00:06:38.000He was sent to jail for life on Robben Island as a terrorist for blowing up post offices,
00:06:46.000for organizing armed rebellion and even announcing that women and children are going to get killed in the process.
00:06:52.000And he went through a full legal process.
00:06:55.000He was defended properly, was prosecuted properly, and he was sent to jail.
00:06:59.000And even the international human rights and amnesty internationals, if it existed in those days, or the equivalent, did not pursue that case.
00:07:34.000Well, 27 years, mainly on Robben Island.
00:07:37.000He was an extraordinary man because that's a long time to spend in prison.
00:07:42.000And over that period of time, he won over a lot of the guards, a lot of the people around him.
00:07:49.000And I think he, I won't say mellowed, it's the wrong word, but I think he realized as he got closer to release that he needed to deliver reconciliation to the country.
00:08:00.000The country couldn't be torn apart any more than it was going forward.
00:08:06.000And he took a view with de Klerk, both of whom were on the Nobel Peace Prize together, F.W. de Klerk, that the country needed truth and reconciliation.
00:08:16.000And South Africa formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which basically said that if you come and admit the crimes that you did under apartheid in front of audience, in front of the parents whose child you might have killed, you would be forgiven.
00:08:34.000And that was the bloodletting that was required to go forward in a peaceful way.
00:08:40.000The constitution was developed together with the ANC, an incredible constitution, but it didn't factor a certain important thing into the constitution.
00:08:53.000The constitution was that if somebody evil or malevolent or corrupt was elected president, the power that they would have to turn the country in the wrong direction, which we'll get to in 2008.
00:09:07.000So Nelson Mandela held back a lot of the forces in South Africa from 1994 until he stepped down and Thabo Mbeki came in as president.
00:09:18.000He held back the forces that wanted retribution, punishment, and managed the country in a way that held it all together and held it in the right direction.
00:15:12.000It's ideological, plus kleptocracy, plus ineptocracy.
00:15:21.000It's all three together, which is a highly destructive, you know, it's like the witches boiling their stew.
00:15:28.000It's because when I read about South Africa, as someone who has a Venezuelan background, the more I read about it, the more I go,
00:15:37.000this is a very similar story to what I've experienced and what I've seen in a way that I didn't actually think it was when I first read about it on the surface.
00:15:49.000So, people often say South Africa is the next Zimbabwe, but it's not.
00:15:54.000And I can tell you why it's very different.
00:15:56.000But it is much more likely the next Venezuela.
00:16:00.000You know, in a moment of, in an emotional moment, this friend of mine, he was the ambassador to the, I won't say which country, ambassador in Africa and then an ambassador in South America, part of the ANC, an ANC member.
00:16:20.000He said to me, you know, Rob, what you white guys will never, ever understand is sometimes we are grateful that Mugabe chased the white farmers out of Zimbabwe.
00:16:33.000We know everyone was forced into poverty, but we were happy to see the white people chased out.
00:16:38.000And I just thought, wow, if this hatred exists under the surface, do we even stand a chance in this country?
00:16:45.000And it's very worrying because I think what's happening is there are five million white South Africans and five and a half million colored South Africans.
00:16:55.00088% of South Africans are Christians, conservative, church going, slow moving.
00:17:04.000And even though democracy is moving in the right direction, in 2024, the ANC, for the first time in 30 years, lost its majority in a national election.
00:17:16.000It had 70% in the beginning, dropped down to 60, was at 56% in May 2024, and the election happened 41%.
00:17:25.000And they were forced to form a coalition with the main opposition, the Democratic Alliance.
00:17:31.000And the Democratic Alliance is a centrist, pro-West, Judeo-Christian, free market.
00:17:39.000I mean, I'd say they're more Democrat than Republican, if you look at them in the South African context.
00:17:46.000But the ANC was forced to form a coalition with the Democratic Alliance, okay, and a whole lot of other smaller parties.
00:17:53.000But even so, they're still trying to force through racist, socialist, and anti-American and anti-Semitic laws in South Africa.
00:18:04.000Tell us about that, Rob. What are these laws? What's actually, because people will just say those are words.
00:18:09.000What do you mean specifically? What are they instituting in law?
00:18:13.000The news moves fast, and it's not just about keeping up, it's about seeing clearly.
