Mr Roets Goes To Cape Town: When The NDR Agenda Was Exposed

Written by: Mpiyakhe Dhlamini

On the 6th of September 2018 I witnessed a shameful spectacle. A citizen was attacked by his representatives for presenting a reasoned argument on a proposed constitutional change that could fundamentally alter the basis of the entire Constitution. This was driven by a distortion of history and the African National Congress (ANC)'s reliance on the Communist Party for its ideology. Despite the abundance of horrific examples from Cambodia to Zimbabwe, the South African ruling party has never abandoned its commitment to this, communist, ideology.

In the ANC’s case, the implementation of their particular version of communism is known as the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), and it was this that Mr Ernst Roets, the Deputy CEO of AfriForum, had firmly in his sights as he attended Parliament’s constitutional review committee hearings on a proposed change to section 25 of the Constitution to allow expropriation without compensation (EWC).

You can see the video of Roets’ testimony here. I won’t go into too much detail about it, but Roets starts out by giving a good summary of the ANC-EFF alliance's communist agenda. He also debunks some common historical myths around the question of land as well as taking the government to task for their failure at land reform. Importantly, he also accepts the need for restitution of land to people who had theirs taken by way of apartheid-era legislation as well as the Natives Land Act of 1913.

I agree with all of the points that Roets makes. The ANC government could have simply bought the 5% of land available of the market and given it to black people (if this had been done since 1994, Roets says, more than half the farms in the country would be in the hands of black people) if black ownership of land was their overarching concern. They have also transferred only 6% of land bought through their reform programme to black people. This is not consistent with their rhetorical aims, but is fully consistent with the NDR, which is their real goal.

Those who say that history is unimportant have not read the ANC’s strategy and tactics documents. It lays out clearly their rationale as being based on South Africa’s historical circumstances and the concept of 'colonialism of a special kind' is invoked. This means that in South Africa both the coloniser and colonised share the same geographical area, with the colonised being black people and the coloniser white people, who are referred to as European settlers.

The response to Roets were the exact opposite of his presentation, ranging from the racist to the threatening, all hysterical. Clearly the ANC and EFF wanted to bury the main story, which should have been around the NDR itself and the fact that the ruling party spends considerable time thinking about how to best position itself to implement a socialist revolution given the prevailing winds. This is not merely a thought exercise, but something that informs policy debates at their conferences as well as feeding into policy as we have seen with things like the NHI, unilaterally withdrawing from investor protection treaties, attempted takeovers of private education and private security, etc.

The anger we saw in Parliament was the anger of people who have been caught out in the middle of a grand project of private sector capture -- theft -- which is nothing more or less than the incremental implementation of socialist policies; policies that have been shown over and over again to cause poverty and misery where they have been tried.

While the response by the ANC-EFF alliance was predictable, it was disappointing that none of the other opposition parties stood behind the eminently sensible points that Roets was making. Glynnis Breytenbach of the Democratic Alliance even said she would not align herself with anything Roets said. This, the once-liberal party of South Africa, the party that should be fighting tooth and nail against the NDR.

The African Christian Democratic Party’s Steve Swart also engaged in virtue-signalling by making Roets responsible for the “hardening of hearts” by ANC MPs. I say their hearts turned into rocks the day they became communists. The Congress of the People's Deidre Carter took the easy road out by refusing either to condemn or endorse Roets' submission. She just asked him for solutions after saying she refuses to “incriminate someone for testifying before Parliament when I have never done it before”.

Chris Koornhof of the ANC and a former MP for the National Party even attacked Roets for fighting for his ideas and called him a white supremacist, after apologising for speaking while white of course. Yes, a man who was a member of the NP accused Roets, who had just said in his presentation that Apartheid dispossession must be set right, of being a white supremacist. Personally, I give Koornhof the gold medal for virtue-signalling.

The events of 6 September 2018 should prove conclusively that all the parties in Parliament are either stupid beyond belief, are hardcore communists, or have no one’s interest in mind except protecting their cushy jobs and perks.

Voting alone won’t stop expropriation without compensation, we have to fight for the right ideas, ideas that have created prosperity throughout the world. Never allow yourself to be intimidated into silence by cries of “Racist!”, because once that happens you have ceded ground. Never allow them to take control of the historical narrative. Lose the past and you will win no ideological battle in the present. Don’t stand alone. I’m not sure if there’s a silent majority or not, but I know there are enough of us to make a noise so no one may claim they were never warned when the worst finally happens.

Divert any political donation you were going to make to the parties to AfriForum and/or any other organisation fighting for your liberty, like the Free Market Foundation, the IRR and even the Rational Standard.

Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an associate of the Free Market Foundation