Phansi Xenophobia Phansi!!!

My peace was interrupted this morning by the xenophobia being peddled by some twit in a suit on television. Now while the SABC is free to choose whom they invite to appear as experts on any particular matter, the fact is that getting a dude who claims to be the shadow deputy minister of defence and military veterans (which he is not), as opposed to the deputy shadow-minister of defence and military veterans (which he is), indicates that perhaps the SABC needs to refine their search criteria.

And apparently the Minister of Defence (and presumably military veterans) Lindiwe Sisulu was unavailable to appear alongside the deputy shadow-xenophobe, who incidentally is from the self appointed moral hyenas of our rainbow nation, the DA. So we were treated to a five minute discussion on our supposedly poriferous borders. Our borders, mind you, with Lesotho and Zimbabwe that is. He said nothing about the longest South African border, being our unguarded and unmanned eastern, southern and western coastlines.

He also failed to mention our borders with Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland and Namibia. But that’s a small matter, it is very rare that the DA gets anything right, and why would they want to offend their Mozam-Portuguese or Namib-German donors, let alone going after Botswana which, according to the DA, is the only stable African country, or for that matter for interfering with the Kingdom of Swaziland where so many South Africans have holidayed, sometimes even without their wives.

The twit from the DA, his excellency, the deputised representative of the shadow-minister for defence and military veterans, wants more policing of our borders and he wants this from the military, that is the SANDF not the SAPS. Fair enough, after all the SAPS has enough to do in respect of suppressing service delivery protests and other social malcontents. So the DA suggests the border patrol and guarding divisions of the SAPS become part of the SANDF and that the SANDF, together with customs and immigration, should ensure that our borders are less porous.

Now while this xenophobic twit from the DA’s shadow chancery may have grown up listening to all sorts of stories about the frontline states, and even more stories about liberals who dodged the SADF draft “as moral conscientious objectors” (or lazy-arsed, pot smoking, liberal hippies); it must be quite an adventure to go and inspect the borders of our state and make judicious statements claiming that the country is vulnerable and prone to invasion.

Of course the xenophobic twit from the DA knows nothing, because he evidently doesn’t understand that Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia are all places were the South African rand is accepted as currency, and indeed are all countries whose citizens live and work and learn in South Africa. In fact, the very existance of the SA Common Monetary Area and the SA Customs Union, suggests that there should be no borders or restrictions on movement between the SADC countries at all. Or are such arrangements only for the white people of Western Europe?

But the worst part of the xenophobic attack perpetrated by the DA on national, public television this morning was the suggestion that Zimbabwean and Lesotho nationals are coming to South Africa (illegally) and are placing strain on our resources. Naturally at this point I would have hurled a brick at the television, but I am rather fond of watching the Canadian ICS agents patrolling their border with the USA on SABC 3, which I’m sure is what has inspired the DA’s shadowy war veteran to film a reality TV interview in a river bed on the Zimbabwean side of the border. Oh, the thrill of living dangerously.

But I think what is most annoying is that the DA is a liberal party which supports, by its own declaration, an open opportunity society; except that they don’t mean this in the real sense, just insofar as they need to justify the issuance of contracts and tenders to white business people in the Western Cape. Because an open opportunity society would predetermine that the SADC, the SADC and the (SA)CMA were made up of the same member states and that in and among the 14 or 15 member states, there were no borders, no needs for visas, residency and work permits; and no undue harrassment of anyone who was a SADC citizen.

However it seems that the DA promised an open society, they were elected into office in die Weskaap on the basis of an open society, but now they are peddling a closed society; and that is fraud in anyone’s language./em>

Finally, I would like to understand why the DA is condemning people who in the Western Cape have proposed a variable wage rate, that is less than the R55 per day which is the Cosatu approved minimum wage rate? Given that free enterprise and the market economy suggests that fixed and minimum wage rates are counter productive and prevent the producers, manufacturers and wholesalers from cutting their output prices to retailers and in turn that this prevents the retailers from cutting their prices to their customers.

Now unless the Western Cape farmers are just greedy bunch, who will take the lower wage-earners and not pass these savings on to the customer, we can see that stimulating competition in the wage and labour market is imperative.

After all we are in a recession and if I want to reduce my consultation fee from R2 500/hour to R500/hour so that people like the shadow-minister for defence and military veterans can actually afford my services, that’s my right — because the only thing that wage fixing does is to drive illegal employment underground and out of sight; while reducing the number of people who actually find employment.

Personally I would rather have full employment at a lower wage rate (and then hash the retailers for price cuts to reduce the cost of living) than partial employment at a higher wage rate; but then again this is my experience as an unemployed and destitute person, who cares more about the welfare of the people living in inhumane conditions all over the country than about the suited elite, prophesising this DA-Cope-logic of amaKweraKwera.

Even the IFP supports an open SADC, albeit one that recognises the sovereignty of our Kingdom of KwaZulu, but an open society nonetheless. After all the Niger-Congo (A&B) people are one people, although we speak many languages and have many customs and cultures and social orders throughout Southern Africa.

And just as a side note, to the shadow minister for defence and military veterans, you claim that South Africa is a friend to every dictator and that our foreign policy violates our own human rights culture; and that this situation is the ANC’s fault; but I have just seen your surrogate matriarch on TV, the US’s Secretary of State, Hillary “I don’t go down on Bill” Clinton; and she was having tea with Hamid “The mayor of Kabul / Agent for Unocal & Co” Karzai, a person who is accused of stealing both of his two election victories.

And since the DA would never dare to criticise the US Democratic Party or its leaders, given just how lonely those Harvard nights can be, and just how the US-DP has influenced the structure of the innards of the DA, it must then be acceptable for democracies like the USA to be in bed with human rights abusers, but unacceptable for us poor Africans to be friends with the same human rights abusers.

By the way, you do know that Hamid Karzai is the biggest horse, smack, junk, heroin and shugars dealer in the world; and that the Obamanians promised to close the Guantánamo Prison and withdraw from both Iraq and Afghanistan — but that none of these things are happening any time soon.

But just to be clear, the DA is adopting a “NO MEXICANS ALLOWED” policy in South Africa, because good fences make for good neighbours. And while they say this we all think, if only there had been soldiers, customs and immigration at Table Bay to tax, control and stockade Van Riebeck and his very, very merry lords.

After all, we South Africans have more in common with our siblings from throughout the SADC and Sub-Saharan Africa than we do with any jumped up xenophobe of European origin bearing a South African passport or not.

But nonetheless we must be grateful that this early in the game the colonial-DA and colonised-Cope have announced that they are Anti-African xenophobes and racists — because I don’t hear anyone complaining about the number of Chinese people who are taking away jobs from South Africans by undercutting our wage rates.