Snippets from South Africa, February 2010
Chilling Report: Cuban-Style “Community Spies” Could be Established in South Africa!
If a National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) plan for compulsory community service is approved, South Africa could see Cuban-Style revolutionary youth spies on every street corner.
The chairman of the NYDA, Andile Lungisa, who was also deputy president of the ANC Youth League, said that in countries like Cuba, children as young as 13 have become “defenders of the revolution”, keeping a close watch on the activities of people in their neighbourhoods; and he said the Agency would like to see this happening in SA as well![3] He said the Agency wanted to make the national youth service programme compulsory for all young people.
One must remember South Africa’s frightening recent history. Before the African National Congress (ANC) came to power and was waging a terrorist campaign against the State, it already had such neighbourhood spies in place in the black townships: street committees which watched and monitored the comings and goings of people, and dealt out harsh “street justice” at “kangaroo courts” to anyone suspected of being an informant or a collaborator with the State. It was a form of control by sheer terror, and was highly effective. If such spies ever were brought back, it would just be the reinstatement of what the ANC has done before – but now on a national scale, and with government backing.
Marxist revolutionaries have always used children to accomplish their goals.[4] This is because children are highly impressionable, and can be manipulated any way those above them desire. The thought of children having such power as to monitor the comings and goings of people in their own streets and neighbourhoods, thereby playing a major role in ensuring that everyone complies with whatever the ANC desires, is chilling indeed. Is this the direction SA is headed? Christians must pray that the Lord would spare us the horrors of such intimidation and coercion!
The Shocking State of South Africa’s Hospitals
Is this the country whose health care system was once one of the very best on earth? Is this the country that produced the world’s first heart transplant?
Parliament’s portfolio committee on health was told in October 2009 that SA’s public hospitals are in a shocking state: failing equipment, lack of basic consumables, dwindling numbers of doctors. Professor Bongani Mayozi, head of internal medicine at the University of Cape Town, told the committee that it takes up to three days for patients to get a bed in a public hospital. “These people are sitting on a chair or lying on a trolley. They are very sick. They need to be admitted. Some people wait up to three days to get into a bed. We regard this situation as completely unacceptable, something that you would not wish on your mother or father.”[5]
He said surgical lists in many centres have been cut, equipment has not been renewed, there is an overall decrease in tertiary level beds, and the capacity to train new doctors has been severely diminished. He said that SA is producing 0.58 doctors per 1000 people. Brazil and Mexico, with a similar gross domestic product per capita, are producing nearly two doctors per 1000 people. “As a result of this, South Africa’s infant mortality rate is a lot higher than it should be and more people are dying from infectious diseases,” he said.
And the cause of this terrible state of affairs? Mayozi was straightforward: “When one looks at the reasons for the lack of progress, they are not difficult to find. They are related to under-investment in our public health sector over the past 15 years.” In other words, since the ANC became the government in 1994!
The acting head of the School of Medicine at the University of the Free State, Andries Stulting, said the province’s health care situation is dire. “There is a collapse of systems in the Free State,” he said. “TB, HIV, primary health care, hospital services, training platforms, research, you name it, we are declining. We can’t do elective surgery anymore. Patients come with hernias and cataracts. They don’t seem to be emergencies, so we cannot operate. People go blind and people can’t do their work. We don’t have basic things like eye pads, eye shields, medications… or should we keep quiet because we can be reprimanded? I hope I can give you some good news, but at the moment there is none.”[6]
In every field, South Africa is collapsing. Everything is running down: health care, the justice system, law enforcement, roads, municipalities, power, telecommunications, everything. Once the greatest country in Africa, one of the greatest in the world, today it is a shadow of what it was then, and worsening all the time. And the blame must be laid squarely at the feet of arrogant leaders, who are so busy implementing their failed ideology that they are sacrificing skill and competence in its pursuit.
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