Julius Malema’s wailing sonnet in the Sunday Times, ”Why do white people despise blacks?” is a sensational piece. It laments on white monopoly wealth, poverty, rhinos, pets, land redistribution, and nationalisation.

Yet, it totally immunises the blacks that came into power with policies that only reinforced the inequality he weeps over. 

Towards The End of Apartheid

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the Apartheid government had shifted its approach towards black people. It desegregated public facilities, repealed racial laws, granted black people property rights, as well as entrance into historically white schools, and decriminalised labour unions. 

One could migrate from a hut in rural Eastern Cape, and buy themselves a decent entry-market house in East London; without even knowing what a high school diploma looked like.

You had families whose children went to white private schools in the city, with the aim of advancing their economic mobility. Thus education functioned as a form of social/economic investment, not merely as a right.

Through public transport, they would commute to school and work, with a nutritious diet for lunch that included the now novel cheese. These were families whose primary incomes were from factory jobs that made maize meal, or car batteries.

Today : Post – Apartheid South Africa

Today this is so difficult, if not impossible, even when you work in the now declining manufacturing sector. The chances of you getting retrenched or experiencing damaging strikes are higher than our national and youth unemployment rates combined. You can just apply for an RDP house, and worry about when it will start falling down before the bank finally grants you a mortgage bond.

Today, you migrate from the EC (seeking employment) to a little shack and eventually, a peewee RDP house in Cape Town. Since economic castration often leads to depression, you are most likely depressed, an alcoholic and are ready to fight anyone in the tavern. You frequent the tavern with a strong intention to fight. This explains the alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and homicides prevalent in black communities, especially among the youth. 

We have a 27% national unemployment rate (and 54% youth unemployment), with the government being the biggest employer in the country. It’s like we’re in the Soviet Union, where everyone was a government employee, but had to wait in line for 3 hours to buy a loaf of bread.

Since we don’t have an economy that yields real-income employment for a majority of black people, we now have university graduates washing dishes in restaurants or working as social justice warriors for NGOs. Meanwhile, white people who are vilified by failing affirmative action laws are now migrating overseas, where a better life lies ahead.

Malema’s resentment of white people, and their attitude towards pets and rhinos is arresting. Suddenly the great value placed on non-human species is now an exclusively white quality. This then explains why most of the animal cruelty the SPCA condemns has its home in black communities.

Just stroll down a township, you will definitely find a skinny dog that is so petrified that it will perform a moonwalk dance in exchange for a bone. Even when it squeals from its yard (with a slave-chain yoked around its neck), it only offers redemption songs, instead of barking.

Township dogs always sound like they’re waiting for a welfare grant, singing, “Senzeni Na? Senzeni Na? Aphi amathambo? [What have we done? What have done? Where are the bones?]”. Almost like those black people who only attend funerals to whine about not having enough meat on their plates.

White-owned suburban dogs know their worth. This becomes apparent the moment you pass by a tall gate in a white suburb (where Julius, who probably owns one, lives). Their barks send thrills of thunder into your chest, sounding like a grand giant mumbling about who’s picking its pockets while taking a nap.

The way blacks treat dogs is similar to the treatment black people endure in this country under black rule. Just recently, 94 mentally ill patients died of negligence, after being moved from well-run, private mental health hospitals to unlicensed, concentration camp-styled, health facilities run by NGOs.

We are not even done moaning over the killings of 34 miners in Marikana. This racist, corrupt, and failing black government is today administering the deaths (and murders) of its own people. 

Malema’s sonnet ends with a clarion call towards socialism. As if we haven’t withdrawn enough poverty from our broke socialist account already. As if the sectors we have already nationalised have not failed enough.

Our government agencies and sectors are all failures, including the ones that are supposed to make a profit in order to survive. Generally, governments are like a drunkard uncle who’s supposed to look after you, but spends most of his time drinking, getting high and sleeping on the couch while watching porn.

They only head towards the right direction when pushed by their own citizens, especially the private sector, that actually creates the wealth and opportunities governments usually flush down the toilet.  

The sad reality is that socialism only yields what socialism yields best – failure, repression, poverty and mass murder. In our case, and mass rape. After 1994, more people have been raped and killed by blacks than under Apartheid and the entire Colonial era combined. What compounds this fact is that today, you are most likely to be killed, raped, robbed, and impoverished by a black person than you are by a white person.

All we have done was replace the white man’s racism (Apartheid) and oppression with our own. We are todays leading racists, and we despise ourselves first.

A Prosperous Future For All

Our only solution to achieving the wealth we claim a right to, is through reinvestment in manufacturing and industrial based free-market capitalism. Also, a focus that is centred on the growth of all South Africans, and less on race will take us forward. This way, we can create wealth, employment, and usher in the true Renascence (South) Africa truly deserves. 

Photo credit: Youth Village