The appointment of Menzi Simelane to head the National Prosecuting Authority is profoundly reminiscent of the National Party’s style of rule in the declining years of Apartheid.
Do you remember the Broederbond, and other instruments of Afrikaner Nationalism? Do you remember the stolid manipulation of every conceivable government, parastatal or private institution? The constant need to appoint National Party apparatchiks to every level of management?
The fundamental nature of Menzi Simelane , down in his bones and in his genetic code, is to do what he is told by the president and the party. As director general of Justice he attempted to instruct the prosecuting authority to desist from prosecuting Jackie Selebi, he lied for Mbeki, he lied to the Ginwala Commission and he believes the executive has the right to instruct the prosecuting authority – and hang what the constitution says.
Now Jacob Zuma has appointed this man to head the National Prosecuting Authority. This soon after Zuma appointed Mo Shaik – whose only apparent credentials is slavish loyalty to Jacob Zuma – to head the South African Secret Service. The Secret Service and the prosecuting authority? What could he want with those institutions?
(Read that inestimable constitutional law professor and blogger Pierre De Vos for details, transcripts and intemperate language and barbed apology)
There is no doubt – in my mind, at any rate – that Simelane is appointed primarily because he will be prepared to lie and otherwise intervene in the legal process to protect this president and these rulers as he has done for the previous gang.
Only a government entirely overrun with apparatchiks and political gangsters could make an appointment as brazenly in-your-face as this. This is haughtiness and lack of sensitivity taken to new and dizzying heights. This is the demonstration that the Zuma government will go to any lengths to protect itself from legal prosecution – no matter what the consequences for sentiment, constitutionality and good governance.
The declining years of Apartheid saw the best of young Afrikaners abandoning the party and the bureaucracy of government. What they left behind was an increasingly predatory state in terminal decline, deeply corrupt and entirely dependent on patronage and extra-legal manipulation.
This is the brink upon which we again stand.
The ruthless characterisics of ANC/SACP/COSATU Bolshevists :
Excerpt :
BOLSHEVISM
The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy
BY
JOHN SPARGO
CHAPTER VI
THE BOLSHEVIK WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY
No sympathizer with Russia—certainly no Socialist—can fail to wish that this indulgent criticism were true. Its acceptance would lighten the darkest chapter in Russian history, and, at the same time, remove from the great international Socialist movement a shameful reproach. But the facts are incompatible with such a theory. Instead of being fanatical idealists, incapable of compromises and adjustments, the Bolsheviki have, from the very beginning, been loudly scornful of rigid and unbending idealism; have made numerous compromises, alliances, and “political deals,” and have repeatedly shifted their ground in accordance with political expediency. They have been consistently loyal to no aim save one—the control of power. They have been opportunists of the most extreme type. There is not a single Socialist or democratic principle which they have not abandoned when it served, their political ends; not a single instrument, principle, or device of autocratic despotism which they have not used when by so doing they could gain power. For the motto of Bolshevism we might well paraphrase the well-known line of Horace, and make it read, “Get power, honestly, if you can, if not—somehow or other.”
Norman, I am going to let this go for now, but I’m going to bin similar comments in future if I feel that this is turning into a regurgitated anti-communist tirade …. I think your case would be strengthened if you at least wrote your own stuff – as opposed to cutting and pasting these tracts – Nic
Nic,
I have no desire to reinvent the wheel .The facts have been well documented by others far more qualified than this amateur observer, who has no journalistic ambitions ( I am a chartered accountant by profession )
The history of Communist Crimes and Terror have been blatantly censored by the mainsteam media In South Africa and elsewhere [ being sympathetic fellow travellers , that is, Fabian Socialists , “Renegade Liberals ” et al,
as documented by writers as diverse as Robert Conquest( see ,inter alia “‘The Dragons of Expectation ” and Malcolm Muggeridge ( see Muggeridge’s ” The Decade of the Great Liberal Death Wish , Esquire Magazine, December, 1970 ).
Incidentally,I question your use of the term ” anti-communist tirade .” This is the regurgitated response of those “Liberals “castigated by Malcolm Muggeridge and Robert Conquest
All of the recent appointments just reinforce how far we have slid [and are sliding] down a very slippery slope and also reaffirm just how corrupt JZ was/is/will be for his own agenda judging by his never-ending highway littered with roadblocks.
What does tweak in my brain – the rewards of corruption are for the picking at the groaning buffet-table – and the ambitious will be eying JZ’s position with ill-concealed greed and with knives less and less well concealed. His seat in not secure and I don’t think his health is either. He didn’t heed “brcareful what yuou aks for” – he’s got it in spades.
Thank God for friends, good food and great wine – life’s panaceas
Jen