00:18:18.000In a world where headlines are constantly shifting and narratives change by the hour,
00:18:23.000understanding how a story is being reported is just as important as what the story is.
00:18:28.000That's why I use Ground News. It shows you how coverage of any story differs across the political spectrum,
00:18:35.000helping you break out of echo chambers and actually see the full picture.
00:18:39.000Take the recent landmark UK Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of woman.
00:18:43.000Using Ground News, we can see that CNN, which leans left, ran with,
00:18:48.000UK Supreme Court says legal definition of woman excludes trans women.
00:18:52.000The Spectator, which leans right, led with, the Supreme Court ruling is a victory for women.
00:18:57.000Same story, two completely different takes.
00:19:00.000Ground News makes these contrasts easy to spot by letting you compare headlines at a glance.
00:19:05.000It also shows you ownership information, like the ownership status of both CNN and The Spectator.
00:19:11.000My favorite feature is the blind spot feed.
00:19:13.000It surfaces stories being ignored by either the left or the right.
00:19:17.000Stories you might not even realize you're missing, so you can stay informed without being trapped in a single world view.
00:19:23.000Click the link in the description or head to ground.news slash trigonometry for 40% off their unlimited vantage plan, the same one we use.
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00:19:39.000Since 1994, 114 race-based laws have been added to South Africa.
00:19:50.000Since 1994, there are 140 mostly anti-white race-based laws in South African law.
00:19:58.000In the early 90s, after 1994, a process called black economic empowerment was put into place.
00:20:07.000And everyone accepted that. Corporates accepted it.
00:20:11.000Everyone said, it's a good thing to empower the previously disadvantaged and bring them into the economy.
00:20:18.000By the way, the same thing was done in the 1940s and 1950s, when most of the big businesses were owned by Anglos and not Afrikaners.
00:21:01.000It then moved from any company doing business with the government to any business.
00:21:07.000To January 2025, we have the Equity Employment Amendment Act, which says that any business with 50 or more employees has to have a racial breakdown equal to where the country stands.
00:21:26.000How are you going to have a technology department with only 7% white people, 8% colored, 2% to 3% Indian, and the rest black?
00:21:42.000The government has gone from include previously disadvantaged in the economy, which have been accepted, to we're going to tell you who you can hire and who you can't fire.
00:26:48.000He's walking up and down in stadiums filled of a hundred thousand people, all wearing red berets, shouting and singing, kill the boar, kill the farmer.
00:26:56.000And then in a separate interview, which is available on the internet, he says, we will slit the throat of whiteness, but not yet.
00:29:05.000So from 1994 to 2008, there wasn't any of that.
00:29:10.000From 2008 today, the ANC has de-industrialized our economy, destroyed our state-owned enterprises.
00:29:17.000On every metric, every single metric you look at in South Africa, health, education, we have massively underperformed.
00:29:25.000And if you look at GDP, since 2008 to today, we've grown at 1% a year on average.
00:29:35.000And our population growth is 2% a year.
00:29:38.000So the last 14 years, we've gone poorer.
00:29:41.000And it's entirely due to the ANC, ideology, kleptocracy, ineptocracy.
00:29:48.00031 years they've been in power, and now they're saying the fault is whiteness, apartheid, colonialism.
00:29:58.00031 years later, you would think there's a sell-by date, an expiry date, at which you stop blaming your ex-wife, your ex-husband.
00:30:07.000There's got to be an expiry date for people to stop blaming whiteness, apartheid and colonialism.
00:30:13.000Surely now it's obvious it's the ANC to blame for what's happening in South Africa.
00:30:18.000And yet, they turn the narrative on us.
00:30:21.000And how much of this is also due to a population that is illiterate, uneducated, therefore easier to manipulate?
00:30:28.000So someone in the State Department came to see me a year ago, and he was just wondering why South Africa couldn't fill out the fisheries agreement,
00:30:35.000the AGOA agreement, fill out the forms and send them in.
00:30:38.000And then he asked me a bigger question.
00:30:40.000He said, do you think what's happening in South Africa is malevolence or incompetence?
00:31:53.000And I also think, and I've never mentioned this, I remember to say this, I think there are 300,000 British passport holders in South Africa.
00:32:02.000And there are 300,000 South Africans inside the M25 in the UK.
