
00:55:37.680
with examples of asymmetric defense strategies that that means that you it's not just a done deal or a
00:55:44.160
guarantee that if you are lesser in number or of in lesser in power or firepower or whatever
00:55:49.920
metric that you're using that it is just written in the stars that you are going to be destroyed or
00:55:55.600
dominated uh in all facets um and that's why even in 2025 we're continuing to build we're continuing to
00:56:03.600
state proof ourselves we're continuing to increase our capacity to uh to be able to ensure a future here
00:56:09.920
at the southern tip of africa and uh that's what we're going to continue to do so um i think in
00:56:18.080
many ways you're actually understating the stress test that um many of these institutions went through
00:56:24.720
because um in 2021 i actually wrote about a lot of the riots um so you were you were keeping an eye on
00:56:31.440
the country already then i was yeah um because i at the time i had no idea what was going on it was
00:56:38.640
that's where everything began um but one thing that i can remember if my memory serves me correctly
00:56:45.440
is that um durban is you know the major port in south africa is it not or at least one of them
00:56:52.160
one of the major ports are durman and cape town and many of the uh many of the distribution centers there
00:56:59.120
got burnt to the ground and um outside of south africa you might think okay well that's not too bad but
00:57:05.360
they're all all centered in uh one place and so for a very long time it may have even been for
00:57:11.600
a full year afterwards if not more um this infrastructure didn't come back and so there
00:57:17.840
wasn't the capacity to bring in goods into south africa and so for a considerable amount of time
00:57:24.800
there was a massively reduced um number of imports from what i understand at least so that um if you're
00:57:31.680
able to even during that crisis in the of the the hutis uh attacking freight ships i think it was
00:57:38.320
was it two years ago was it last year in the past two years uh and a lot of the ships were diverted to
00:57:44.800
go in in to return to tradition and go past the cape of good hope um south africa was not positioned to be
00:57:52.080
able to take full advantage of that diversion of uh of cargo because for the reasons that you outline
00:57:58.400
there are our ports were firstly already crippled just by mismanagement and corruption again government
00:58:04.080
monopoly transnet um but at the same time also due to destruction as you rightly pointed out in in the
00:58:10.560
port of durban mm-hmm yeah i um i did look at this wasn't it that they would deliberately avoid
00:58:18.560
south africa because um well they tried their best yeah wherever possible yeah because they were going
00:58:25.040
to when they get to south africa they were going to stand in line uh to get into port for like for
00:58:30.960
days sometimes for weeks okay so i suppose we may as well look um to the future and um one of the
00:58:40.240
questions that um when i've said i was doing this interview most people were keen to find out about
00:58:45.920
being um from abroad is that um do you see any other countries that are following in the footsteps of
00:58:51.840
south africa because i've seen many people um using south africa as an example as the destination for
00:58:57.920
a lot of uh western europe and north america um sort of the anglosphere countries more generally
00:59:07.120
so uh your question is what what lies ahead for the for south africa and in regards to
00:59:13.680
maybe the situation deteriorating or improving mm-hmm all right so on the one i mean it once again comes
00:59:21.440
down to that split between the state capacity decay on the one side and communities organizing on the
00:59:26.480
other one the future of south africa i mean it's it's difficult to make predictions about especially
00:59:31.280
about the future but when it comes to south africa particularly um i think there is one prediction
00:59:36.880
that i can very confidently make and that is the two-pronged approach on the one side state capacity
00:59:42.800
decay will continue to uh to decay that i've seen no indications to the contrary that the state will
00:59:50.240
finally get its act together and that everything will be fine as i said this is the government that has been
00:59:56.000
struggling to fix an electricity crisis for 18 years um i think that trend is going to continue
01:00:02.080
the government capacity to provide basic services like water electricity infrastructure
01:00:08.800
um maintenance fighting crime that's going to keep deteriorating but it's going the counterweight
01:00:16.000
is going to keep increasing and that is the counterweight of communities keeping continuing
01:00:20.480
to organize and becoming increasingly state proof we've seen it's not just i mean i don't want to
01:00:26.080
create this impression that it's only afri forum and the solidarity movement that is organizing communities
01:00:31.200
there are many other organizations out there that are also state proofing or helping state proof
01:00:36.800
