My friend Daniel Sutherland compiled a list of fake news sites -
My updated handy list of fake/satire news sites again. I forgot to add wmcleaks.com
the last time around. Please save the image on your computer or
cellphone. I did see quite a couple of shares from some of these sites
the last 24 hours. Let us distinguish between real news on the one hand
and fake/satire and hate speech propaganda on the other side please.
From protests against President Jacob Zumato children doing
yoga , here are some of the most interesting moments we caught on camera
in the first half of the year
By GroundUp Staff
2 July 2017 Metrorail
services had broken down earlier that day and commuters rebelled. Ashraf
Hendricks / GroundUp
The first half of 2017 has been turbulent. Across the country,
tens of thousands marched against President Jacob Zuma. Lives were lost
in a storm that shook Cape Town. A fire engulfed the Imizamo Yethu
informal settlement. We also lost struggle stalwart Ahmed Kathrada, a
wonderful man of great integrity.
The Western Cape is in the grips of its worst drought in recent
history. There have been many marches and protests – against and for
immigration, over water, electricity, education, housing, shack
demolitions, transport and health-care. Trains and buildings have been
torched.
We haven’t only reported doom and gloom. Our photographers captured
learners attending their first day of school; children experiencing the
joy of yoga on International Meditation Day, and Muslims searching for
the new moon to mark the end of Ramadan. We also met furry friends at
the Mdzananda Animal Clinic, Khayelitsha. A Grade R student cries
after her parents leave during her first day of school at the Isiphiwo
Public Primary in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on 11 January 2017 - Ashraf
Hendricks / GroundUpA young boy stands outside an abandoned house
in the now ghost town of Dingleton in the Northern Cape on 16 January
2017. Kumba mine has been trying to buy the land, but 25 families have
refused to leave until they receive adequate compensation. - Ashraf
Hendricks / GroundUpElube Mwalwen from Malawi
surveys the damage done to the room she rented in a house that was set
alight during a vigilante attack in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, on 12
February 2017. The community was hit by violence as residents claim
their community is being overrun by drugs and prostitution - Ihsaan
Haffejee / GroundUpThabiso Tshepe sells fruit and vegetables
at his brother’s stand in the Marikana informal settlement in Philippi
East, Cape Town, on 14 February 2017. - Masixole Feni / GroundUpSonwabile Manziwa poses with his dog ‘Danger’ at the Mdzananda Animal Clinic in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on 21 February 2017 - Masixole Feni / GroundUpPolice isolate a group of protesters
after an anti-immigrant march in Sunnyside, Pretoria, on 24 February
2017. Police arrested the entire group and found drugs on one of them. -
Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpMinister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini
appeared before Parliament’s Standing Committee On Public Accounts
(SCOPA) in Parliament’s Old Assembly in Cape Town on 7 March 2017. For
months, the social grants system has been under scrutiny. Dlamini
was asked at SCOPA to explain her department’s actions which flew in
the face of a Constitutional Court order. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA fire engulfed Mandela Park Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay on 11 March 2017. The fire left two dead and hundreds homeless. - Aletta Harrison / GroundUpReclaim the City supporters
outside an occupation at the Woodstock Hospital in Cape Town on 27
March 2017. Supporters also occupied the Helen Bowden Nurses’ Home in
protest against the private sale of the Tafelberg property in Sea Point.