00:32:08.000You know, but there's also, there must be seeds of hope here because it must come to the point where, so for instance, in Venezuela, the only reason the government is still in power is by force.
00:32:20.000That's literally the only reason because the entire public sees that it's complete bullshit that they've been fed.
00:32:27.000Even if you're uneducated, even if you are not put in not literate, you can still see what is happening because it's undeniable.
00:32:34.000Has South Africa got to that point yet?
00:32:37.000Very, very, very good point no one has ever raised.
00:32:40.000The army and police in South Africa, in 1994, we had by far the biggest, strongest, well-trained, best-trained army in Africa.
00:32:49.000I was an infantry officer for two years in 83 and 84.
00:32:53.000Our police were efficient and effective and they got the job done.
00:32:56.000From 94 to today, both have fallen apart.
00:33:00.000We don't have a single, we created the Roy Falk helicopter, was the most manoeuvrable helicopter in the world, 20, 25 years ago.
00:33:11.000Okay, South Africa had a huge arms industry, collapsed, bankrupt.
00:33:15.000So, in Venezuela, they can stay in power through use of force, through military and police.
00:33:21.000South African military and police is pathetic and useless.
00:33:25.000Our police only have the budget to go to the firing range once a year and shoot at a fixed target.
00:33:32.000Okay, whereas the average South African that has a gun and a gun license, a lot of people that don't have gun licenses, is way better trained and there are more private, armed private security people in South Africa than the army and police put together.
00:33:50.000So, there's no ability by the ANC government or by the EFF and MK, we're going to talk about them in a second, to have a coup d'etat or to create some military override to say, you will do what we say.
00:34:11.000But what they've done is played the slow game, it's a Soviet playbook, and they've put in place, measure by measure by measure, year by year, to strangle us economically.
00:34:22.000Corporate South Africa are either cowards, colluders, or most likely have been captured, because they're not standing up and saying anything.
00:34:33.000I'm one of the very few businessmen standing up and speaking like I do.
00:34:37.000But in their defense, you're worried about your safety.
00:34:42.000And so they can quite easily say, why would I say something when my life is going to be in jeopardy or the lives of my children or my family?
00:34:51.000But at what point do you take a stand?
00:34:53.000If you boil a frog, you know, at what point does the frog say, I can't take it anymore?
00:35:00.000We're getting to that point, but we haven't got there yet.
00:35:03.000And so it's a slow, it's the long game.
00:35:06.000This is what I was going to ask you, the way you feel things are headed.
00:35:09.000You mentioned there's 300 South Africans within the M25 for people who are not in Britain.
00:35:14.000That's basically in London, Greater London, I'd say.
00:35:17.000And 300,000 British passport holders, and we see people now moving to the US, leaving South Africa.
00:35:27.000Do you think we are going to see a refugee crisis with South Africa in our lifetimes,
00:35:33.000people genuinely fleeing for their lives because things have become so bad?
00:35:47.000We had civil unrest three years ago that started in Durban in the KwaZulu-Natal area and spread to Johannesburg.
00:35:54.000The police and army did nothing to protect the citizens.
00:35:58.000They stood back and the citizens had to take it into their own hands to stand up and defend against these criminals.
00:36:05.000And it was orchestrated, was organized.
00:36:09.000It was the beginning of an attempted coup and it failed because the average citizen was brave enough to stand up and protect their businesses,
00:36:17.000protect their shopping malls and stand together.
00:36:20.000And there were blacks, whites, Indians and colored standing together with their weapons to protect against these people,
00:36:26.000with the police standing and watching from the sidelines.
00:36:29.000So, I would say the one positive we have is it's almost impossible to have a coup.
00:36:37.000If you look at the economic freedom fighters, they're about 8% of the vote.
00:36:41.000The Red Beret, the dangerous, crazy guys, they're mostly up in the Northeast.
00:36:48.000There's no support for them down in the Cape.
00:37:29.000And the other thing he and I discussed as well is I wanted to ask you about, Rob, is we, as you know, we've been pretty vocal about our opposition to DEI here in the West, diversity, equity and inclusion, mainly because I feel it was just factually unfair on principle.
00:37:47.000Let's be honest. But also what it does is it institutionalizes incompetence because you're not hiring the best people, you're hiring people on other metrics.
00:37:56.000That sounds like what's been happening in South Africa.
