Solutions Journalism! As President Joe Biden Preps for his first summit on Africa Time To Ask Is Cyril Ramaphosa’s Farmgate Scandal Really A South African, American Political Crisis or from Elsewhere?
Solutions Journalism! As President Joe Biden Preps for his first summit on America Time To Ask Is Cyril Ramaphosa’s Farmgate Scandal Really A South African, American Political Crisis or Elsewhere?
Exclusive Reports and Interviews by Ben Edokpayi ©
WordCount 2614
https://www.thecable.ng/farm-scandal-ramaphosa-wont-resign-despite-impeachment-threat-says-aide
Cyril Ramaphosa: South African president faces threat of impeachment over ‘Farmgate’ In a Case With Seismic Global Ramifications All The Way To Solano and the Niger Delta. I Have informed the SOS Anthony Blinken That Joe has Been Dealt The Wrong Hands interlaced with Death and Assasination Threats (Between 2014 and 2017) Known to the US Embassy in Lagos. In an Unclassified Email That Person Was Labeled #AAO. Her strange tales included a break in to their Farmhouse from the roof. She was advised to report it to the Local Police Chief Hassan Jimoh. I don’t think she did or that her parents knew of a break in. Fake cover for satanism in a room and contraband items in a refrigerator. It just seemed like someone was following a script about break ins at our Vacaville home.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-63817164
https://www.thecable.ng/farm-scandal-ramaphosa-wont-resign-despite-impeachment-threat-says-aide
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-63832698
This Unusual Trail Started in 1990 with a Los Angeles Interview for The African Times. I was told last month by Ambassador Susan Rice That I may be invited for this summit.
https://www.state.gov/africasummit/
In the meantime some important details.
“This Violence is Really Shaming Us,” Gatsha Buthelezi, South African politician and former prime minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan and INDABA, from a 1990 interview and his ties with Nelson Mandela
In March 1990, during a visit to the Los Angeles area, I was privileged to meet and interview Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief Minister of Kwazulu and leader of the Inkatha Movement. This was a few weeks before his scheduled meeting with Nelson Mandela in South Africa was canceled. My interview with Buthelezi, featured in the African Times covered a number of topical issues at the time ranging from black-on-black violence, De Klerk’s reforms, his relationship with Mandela, the future of the homelands and other pertinent issues in South Africa. Buthelezi also gave me copies of letters exchanged between him and Mandela when he was in Robben Island, which I could no longer find at my home in Vacaville, California before I left last year. Here is my Q & A session with Buthelezi conducted in March 1990.
Q — Do you think the South African government of Frederik De Klerk has done enough for the American government to consider lifting trade sanctions?
A- I think so. I really think so because President Bush does feel De Klerk needs to be encouraged because really on the 2nd of February, 1990 when he spoke to Parliament I think he went much further than anyone would have thought. I mean anyone who has met him would have seen how sincere he was. I never dreamt myself that he would have gone as far as derestricting organizations and people that have been restricted for so long. He means what he says when he promises that he wants to get the negotiations going.
Q- De Klerk has shown a lot of boldness in his actions. How would you describe him, especially in his dealings with Black South Africans?
A-You would be surprised that I didn’t know him before. I first met him two years ago at a seminar where we had a panel of discussion with the leader of the opposition in the right wing party and with others in the labor party. So when he was elected he set up a meeting and we met and I was quite impressed by him saying that we must understand his problems. Saying that he is son of a minister of government which believed in apartheid and that his uncle Mr. Streidom, a minister, also believed in apartheid. And he said when Mr. P.W. Botha came to the scene and said apartheid must go he found this very traumatic not only for Afrikaners in general but for himself too. So I mean he was very honest. He just put all his cards on the table.
Q- Do you think he would go all the way in dismantling apartheid?
A — I have no doubts about that. If he doesn’t, no other white will. I don’t know as a Christian, if I should call him a messiah, but I would think that of all the white leaders he is the first one who seems to be serious about dismantling apartheid.
Q — What kind of relationship have you had with Nelson Mandela before and after his release from prison?