Reclaim the City said the Tafelberg site should be used for affordable
social housing. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpChildren playing in Elsie’s River, Cape Town, on 28 March 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA woman with a wreath of flowers walks past the casket of Ahmed Kathrada
before the start of the final Muslim prayer at his funeral in Westpark
Cemetery in Johannesburg on 29 March 2017. Kathrada ‘Kathy’ was a South
African anti-apartheid activist and close confidant of Nelson Mandela. -
Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpFibreglass structures in which residents of Komponi in East Londonlive. 4 April, 2017 - Nombulelo Damba-Hendrik / GroundUpCapetonians turned out in numbers on 6 April at Ahmed Kathrada’s memorial at St George’s Cathedral to demand the end of Jacob Zuma’s presidency. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpTens of thousands march to Parliament
demanding the resignation of South African President Jacob Zuma on 7
April 2017. The march was triggered by the axing of finance minister
Pravin Gordhan. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA man protesting against President Jacob Zuma
sits on a sculpture at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Thousands of
people took part in an anti-Zuma demonstration on 12 April 2017. -
Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpCommuters hang on a Khayelitsha-bound train in Cape Town on 20 April 2017 - Mandla Mnyakama / GroundUpThembeka Sam with her three-year-old nephew Mivuyo Patuluko
in Beacon Bay, East London, on 2 May 2017. Patuluko uses a wheelchair
and has epilepsy. He does not speak. When his mother passed away in
2015, his aunt took him in. - Manqulo Nyakombi / GroundUpA man uses a sling shot to launch stones at a police Nyala during a protest in Finetown, Johannesburg, on 10 May 2017. Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpTheewaterskloof Dam in drought stricken Western Cape
on 11 May 2017. At the time this picture was taken, the Western Cape’s
dam levels were at just 21.2%. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpMetro Police Gang and Drug Unit search two young men during an operation in Ravensmead, Cape Town on 15 May 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpResidents protest during a land occupation in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on 22 May 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA resident is seen with a cat that was killed during evictions
in the Bekezela informal settlement in Newtown, Johannesburg, on 2 June
2017. Hundreds of people were forcefully removed and left on the
streets after the Red Ants evicted them from their homes. - Ihsaan
Haffejee / GroundUpA woman navigates her way across a flooded pathway
during a storm in Europa, Gugulethu, Cape Town, on 7 June 2017. At
least five people died and many lost their homes. - Mandla Mnyakama /
GroundUpCoco snuggles up near a brazier
that his owner, Lillian Snyders, made outside her home during winter in
Macassar Village, Cape Town, on 8 June 2017 - Yazeed Kamaldien /
GroundUpResidents block roads with stones and burning tyres
during a protest over a threat to cut off water and electricity in
Davidsonville, Johannesburg, on 12 June 2017. - Ihsaan Haffejee /
GroundUpGrade one pupils stood ready with white roses
which they placed at the Hector Pieterson Memorial during Youth Day
celebrations in Soweto on 16 June 2017. - Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpA youth meditates during International Yoga Day at the Lenasia Cricket Stadium in Johannesburg on 21 June 2017. - Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpHundreds of Muslims gather in Sea Point, Cape Town to break their fast and to look out for the new moon on 24 June 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUp
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
Reuters
South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) enters its 2017 policy conference riven and weakened. The five-yearly national event is the precursor to the national elective conference where its policy proposals will be adopted formally.
The party is operating under the weight of concurrent crises. It acknowledges these fleetingly, vaguely and indirectly in nine policy discussion documents that have been prepared for the conference, giving little indication of the unprecedented organisational mess it is in.
The full drama of the party’s capture, collapse or continuation will play out in debates at the conference. But it remains unclear whether or not the various factions will be able to find solutions and compromises that define the party 23 years after it came to power. It is also unclear whether the party can differentiate between the need for far-reaching change or whether it will simply stick to slogans like “radical economic transformation”.
The elephant in the room is whether economic transformation is a policy essential or simply a lifebuoy to protect the party’s embattled president, Jacob Zuma, and his faction. The truth is that the ANC doesn’t have much time to find answers to its organisational battles before its December conference when a new leader will be elected.
The main, interrelated crises that the ANC policy discussion documents relate, in some way or another, are the:
leadership battles that are expressed along deep factional lines, amid suspicions that the president has gone rogue;
communities that have become alienated, and a party that’s reverted to out-of-context liberation and revolution rhetoric to attract “masses” back into its fold;
the predicament created by the fusion of the party with state institutions, and the party infecting the state with its problems, to the point of paralysis, and
a loss of credibility. This is shown by its reaction to allegations of state capture involving undue influence on Zuma, along with the poverty of ideas on how to extricate itself from the crises.
There are some early indications as to how the ANC will emerge from this cauldron. Will it be muddling through, veiled in compromises, or can a “new” ANC emerge?
Dissecting a few aspects of the crises in the context of the policy conference sheds some light.
Irreconcilable factions?
The ANC is at its weakest point ever. Factional fallout is pushing the party to the verge of implosion. The two major factions are allied to President Jacob Zuma and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in the one camp, and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa in the other.
Rightly or wrongly they have become identified with diverging ideological-policy voices. Zuma’s camp is supposed to be more radical, while Cyril’s is viewed, in the phraseology of the Zuma camp, as being more sympathetic to “white monopoly capital”. Ramaphosa’s game comes across as more erudite, playing on policy stability and inclusive growth.
Reading the policy documents raises the question of whether formulations can be found to bridge the factional divides, or whether the losers will simply choose to break away from the party.
