South Africa will spawn its own Mugabe
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?storyID=6392
How long will it be before South Africa produces its own home-grown Robert Mugabe? Only so long as the Almighty spares Nelson Mandela, since it is his miraculous influence that has stopped such an inevitable calamity already happening.
Consider South Africa's circumstances. A small, white minority has a virtual monopoly of all the country's wealth and property. Political power may have been handed over to the blacks, but in terms of ordinary life the whites still have it made, and very blatantly and offensively so.
That was the bargain Mandela struck to end apartheid, but it cannot last once his authority is no longer around to sustain it.
Sadly, however, I do not believe that a grievance so profound and so deeply rooted can be put to rights democratically, by due process,
It is Nelson Mandela’s influence that has stopped such an inevitable calamity already happening within the law.
The whites, who still wield economic power, won't allow it, and if they once reach the conclusion that the necessary degree of radical redistribution and/or expropriation is unavoidable, they will get out, taking their money with them.
Such then will be the passions released that no democratic government will be able to contain them. Nothing short of a mailed fist will work.
The blunt truth is that henceforth the white minority are fated to be obvious scapegoats for anything that goes seriously wrong in South Africa. As soon as Mugabe got into trouble, he turned on his white minority; so it will be in South Africa. That is the law of the jungle, as Kipling would have said.
So let the world sing - white even more heartily than black - God Save and Long Live Nelson Mandela.
FIRST POSTED APRIL 17, 2007