A — Of course when he was in prison he consistently wrote to me and I wrote to him too all the time. We are very close friends, apart from being in the ANC together. So I mean he’s been very consistent as far as that is concerned. I remember that when General Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former leader, came to South Africa as one of the Eminent Persons Group, he went to meet him and when he saw me afterwards he was quite surprised because Dr. Mandela had said that whatever differences we might have that he regards me as a freedom fighter in my own right. Last year, he wrote to me agonizingly about the violence that is really shaming all of us in the part of the country where I come from, between the ANC and the Inkhata. And that is why I think one of the first things he did after his release was to go there and speak on the 25th of last month. He phoned me on the 18th of February to tell me that he is out of jail and said he was going on…and would go on to Sweden to see Mr. Oliver Tambo (ANC President) and that when he returns he promises to come to see me.
Q — What kind of role do you see yourself playing in the South Africa that is evolving?
A — Well, I think Dr. Mandela himself has said he expects me to play a very important role. Mr. De Klerk has said so too. And of course the first thing now is to set up a new constitution and so I suppose I would participate in that.
Q — Right now the ANC is on the verge of talks, for the first time, with the white South African government. What kind of obstacles do you envisage for these talks?
A — The major obstacle, of course, is that all of us clamor for the complete lifting of the restrictions under the state of emergency. But now when you think of the violence we have already discussed it is very difficult because there are townships in my region where there is no peace between members of these organizations; where they are killing themselves. So therefore people themselves ask for soldiers to look after them. So I think that De Klerk is sincere about wanting to lift the state of emergency but I just cannot see how he can do it as long as the violence continues and people are dying.
Q — The homelands have been the scenes of black on black violence and killings, a fact that is really incomprehensible considering the need for blacks in that region to pool their resources in the fight to dismantle apartheid. As leader of one of these homelands, what are you doing to stop this anomaly?
A — Well, I have done quite a lot. I have been to the rural areas where we have had prayer meetings, and invited ministers of religion to pray. I went and talked there … The Zulu King, who is the titular head of the nation, went out there with me. On the 19th of September last year he held a very big gathering at the stadium where Mandela spoke on February 25 and he also appealed to his people to stop the violence. At that occasion he invited Walter Sisulu to come and discuss the matter with him and me. But of course Sisulu has not … us before I left South Africa. But I heard when I was in Europe last week (in February) that he had come to discuss the matter with the peace committee. We set up a peace committee with the United Democratic Front, UDF and COSATU in an effort to solve this problem.
Q — A lot of people regard the so-called homelands as a creation of the South African government to divide the black majority and also derive cheap labor from them. What is your opinion?
A — I have always opposed the homelands. But of course my leadership among the Zulu people who are throughout Africa known as a warrior nation, was not created by the homeland policy. In fact I remember the issue came up when I spoke at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos in 1976 as a guest of the Nigerian government. I was speaking in Lagos with Obasanjo and he wanted to take me away because he knew my opposition to it. I have always been opposed to it, that is why since 1980 I have been trying to get those parts which they call Natal to get together with the rest of the parties. All these years I have strived for a regional government of people of all races, not just black Zulus. The government rejected it because of its apartheid policies and then later on we also set up another dialogue called INDABA and we came out with proposals, but even that was rejected by the government because I didn’t believe in homelands. I believe that we must try and put together that which apartheid separates because Africans are one people regardless of race. I mean Nigeria could be a good example. We are not as multi-racial as Nigeria but we are multicultural as Nigeria and racial and I think probably a geographic federal entity might well be the solution for the country.
Q- Do you foresee a situation where there will be an uprising against blacks, DeKlerk and his reforms, by some hardcore racists
A — It is possible. But I think if we all respond swiftly and get to the conference table their noise can be made inconsequential. But I think if they dilly-dally negotiations may fall apart.
Q — With the swift momentum of change in South Africa can you set a time frame within which you think the ANC and the South African government can come to terms.
A — Really, it depends on the ANC itself because Mr. DeKlerk has said they must come to the table. I think the problem is the Harare declaration where they (ANC) tried to ask for the type of constituent assembly similar to the Namibian one. That is a major complication.