This wouldn’t be the first split from the ANC. The first resulted in the breakaway Congress of the People after the ANC’s 2007 conference. Another followed after the 2012 conference and culminated in the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters.
The difference this time is that there’s no clear centre of power that would remain to carry forward the remaining faction.
A spin-off party – at this stage an anti-Zuma ANC looks most likely – could link up with the growing political opposition to defeat the Zuma ANC in the 2019 elections. This would take the cost of another split far beyond anything the ANC had seen before. Hence, the latest thrust for organisational unity.
But even if it could achieve unity, there would still be the issue of how this was translated into policy consensus. Or the tricky issue of what to do about Zuma, state capture, abuse of state corporations and organs for private-factional gain.
The possibility that the ANC could lose power in 2019 runs like a tragic thread through the documents on Strategy and Tactics, and Legislatures and Governance. The ANC acknowledges that its actions have repelled many of its previous supporters. It argues nevertheless that it has retained its liberation movement reputation, that voters believe it has performed, and can be trusted more than other parties.
Possible future electoral losses are noted. The party says it must “prepare itself for the complicated relationships involved in coalition government”.
But the documents concede only superficially that corruption, especially at the top, has tarnished the ANC’s credibility.
The crisis of the ANC’s fusion into state power leaps from the pages that deal with the public institutional landscape and the ANC’s proposals on how to address institutions gone wrong. But the documents simply regurgitate what’s gone before. There is no explicit mention of the problems of the presidency’s powers, or the deep problems of an unprofessional executive that is largely beyond accountability. These are alluded to in vague and abstract terms and are so carefully stated that they might as well be off the radar.
Zuma’s closeness to the Guptas, his friends who are the the centre of state capture claims, is inseparable from these elusive statements.
Is Zuma trying to engineer a collapse of the ANC?
So what happens next? One possibility is that Zuma is preparing simply to collapse the ANC, driving it into the ground on the premise that there can be no ANC without him. This scenario was put to me by an ANC functionary from a so-called “Premier League” – a pro-Zuma faction of leaders of four provinces.
It is perfectly feasible that the outgoing president could tear the ANC apart by letting it split while retaining power, for now, over a faction that cannot win elections and will not find credible coalition partners.
The documents released ahead of the policy conference of South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) expose a panicking party that sees enemies everywhere. While previous policy conferences addressed real policy issues, all energies are now focused on retaining state power as the leadership faces damning claims of capture by a kleptocratic elite.
The discussion documents show a party that professes a desire for self-correction and renewal. But, it seems to have neither the guts, nor the necessary internal balance of forces to do so.
At the same time the documents point to deepening paranoia and an increasingly authoritarian tendency. In combination, they seem to emanate from a parallel universe where the party’s interests have become elevated above those of the South African society at large.
Some of the text show a party that’s going through the motions. There’s trotting out of lofty ideals left over from when it still occupied the moral high ground. It’s a rhetoric that used to be meaningful and powerful. But it’s been emptied out by the ANC’s increasing failure to harness the state’s resources for the good of all.
[the ANC’s vision] is informed by the morality of caring and human solidarity, [and its mission] is to serve the people of South Africa.
Beyond this nostalgia for what it used to be, the ANC documents display little sense of the depth and severity of the political, constitutional, economic and governance crisis facing South Africa. What does come across strongly, however, is a party that feels beleaguered and panicky about possible loss of state power.
Party and state are conflated
The “Organisational Renewal…” document issues the following admonition:
it is in the interests of the movement to… undergo a brutally frank process of introspecting and self-correction.
This sentiment is overtaken by disappointment over the party’s poor performance in the 2016 local government elections. Several pages are dedicated to investigating how other liberation movements became defunct. It transpires that the primary emergency is “to ensure that the ANC remains at the helm” of government.
Of course political parties are about getting and holding on to power. But because of the ANC’s habit of conflating party and state, there seems to be no understanding that its feeling of destiny – that it should rule “until Jesus comes” as President Jacob Zuma put it – won’t dictate the will of the people.
Parties get reelected because they demonstrably govern in service of the will of the people. If the ANC should demonstrate that, it will be returned to power in 2019 . If not, it won’t.
There is an admission that the,
moral suasion that the ANC has wielded to lead society is waning; and the electorate is starting more effectively to assert its negative judgement.
Significant sections of the motive forces seem to have lost confidence in the capacity and will of the ANC to carry out the agenda of social transformation [due to] subjective weaknesses [in the party].