00:38:17.000And the funny thing is about that, you know, whenever we talk about these racial quotas, we go, well, you wouldn't do that in sport, right?
00:38:27.000Like you wouldn't do that in the NBA. You wouldn't do that in the Premier League because that's crazy.
00:38:45.000So there are the laws of the country, which are getting more and more racist and more and more socialist and being forced upon us in a quicker and quicker way.
00:38:54.000And I think that's because the ANC are realizing they've lost their majority and they've got to get this stuff through as quickly as possible.
00:39:01.000But at the sport level, my daughter, under 13, water polo, had to have from the Western Cape, which is the province that has white coloreds, but not a lot of black people.
00:39:19.000There were no black tribes in the Cape, but they've come as economic migrants looking for opportunity.
00:39:26.000And most of the private schools, boys and girls schools, struggle to find black people.
00:39:32.000So if you go up country, 50, 60, 70% of the private schools are black boys, black girls.
00:39:39.000But down in the Cape, it's 10, 15, 20% at the most because they struggle to find local parents who are able to get the scholarships or afford to come to the school.
00:39:49.000So my daughter's under 13 water polo team had to have two girls of color.
00:39:56.000And she lost her position as a result of that.
00:39:59.000And then people will say water polo for 13-year-olds, what does it matter?
00:40:06.000Extrapolate that across all sports in South Africa and you can see where we're heading.
00:40:10.000And then you multiply that to stay-and-own businesses, to private businesses, to everything.
00:40:15.000You are going to find yourself in a position where nothing works because the people in charge were not picked.
00:40:20.000And no one's going to invest in South Africa.
00:40:22.000If you're told who you have to hire, who you can and can't fire, the racial breakdown of your company, I mean, who's going to invest in our country?
00:40:31.000And then you have expropriation without compensation hanging over your head like a sword of Damocles.
00:40:37.000And the ANC government, who Cyril wrote it into law in January, said it'll be in the public interest and I doubt we're ever going to use it.
00:40:46.000Then why have the law? And I use it as my expression is, it's a loaded gun on the bedroom table with children running around.
00:40:54.000At some point, someone's going to pull the trigger.
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00:43:15.000This is what I was going to ask you because I'm just, the thing I always try to do is listen to what our guests are saying and then go, what is the logical, what is the logical conclusion of all of this, right?
00:43:34.000You mentioned your friend and former ANC member who told you, we look at Zimbabwe and we're kind of happy even though the country is ruined because effectively the white people have been chased out, killed, et cetera, right?
00:44:03.000I'm three out of 10 today about South Africa.
00:44:06.000I called my wife a few days ago, having spent 10 days in America, and I said, for the sake of our, you know, for the sake of the next and the next generation, I think we need to set up a base in America and consider moving there.
00:44:20.000Once our children have finished high school, get them into American universities and focus on building our next few generations in America.
00:44:31.000I'm very negative about South Africa right now.
00:44:34.000With my Venezuela head on, sorry to interrupt.
00:44:37.000How much can we trust these statistics?
00:45:37.000And I read an amazing article the last few days that said over a trillion rand has been transferred to a hundred families only for the last 20 years.
00:45:48.000So it's just kleptocracy for the elites at the highest level, but they're doing it slowly, but the country has hit a wall now.
00:45:58.000If they were smart, they would actually allow economic growth through sensible policies so they could steal for a lot longer.
00:46:10.000And I say that if any South African have children that have finished their high school, finished university, they should leave the country.
00:46:18.000What's the point of being in South Africa, being white colored or Indian, if you, if there's a glass ceiling, if you can't get jobs or can't play sport because of your pigmentation?
00:46:33.000The thing that worries me as well is just listening to it, if everything you're saying I'm sure is absolutely correct, which makes me think that if they have, if the government have that much of a stranglehold over the country, which they clearly do, why wouldn't they have that over democracy?
00:46:50.000It is not in their interest to relinquish power.
00:46:53.000So the stance that you're giving me, I don't believe them.
00:47:11.000If there's just a small group of people, call them a hundred families, that want to steal as much as possible, it's not in their interest to have a functioning democracy or a functioning economy.
00:48:50.000Over the last six years, they have been replacing judges with their loyalists.
00:48:55.000To the point where I'm estimating 60 to 70% of the lawyers, local, regional, national, are corrupted and captured by the ANC.
