GARETH VAN ONSELEN: SA’s disturbing echoes with Zimbabwe
News of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s unseating has been welcomed in some quarters. But it invites uncomfortable parallels with SA’s own political malaise
In July 2015, EFF leader Julius Malema said of Zimbabwe’s president: "President Robert Mugabe is the only leader who knows [that] for the real change to come, Africans will have to go through the necessary pain, exactly what Zimbabweans are going through now." Last week, the Zimbabwean people, if the army is to be believed, reached their pain threshold. Malema continued: "We don’t see what’s happening in Zimbabwe as anarchy. We don’t blame it on President Mugabe, we blame it on capital ... [It is] because they disagree with him politically, they use their economic muscle to punish the people." Just last week, SA presidential hopeful Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and the incumbent, Jacob Zuma, went on ANN7 to bemoan the same problem. Only here, we have expanded that description of the enemy: it’s white monopoly capital — the root of all evil. Opposite that, we have some fundamental socialist economic agenda. The EFF calls it "economic freedom in our lifetime"; the ANC, "radical economic tra...
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