LETTER: Nxesi thinks ideology will beat reality
Minister is unable to understanding that his beliefs are behind SA’s unemployment crisis
How could a world leader with the experience of Vladimir Putin make the appallingly bad decision to invade Ukraine? It appears to have been driven by a crazy mystical belief in Russian imperial exceptionalism. Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in 1941 was much the same, brushing off any thoughts about the Russian winter and logistic challenges.
The Russian FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB, would have reported to Putin and his elite on the UK’s Operation Orbital, which provided much needed training to the Ukrainian forces after the 2014 war. He would have had information on the influx of anti-tank weapons and the Ukrainians’ determination to resist. But such factual evidence was discarded in favour of Russia’s supposed destiny.
This is not the first time such idiocy has happened in Russia. Stalin’s decision to collectivise Ukrainian farms in the late 1920s was built on Trofim Lysenko’s fallacious theory that crops could be trained to co-operate like good socialists and produce bumper crops even in winter. The resulting Holodomor killed up to 10-million people, setting the stage for the current conflict.
Not to be outdone, China’s Mao Zedong embraced Lysenko’s ideas in the late 1950s, resulting in the demise of an additional 40-million people. Mao even forced millions of Chinese to kill sparrows because he thought they were responsible for the grain shortage. Such criminal blunders happen when countries allow themselves to be governed by autocratic, ideologically driven elites.
It’s no different in SA. Children have already started to die of malnutrition in the Eastern Cape, while the ANC elite still wants to “redistribute” the land. Another Lysenko wannabe, “unemployment” minister Thulas Nxesi, now also acting “public disservice & maladministration” minister, is determined to get the Employment Equity Amendment Bill passed to enforce his vision of BEE. This is despite the fact that the unemployment rate, on the expanded version, is now more than 46%.
Like Lysenko or Stalin or Putin or Mao, Nxesi is incapable of understanding that his ideological beliefs are the cause of this problem. But then he is also deputy president of the SA Communist Party. As Putin is realising and the ANC one day will, in contests between reality and ideology, reality always eventually wins.
James Cunningham
Camps Bay
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.