These weaknesses are identified but in a way that skirts around the extent and depth of state capture. More and more evidence, including hundreds of thousands of leaked emails, have emerged that an Indian family of business people, the Guptas, has over the past numbers of years gained a hold over Zuma and a network of ANC leaders. This grip stretches from national to local level, and from government departments to state-owned enterprises.
But in the ANC documents black capitalists are blamed for “corrupt practices including attempts to capture institutions of political and state authority…” The Guptas only get an opaque acknowledgement with reference to lobbying:
[T]he lobbying process engineered by clandestine factionalism destabilises the organisation… Factionalism’s clandestine nature makes it a parallel activity…
But it’s almost as though the document’s authors don’t believe their own diagnosis, or the implications of the party’s “subjective weaknesses”. The document becomes contradictory. Even as it admits that the “motive forces” … “still desire such change and are prepared to work for it”, it starts to cast suspicion:
the mass of the people can, by commission or omission, precipitate an electoral outcome that places into positions of authority, forces that can stealthily and deceitfully chip away at the progressive realisation of a National Democratic Society.
The people are the problem, not the party
That “the people”, rather than a party that’s lost its way, are in fact the problem becomes more ominously clear in the document on “Peace and Stability”. Leninist vanguardism makes the party still feel it knows best, and that the people are useful fools.
It’s worth quoting the whole section to see the extent of the paranoia in the ANC and the array of enemies it creates to avoid confronting the enemy within.
According to the document, the main strategy used by foreign intelligence services is to:
mobilise the unsuspecting masses of this country to reject legally constituted structures and institutions in order to advance unconstitutional regime change. The alignment of the agendas of foreign intelligence services and negative domestic forces threatens to undermine the authority and security of the state.
Their general strategy makes use of a range of role players to promote their agenda and these include, but are not limited to: mass media; non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations; foreign and multinational companies; funding of opposition activities; judiciary, religious and student organisations; infiltration and recruitment in key government departments; placement of non-South Africans in key positions in departments; prominent influential persons…
A small clique vs South Africa
The proposed organisational renewal is to bolster the ANC secretary-general’s powers. Even this belated and lacklustre attempt to reduce the ANC president’s control over the party is compromised, as the clarion call of the discussion documents is “Let us deepen unity!”.
That’s why the actual enemies cannot be confronted, those that have insidiously corrupted the very life and soul of the party. Instead, a worrying paranoid and authoritarian tendency emerges. Its targets are journalists, judges, church and business leaders, activists, opposition parties, foreigners and intellectuals.
Nowhere is the fact confronted that Zuma, president of the ANC and the country, has ceded South Africa’s sovereignty to a foreign family, or that state-owned entities and government departments are being repurposed to enrich a small clique at the expense of South Africa’s people.
This story exemplifies how state capture affects poor people
By Nathan Geffen
28 June 2017 This clinic in Hendrina, Mpumalanga, is 95% complete
according to a report. The failure of a Gupta-owned company to pay the
company responsible for building the clinic means that it is not clear
when it will open. Photo supplied
Kwazamakuhle clinic in Hendrina was supposed to open in April. This 24-hour facility will improve health-care for approximately 20,000 people
living in this Mpumalanga Province township. But three months later it
remains unfinished with no indication of when it will be ready.
The clinic is incomplete because Optimum Coal, a company owned by the
Gupta family, failed to pay the company responsible for building the
facility. The building of the clinic is part of Optimum’s social and
labour commitments in terms of the Mining Charter. All this was explained in a GroundUp article published in December.
Now court documents obtained by GroundUp show Optimum’s cavalier
approach to its contractual obligations. Yet there appears to be not the
slightest effort by the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) to take
action against Optimum. Another story of Gupta shenanigans might leave
readers jaded, but this story exemplifies how state capture affects poor
people.
As described in our previous article, Optimum committed to paying for
the new clinic. Three amounts had to be paid to the company building
the clinic, Re-Action Consulting: R5.6 million on 7 January 2016,
another R5.6 million on 16 March 2016, and R3.8 million in August 2016.
The first two tranches were paid while Optimum was owned by Glencore. It
was then bought by Gupta-owned Tegeta, which failed to make the August
payment as well as additional management fees owed to Re-Action.
Nevertheless Re-Action continued to build the clinic using its own
funds. However, it has drawn a line in the sand that the finishing
touches to the clinic will not be completed nor the facility handed over
to the health department until it is paid the money it is owed.