their communities and finding alternatives to service delivery and all the filling the void left
01:00:43.040
by the government that is a trend that is increasing in a positive way many communities
01:00:47.680
all across south africa have just started taking things into their own hands when it comes to
01:00:53.360
basically solving the problems that the government should be solving and communities of all
01:00:57.280
backgrounds black and white so when it comes to the future i think those two trends are going to continue
01:01:02.800
the state capacity decay on the other side on the one side the government is going to become increasingly
01:01:08.400
irrelevant in south africa at different paces as as the circumstances change and then on the other
01:01:15.280
side decentralization and state proofing on a community level is going to be is going to increase
01:01:22.320
and is going to become increasingly complex so there's a there's a fascinating case study for the
01:01:27.440
international for those internationally on the outside looking in whether you are interested in
01:01:32.240
particularly the nature of collapse and the nature of the state deteriorating as many of you on the
01:01:38.000
outside are experiencing as you mentioned earlier even in your homeland of britain even in the united
01:01:43.840
states all across europe you are you're feeling that things are getting worse in regards to the
01:01:49.440
performance of the those various states um and the those various bureaucracies well that then you can learn
01:01:55.840
a bit about south from south africa because we are already a long way down the line of state capacity decay
01:02:02.160
and then on the other side is the positive lessons that you can learn from well what is the response to
01:02:07.040
that problem as your countries unfortunately looks like increasingly south africanized well what is the
01:02:14.640
response to south africanization well luckily there are many organizations communities test cases in
01:02:20.720
south africa being as i said earlier stress tested under incredibly stressful uh um
01:02:26.480
um my english is running out now under start to translate constantly but under i almost just used
01:02:33.520
the afrikaans word my brain was like they'll know what know what you mean under increasingly stressful
01:02:38.320
circumstances so when it comes to the the good there's good news and bad news i don't want your
01:02:44.320
listeners to walk away with just bad news that their countries are likely going to increasingly south
01:02:49.440
south africanize and the good news outweighs the bad news the good news is that the solution to
01:02:55.600
south africanization is already far down the line in development and it's not just in the realm of
01:03:01.040
ideas we're not sitting around doing podcasts about what we're going to do about the problem we're not
01:03:05.840
just sitting around writing opinion pieces we are actually pioneering and stress testing these ideas
01:03:11.680
in the field and we've been doing it for decades now and increasingly so so the good news that i want
01:03:17.920
to end on is that you can learn from not just the seeing the problem unfold in south africa but then
01:03:25.520
also you can learn from not just the successes i want to add the mistakes as well that we have have
01:03:31.440
naturally made over the years and will continue to make seeing as these are human initiatives
01:03:36.400
you can learn from those mistakes and from those successes so that if your country finds
01:03:41.360
itself in a more south africanized state of being um you at least know how to react on a on a basic
01:03:48.640
level doesn't mean that you can copy and paste what we do um but you can at least take what we do and
01:03:54.000
adapt it for your own personal uh situation and context this has been very very interesting and um
01:04:01.840
obviously i wish you all the best um and good luck to everyone in south africa because uh can't be the
01:04:08.800
easiest thing to go through but it's nice to uh end on a nice positive note i imagine that um quite
01:04:15.280
often these sorts of things bring communities together more than anything and that's a nice
01:04:19.840
positive way to end it so um final thing i wanted that's one of the benefits uh that's one of the
01:04:25.120
benefits of living in in troubling and trying times is that you you really see what the people around you
01:04:31.520
are made of and that's that there is a positive a positive view in that in regards to when things
01:04:38.000
get very comfortable around you you you just see the worst of people but when things get tough when
01:04:43.200
things get really bad you genuinely do see the best of people coming to the full even if it is an
01:04:49.200
organized minority and that is one of the things that that brings me a lot of gives me great hearts in in
01:04:54.640
in our situation and that's uh i i didn't expect to go away feeling so positive after talking about
01:05:02.560
south africa's decline but that's very nice um so where can people find you online um how can people
01:05:10.160
support the work you're doing right so uh you can support the work that afri forum does by uh supporting
