Civil unrest under South Africa’s ANC regime likely, US warns
The US Embassy in South Africa last month warned that civil unrest in the country is growing amid a declared “State of Disaster” due to energy shortages.
South Africans are frequently experiencing “load-shedding” — controlled rolling blackouts — which can last up to 15 hours a day and are expected to extend beyond 2023. In 2022, South Africans faced electricity cuts 288 days out of the year.
As noted by the US Embassy, which now advises US travelers to exercise increased caution due to crime and civil unrest, the energy shortages have led to street protests as South Africans declare “enough is enough”.
According to the BBC, the energy shortage is neither sudden nor surprising to the African National Congress (ANC) which rules South Africa. In fact, it has been 15 years in the making.
Shortly after it assumed power in 1994, the ANC was alerted on several occasions that the country was headed for a future power crisis. In 1998, the government’s White Paper on Energy Policy warned that Eskom, the country’s government-owned power utility, only had power reserves to last until 2007 and suggested building new infrastructure to avoid a crisis.
But the White Paper also listed other suggestions in its vision for an energy policy that showed it to be ahead of the current globalist agenda. The paper set diversity targets for the Department of Minerals and Energy, which were at least 50% black, 30% female, and 2% disabled. A heavy emphasis was placed on “climate change”.
In 2001, the ANC government under then-President Thabo Mbeki ultimately decided not to invest in infrastructure, reportedly because it was considering privatizing Eskom.
In the end, instead of being privatized, Eskom became a “feeding trough” for corrupt government officials under former President Jacob Zuma, according to Eskom’s outgoing CEO André de Ruyter. Analysts say that de Ruyter’s accusations, for which he has been accused of treason by the ANC’s energy minister, reveal “a ruling party rotten with corruption”.
Indeed, the reasons for South Africa’s brimming civil unrest extend beyond the energy shortage into rife corruption and rampant crime under the ANC.
“The ANC has put us in big trouble,” said Southern African Federation of Trade Unions General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, a former ANC supporter, according to The Epoch Times. “We are now a failed state. There are few countries right now in a worse state than South Africa; only war zones, maybe.”
“When you have 82 people dying in your country every single day, through violence; 135 women raped every single day; when people are being held up in their homes and robbed in broad daylight, and your criminal justice system’s no longer capable of responding because it’s dysfunctional; when police say only 11-percent of people accused of rape are ever convicted . . . [t]hen your state’s no longer capable of defending its own citizens. It can’t even perform the most basic functions,” he added.
At least some of the widespread crime — particularly black-on-white crimes — has been sanctioned by the ANC, though it is largely denied by mainstream media.
South Africa’s Afrikaner farmers — or Boers —are predominantly white, often destitute, and repeatedly attacked violently by black supremacist supporters of the ANC.
Since taking power, the ANC advocated for blacks to own more land which would bring more economic and political security. This idea took on a radical tone when Julius Malema, the founder of a militant ANC spin-off organization called Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) began urging blacks to seize land from whites, who make up approximately 7.7% of the population.
According to a report by AfriForum published this month, there were 333 reported attacks on Afrikaner farms last year and 50 murders. The numbers are down from 2021, which saw 415 farm attacks and 55 murders. Only 33% of murder suspects are arrested and convicted.
“Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the number of attacks actually decreased seeing as more and more cases are never reported to the police. I don’t think the public’s trust in the police has ever been as low as it is now,” said AfriForum Community Safety spokesman Jacques Broodryk.
In addition to murders, hundreds of thousands of destitute Boer Afrikaners who live in large squatter camps also face death from cholera and other diseases wrought by poor sanitation and water supply. Aid workers have blamed the disease-related deaths on intentional neglect by local ANC councils.
"Every year, these brave descendants of the proud Boer people have to fight court battles against evictions by town and city councils everywhere,” said aid worker Gideon van Deventer, according to Israel National News.
"Sometimes these councils employ sly tactics, like charging the destitute for allegedly contravening all sorts of obscure council regulations, which is clearly a form of harassment and intimidation, as they own nothing, are clearly indigent, and can by no means be perceived as a threat to the mighty ANC in any form whatsoever.
"The ANC council and government policies of 'blacks first' will eventually be their ruin, especially if this case turns into an epidemic or a human rights disaster," van Deventer said.
This grim picture of Afrikaner life — particularly the farm murders — is said to be carefully constructed by the ANC, which some say intends to eliminate the white race from South Africa.
In his memoirs, political veteran Mario Oriani-Ambrosini recalls a conversation he once had with South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa in the 1990s during negotiations for a new South African constitution:
In his brutal honesty, Ramaphosa told me of the ANC’s 25- year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.
But mainstream news outlets and journalists dismiss the possibility of a white genocide as a “far-right conspiracy theory” and deny that rampant hate attacks on Afrikaner farms are a significant problem. This was exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s directive in 2018 in which he ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the farm murders perpetrated against white Boer Afrikaners following a report by Fox News on the issue.
Nevertheless, Minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele denies that the country is or will be experiencing civil unrest.
“We do not have any information to indicate there’s going to be any kind of civil unrest in our country. We will talk to our American partners because such alerts have the potential to cause serious problems in the country,” Gungubele told The Epoch Times.