RAMAPHOSA and STARMER

Hannes Wessels,

It was with a sense of almost total despair that I read recently of South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech when opening Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Show in Harare recently.

The South African was unstinting in his praise of the Mnangagwa government’s agricultural policies including the so called ‘Land Reform’ policies initiated in 2000 by then President Mugabe.

Being one of the many unfortunates who lived through that ghastly process, I witnessed the heartbreaking destruction of farms, homesteads and infrastructure, the slaughter of stock and wildlife, and the misery visited upon millions. The farm owners and families, tens of thousands of workers and near-two million dependents, too, as hyper-inflation went into the stratosphere as the currency and economy collapsed. I felt a sense of hopelessness wondering what could now happen to the country Pretoria’s president governs.

He closed his address by thanking the Zimbabwe government for enlightening him about how a country’s agricultural economy should be managed and asked that he be allowed to return home and use the same template for initiating much needed transformation in the agrarian world.

It seems that pressure from the Trump administration on Pretoria to abandon the racist agenda it insists on pursuing, is so far failing to have any effect. Only God then can save this wonderful country from self-destruction.

It was with this in mind that I listened to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s responses to questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

At one point the Labour Party leader attacked Reform Party Leader Nigel Farage for being in the United States where he was appearing before a Congressional subcommittee providing testimony on the status of freedom of speech in Britain.

I was then struck by the unpleasant realisation that PM Starmer and President Ramaphosa have much in common.

Both leaders seem to harbour a deep-routed antipathy towards farmers, both seem set on punitive policies aimed at those in their own countries who, mostly due to enterprise and hard work, have accumulated a modicum of wealth, but also on the intolerant way the two respond to criticism and the vexing question of freedom of speech.

Just as Ramaphosa and his ANC party railed furiously (to the point that charges of sedition were even bandied about) against members of the political opposition whose leaders had travelled to the US to explain the blatant racism underpinning the government’s policies, the threat to proprietary rights posed by the decision to expropriate without compensation, and the scourge of farm murders allegedly encouraged by the freedom of influential political leaders to call for the ‘killing of Boers’, Starmer displayed the same angry disposition when targeting Farage.

Using words out of Ramaphosa’s mouth like, ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘disgraceful’, he accused the Reform leader of ‘badmouthing’ his country and calling for the imposition of sanctions which would hurt working people.

Farage flatly denies calling for sanctions but, in his address, he shocked his Washington audience by declaring his view that the UK’s attitude towards free speech was alarmingly close to that of North Korea.

Farage cited examples such as Mrs. Lucy Connolly, a housewife and baby-minder who received a 31-month jail sentence for an intemperate ‘tweet’ directed at illegal migrants in the immediate aftermath of the slaying of three children by a young Rwandan man in Southport.

Referring to the recent arrest of Irish comedian Graham Linehan by five armed police officers at Heathrow airport, for allegedly ‘offensive’ social media posts, it was pointed out that Linehan was not even a UK citizen, so the same fate may await other Americans travelling to the UK who, having availed themselves of their First Amendment Right of free-speech at home, might be arrested and punished abroad.

Buttressing his claims of an out-of-control Gestapo-like police force, is a report in the New York Post stating roughly 30 people a day are arrested in the UK for social-media posts, adding up to roughly 12,000 annually.   

The irony of all this is the fact that the majority of South Africans and UK citizens, were, until recently, vehemently opposed to the idea of a second US administration under Donald Trump.

Starmer, Ramaphosa, along with their political appointees and supporters, backed by the entire mainstream media, were vociferously of the view that Trump was innately authoritarian, a fascist at heart, and that his return to power would pose a calamitous threat to democracy and fundamental human rights, such as freedom of expression.

Fortunately, enough Americans disagreed, Trump triumphed, and his White House, with reporters seemingly present at every event of any political significance hosted by the president, might go down as the most transparent and open-minded in history.

Far from threatening democracy, America under President Trump, re-emerges as a bastion of true freedom, and the real threat we now see very clearly, comes from the ‘liberal fascists’ – leaders like Ramaphosa and Starmer.

Unfortunately for Brits and the South Africans, the penny may have dropped too late and the damage these two are yet to do, may well be irreparable.