01:05:18.400
us at a link that i will give to the the lotus eaters that you can put in the description of this episode
01:05:24.160
you can either become an international member which is a new feature that we've added or you
01:05:28.560
can make a once-off donation to to help fund the state-proof solutions and state-proof experiments
01:05:34.240
here at the southern tip of africa you are investing in your own future as i said earlier because you can
01:05:38.960
fund the experiments and then the results of the experiment can can inform your own future actions
01:05:45.360
but then my myself personally well you can find my content on x i post under my my uh my name
01:05:52.560
conscious caracal but that's just my my brand there i'm not i'm not anonymous you're not going
01:05:57.440
to be doxing me if you refer to me as adenst um but then also on my youtube channel i do interviews
01:06:03.680
with guests from south africa and abroad but with a specific focus on every episode that i or every
01:06:10.160
interview that i do i want to firstly make sure that it remains relevant the topic that we talk about for
01:06:15.680
the next five at least five or ten years i don't do current events so if you want to see like
01:06:21.280
current events analysis of like what the south african government did this week and my reaction
01:06:26.240
you're not going to see that we're going to be talking about topics that i try to make relevant
01:06:30.480
not just for south africa but for the wider west simultaneously so that my audience in abroad and
01:06:36.320
my audience locally in south africa um according to my analytics is pretty much 50 50 split in regards to
01:06:42.480
to my audience that the topics that i discuss on my channel is relevant to both of those uh those
01:06:47.680
audiences every time that's what i try to do with my channel and that's also under the name conscious
01:06:52.480
caracal or so you can find that on youtube and on x on any uh podcast platform where you listen to
01:06:58.560
podcasts and then lastly i think it's just broadly it might sound a bit cheesy or lame but i mean what you
01:07:04.800
really can do to help is just to continue talking about south africa continuing to inform people about
01:07:10.000
what's going on here um even as i said it might it doesn't sound as dramatic or glamorous or glorious
01:07:16.640
but i mean just simply if you're in a conversation and people are talking just absolute nonsense about
01:07:21.680
south africa that you know is nonsense correct them not in a in a like a rude way but in a genuine like
01:07:28.640
critical way and saying i don't think that's that's the situation and here's uh here's why i say that and
01:07:35.040
i can't tell you how many times i've encountered that those types of just conversations being had
01:07:42.080
by either expats of african expats or just people taking an interest in south africa informing other
01:07:48.800
people around them it does have a cumulative effect so as i said it sounds a bit like a hippie flowery like
01:07:55.680
yeah just talk about south africa and that's how you can help us but it genuinely does make a difference
01:08:00.640
when a lot of people just correct the factual errors that they encounter on a daily well on a
01:08:05.760
daily basis but on a regular basis um when uh south africa is a topic of discussion so that genuinely is
01:08:13.360
something that you can do it's not just uh screaming into the void if you help get the truth about south
01:08:19.120
africa out there it really makes a difference and i've seen the difference as someone who lives here
01:08:24.000
well that's great and uh thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me um i wish you all
01:08:30.400
the best and um you're doing some great work and um i suppose thank you and i suppose you're going to
01:08:37.360
continue on with much the the same direction and so i i would encourage everyone watching this
01:08:43.840
to um check out your work as well thank you very much josh i appreciate it and keep up the good fight
01:08:50.640
there on your side of the of the big salty pond as well i know you've got your own uh challenges
01:08:56.640
major challenges as a nation as a people and um all the best to you i think it's i'm glad to see
01:09:03.280
the people and we appreciate people on the outside looking into what's happening in south africa but do
01:09:08.240
know that we are also paying attention to what's happening on your side of the atlantic we are not
01:09:13.200
just focused here on particularly south africa south africans in general are actually very
01:09:18.400
outward focused often with our with our focus when we are looking at the issues all across the world
01:09:25.040
but we are we are keeping an eye on you guys there in britain as well in the united states and other
01:09:30.320
european countries too um and we we wish you all the best well thank you very much and um i suppose um
01:09:38.560
i address the audience now um thank you very much for watching this and um i hope you enjoyed it
01:09:44.480
um make sure to check out um your videos your work support afri forum and goodbye all right goodbye walk well