00:49:06.000The fact that kill the Boer, one settler, one bullet, slit the throat of whiteness, was not hate speech, means that the judiciary isn't the judiciary we had hoped for.
00:49:25.000I'm going to ask you a problematic question.
00:49:59.000And I remember having an argument with my uncle and he made that point in going, oh, you English people, you're idiots because of blah, blah, blah.
00:50:06.000And we take your attitude on the macro level and what we have is societal collapse because no one can trust each other and no one can do any form of business because there can't be any trust because everybody's trying to screw each other over.
00:50:18.000So I guess my problematic question is, how much of this, of what we're seeing, okay, there's kleptocracy, there is the ideological element.
00:50:26.000How much of this is also cultural as well, which is a big problem in Venezuela?
00:50:49.000And it's all of these, but I think the one, the hardest one to talk about is actually the cultural issue.
00:50:57.000And this is a big, this is a tough one.
00:51:02.000When the 1820 settlers arrived from England, the port of Natal, Durban, and they met the first, the Zulus, the Zulus didn't have the written word, okay?
00:51:16.0001820 is 100 years ago, not that long ago.
00:52:54.000No, you don't seem hopeful, but based on what you're saying, I don't see why you would be.
00:52:58.000If you were a rational man listening to what you're saying, it does not look like it's tragically heading in the right direction.
00:53:04.000And one of the things that's interesting as well is I want to talk a little bit about the Marxist stuff because I know from personal experiences there was a lot of Soviet infiltration of African countries.
00:53:18.000I have family members that went there as part of the Soviet Union, etc.
00:53:23.000But one of the other things is we talked very much at the beginning about the fact that the world stopped paying attention to South Africa, even as these terrible things were developing since 2008 in particular.
00:53:35.000Do you think that's partly because actually at some level the rest of the world is going through a similar process at a lower scale in terms of things like DEI?
00:53:45.000So when we see DEI in South Africa, we go, well, of course, these are colonial evil people, white people who are bad.
00:53:54.000And they are now paying for the crimes that they should be rightly paying for.
00:53:57.000So we won't say anything about this because I give you this counter example.
00:54:01.000If, let's say, South Africa was still under a part, let's say it was ruled by a majority white people, let's say, and they were creating rules against black people, they were creating separateness, there was some chance about, you know, kill the black people, etc.
00:54:21.000Do you think we'd have the same attitude?
00:55:08.000Whether I'd get re-educated or just disappear is a whole other matter.
00:55:12.000So if you flipped it on its head, the example you've given, there's no way South Africa would be allowed to continue if it was, you know, kill the minorities, kill the other people.
00:56:32.000And I think a lot of people will be listening to this conversation with that mindset because, look, let's be honest, apartheid was terrible as far as I understand.
00:56:40.000And many of the things that happened to black people in the country we now call South Africa over the centuries were terrible, right?
00:56:47.000So I think that the entire world has now come to a cultural point where we're all trying to reckon with these things that, you know, throughout history were considered actually pretty normal.
00:56:56.000But in the last few centuries, thankfully, we've woken up to the idea we don't want to behave in this way.
00:57:02.000And so you're left with this kind of thing.
00:57:04.000But I just think the reason South Africa is ignored as much as it is, it seems to me, is that we in the rest of the Anglosphere just look at it and kind of go, well, you know, it's bad, but.
00:57:36.000But talking of moving forward, what could you, other than Nelson Mandela, was there any, any reason that that period between 94 and 2008 was so much better than the current period?
00:57:49.000Is there anything you can go back to and go, we were doing these things better?
00:57:53.000Maybe if we stop doing this or go back to doing that, that you might be able to recover some sanity in South Africa?
00:57:59.000So South Africa still has the best infrastructure in Africa.
00:58:02.000There's more, there's a larger rail network in South Africa than the whole of Africa put together.
00:58:07.000Our roads, despite all the potholes up country, I mean Cape, the Cape is a very different animal to the rest of South Africa.
00:58:13.000So if you visit South Africa and you come to Cape Town, you go, what's the fuss all about?
00:58:17.000Like being in a gorgeous Mediterranean country.
00:58:21.000But if you go up country, it's very edgy.
00:58:23.000You don't stop at red lights at night.
00:58:25.000You use them as a yellow light and check there's nothing there and drive through.