Following months of demands for payment, Re-Action initiated
litigation against Optimum in the High Court in Johannesburg. It is
asking for Optimum to be wound up on the basis that it is unable to pay
its debts.
The court record shows how Optimum has stalled the payment by
insisting on documentation from Re-Action and then, upon receipt of this
documentation, requesting additional documentation.
Optimum’s own consultant says pay
Presumably in preparation for the defence of its court case, in March
Optimum hired Accura Development Management to assess the “general
quality and outstanding work” of the Hendrina clinic. The report
confirms Re-Action’s view of things. It found that the clinic was 95%
finished and of acceptable quality. The report contains a list of
unfinished items, but these appear minor and could certainly not have
been expected to have been ready by the time the August 2016 payment was
due to Re-Action.
The Accura report further makes it clear that the payment due to
Re-Action in August 2016 was not dependent on the clinic being complete.
Accura recommends: “Optimum should withhold 5% of the project value as
retention which must reduce to 1.25% on practical completion and 0% on
final completion.” The 5% retention has already been deducted from the
amounts that Re-Action has invoiced Optimum, and for which it is now
litigating.
At first Optimum did not make the Accura report available to
Re-Action. Optimum quoted from the report in its correspondence with
Re-Action in order to justify its non-payment. In the court papers
Re-Action describes these quotes as “selective” and “misleading”. To
eventually get the Accura report, Re-Action had to make a discovery
application under the Uniform Rules of Court (download it here).
Is Optimum solvent?
It is unclear why Optimum has failed to pay Re-Action. Its court
papers offer a series of excuses that are “spurious” as described by
Craig Assheton-Smith, Re-Action’s attorney. Assheton-Smith says
Optimum’s actions are “clearly designed to delay” a payment that is
contractually clear. He says there is no “bona fide” dispute, and
concludes that Optimum is unable to pay.
In Optimum’s court papers it denies that it is unable to pay its
debts and claims to have placed the disputed funds in its attorney’s
trust account, but it provides no evidence for this. In fact in a letter
dated 19 January 2017, Optimum’s attorney states that there is no
obligation to maintain the funds in the trust account.
We asked Optimum if it was solvent, as well as several other
questions, but the company’s attorney merely responded: “The matter is
currently the object of litigation. In light thereof we do not intend to
respond to your queries.”
A mining expert told GroundUp the amount of money at stake here was
“small change” in this industry. In an industry where transactions in
the millions of rands are common and the completion of a public clinic
would be a much needed PR win for the Gupta family, it is unclear what
other explanation there can be for the non-payment other than Optimum
having a serious cash-flow problem.
No enforcement from Government
Last year President Jacob Zuma threatened to remove Lonmin’s mining
rights if it did not hurry up with the implementation of its housing
plan. Optimum appears to be under no such pressure.
On 7 February representatives of the DMR, Optimum and Re-Action met
at Optimum’s offices to try to resolve the impasse. Optimum’s executive,
George van der Merwe, once more said that the company required
documents from Re-Action before payment could be made, but he was unable
to say what documents these were. It was agreed that Optimum would
supply these within seven days. It did not, and the DMR took no action.
(Later, in March, Optimum sent a request for a list of documents,
irrelevant to the payment due, which Re-Action nevertheless for the most
part says it provided.)
We emailed a short list of questions to the Ministries of Mineral
Resources and Health on Tuesday morning. Despite extensive follow-up
efforts, neither had commented by the time of publication, more than 26
hours after our initial enquiries. No one answered the switchboard line
of the Mpumalanga Department of Health.
Re-Action’s lawyers asked for the case to be heard urgently, but this
was denied by the court. It is therefore likely to be years before this
matter is concluded, Re-Action is paid, and the clinic is handed over.
In a nutshell, Optimum, perhaps because it is short of liquid assets,
is unable or unwilling to pay for the clinic. It is in effect being
protected by the DMR. (It’s a matter for speculation what has happened
to Optimum’s money.) This is state capture at work. And the people of
Hendrina are the victims.
Correction: The article originally gave the incorrect population for Kwazamakuhle (the township at Hendrina).
It is perfectly feasible that the outgoing president could tear the ANC apart by letting it split while retaining power, for now, over a faction that cannot win elections and will not find credible coalition partners.
Nowhere is the fact confronted that Zuma, president of the ANC and the country, has ceded South Africa’s sovereignty to a foreign family, or that state-owned entities and government departments are being repurposed to enrich a small clique at the expense of South Africa’s people.