#Obama Deep State Unravels #RobbenIslandPrison #MichelleIForGiveBarry #ButHowManyPeoplehasHeSetUpForTrial :) https://apnews.com/article/f75c82baa2584ba7896e74294691933f
#WardCount1810 This Extremely Important Feature Was Originally Posted In December 2018
Hexagonal Coverts! Newspaper Honors Frederik De Klerk, 85, In Search For Peace With Spotlight On Interview With Gatsha Buthelezi; And Nelson Mandela letters Stolen By Thieves from My Vacaville Home
A Q&A With Gatsha Buthelezi, South African politician and former prime minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan and INDABA; Buthelezi, In the Interview Buthelezi, A Freedom Movement Associate of the late Bishop Desmond Tutu, Elaborates on His Robben Island Link with Nelson Mandela. Two years before that as Newswatch Senior Staff Writer I interviewed former South African President Thabo Mbeki, who was the featured Keynote Speaker at the Lekki Island based Nigerian National Institute of International Affairs, NIIA.
Read More!
THABO MBEKI’S NIGERIAN ODYSSEY — (1977)
- Mark Gevisser
I
“After being deported from Swaziland in 1976, Thabo Mbeki was posted to Lagos as the African National Congress’s first representative to Nigeria. When he arrived, in January 1977, the city was even more turbulent than usual: traffic-choked with the gluttony of the oil boom, frenetic with the preparations for a huge international arts festival, fired up by the Soweto uprising down south, and edgy with its own student protests following the murder of the wildly popular head of state, General Murtala Mohammed. Murtala’s successor, war hero Olusegun Obasanjo, promised to return Nigeria to democracy after a decade of coups and kleptocracy. His plan was to use the country’s oil dollars to transform it into the epicenter of the black world, the moral and cultural leader of the continent. A major part of this was the sponsorship of “pan-African” cultural and political activities — and foremost among these, of course, was support for the anti-apartheid struggle.”
II
“Mbeki was pleased to discover Baba Gana Kingibe, an old [University of] Sussex classmate, working as a political aide to Obasanjo. Zanele Mbeki spent much of 1977 in Lagos with her husband, and the couple hit it off immediately with the Kingibe family; Kingibe has fond, strong memories of Zanele in his kitchen, learning the art of Nigerian cuisine, and of Thabo Mbeki disappearing enthusiastically into the turmoil of Lagos and returning, exhausted and sated, in the evening. But Kingibe warned Mbeki that the odds were against his [diplomatic] mission [in Nigeria]: The ANC seemed “too soft” to a country aroused by the battle cries of Soweto. Malebo Kotu-Rammopo, a South African exile from a PAC [Pan Africanist Congress] family then studying law in Lagos, was struck by the new ANC [African National Congress] representative’s gravitas: “My overwhelming impression of him was of a young person with a tremendous load on his shoulders, surrounded by older people. Expectations of him were so high.” This was all the more so because of the intensity of anti-apartheid sentiment in Nigeria, which developed the only popular international solidarity movement [in support of Black South Africans] on the continent, akin to that in Sweden and the Netherlands. Obasanjo had initiated a South African Relief Fund, to which every Nigerian was encouraged to contribute. Civil servants willingly had contributions, known popularly as the Mandela Tax, debited from their monthly paychecks, and every second song on the radio [in Nigeria in the late 1970s] seemed to refer to Nelson or Winnie Mandela.”
III
“By the late 1970s, almost all student activism at Nigerian universities focused on the anti-apartheid movement, and much of Mbeki’s work was on campuses across the country. Of course, these young Nigerians were by no means free themselves: The military regime banned all local politics. So there was an edge to anti-apartheid activism not to be found in Western Europe: Nigerians expressed their own political aspirations through the proxy of the South African struggle. As G. G. Darah, the Nigerian critic and editor, puts it, “The explosion in Soweto also exploded something in our hearts.””
IV
“In August 1977 Obasanjo opened the UN Conference Against Apartheid, the largest global gathering yet of its kind. His aim was an enforced arms embargo on South Africa that, three months later, would be ratified by the UN General Assembly: Following Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko’s
death in detention in September 1977, even South Africa’s traditional allies on the Security Council capitulated. By the role it played in the process, Nigeria reaffirmed “its total commitment to our cause,” Mbeki wrote anonymously in the ANC journal Sechaba: “Our struggle is theirs.””
SOURCE:- Mark Gevisser, ‘A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) pp. 157–158.
