BNC London: An honest assessment from Tom Bedford
Among the highlights of last week's BizNews pre-election conference in London was having a front row seat occupied by Rhodes scholar, Oxford Blue, architect and legendary Springbok No 8 Tommy Bedford. It took effort on his part as the now UK-based Bedford had a serious fall on some rock-hard ice while skiing in Austria a few weeks earlier. That resulted in his being helicoptered to hospital and eventually brought back to England with instructions to be bed-bound for eight weeks. Bedford recovered faster than the medics forecast and although aided by crutches joined us 120 others in Westminster. Here is his assessment of the one day event. Am hoping it is not the last time we receive material from his cultured pen. – Alec Hogg
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By Tom Bedford
I enjoyed the insightful gathering on Wednesday. Great pity though there were not more attendees.
The Conference was followed by the Election's voting taking place at South Africa House in Trafalgar Square on Saturday. A video on the internet of the huge number doing so subsequently did the rounds, an indication also of the multitude of South Africans mainly in London who have, presumably, left the country. Later in the day another video circulated showing as impressive a queue formed in Den Haag re the voting in Holland. Both were reminders of the queues around the block of the Methodist Church then formed in Westminster (behind Birdcage Walk) in 1992 when casting our votes on the referendum of ending South African apartheid.
Unlike the photos, videos and television coverage which followed in elections of 1994 and those held thereafter when the snaking queues were shown to be mainly of black South Africans voting, it was as noticeable that these queueing voters in 2024 were all white South Africans. If ever there was an indication of the scale of emigration abroad thanks to what the country has morphed into and which as likely is as a result of the ANC's BEE and BBBEE policies mentioned during the Conference ostracising the employment of qualified white South Africans, the extent of these queues formed in London and Den Haag winding around their respective city blocks waiting patiently to vote, was surely the loudest of testimonies of a section of the population deemed largely "unemployable" in their own country but who have obviously found no difficulty being meaningfully employed in what one must assume are competitive fields of skilled employment in both the UK and Holland to which they have migrated.
Looking at the sheer numbers of those queueing and relating them as South Africans doing their stuff for the economic well-being of the UK and Holland – including paying their taxes in these respective countries – comparing this scenario to GG Alcock's address at the Conference does add a dimension to the way some of the ANC's rotten rules have been completely counter-productive to the well-being that the new democracy demanded. His analysis centring on South Africa's black economy as practised in the townships and rural areas was of a blossoming tax free economy thriving there with its own entrepreneurial norms sustaining (perhaps secondary) lifestyles, while the formal economy was struggling, reliant as it was on governmental tax gathering often based on unhelpful regulations related to business where those most skilled and educated people were excluded from playing their vital contributing roles in helping to form, maintain and service key aspects of the new South Africa in the making.
Having listened to GG's presentation on Wednesday and seeing the start of the 2024 general election voting in action three days later, plus having heard that in South Africa there were only 9 million individual tax payers amongst a population of 66 million in the official economy and where besides 33% of the working population were without work, one can only conclude that the ANC cadres running the country have been, and indeed still are, a truly rum lot who in a coup within the governing party took over the country largely for themselves after the Mandela and Mbeki eras. In view of Frans Cronje's analysis, I think it will be of added interest surely how the drivers of GG Alcock's black economy will thus also vote on 29th May, seeing they apparently form such an important economic block within those black communities.
It seem to me, therefore, that no matter who wins or loses, or in whatever combination parties end up to form the country's governing body, with its human failures on almost every front everywhere which followed the near divine Mandela led ANC providence of governance we had hoped would evolve in the new democratic South Africa for which we voted thirty years ago, there is no Mandela (nor a Mbeki) who can turn this crooked and lawless South Africa of today around. Until such a person emerges to put right the current psyche of so many where wrongs are no longer distinguishable from rights, where a daily murder rate of 75 is today an acceptable norm yet Ramaphosa's government feels it can take Israel to court over the Gazan situation and all. the while totally ignoring the worse Ethiopian/Darfur conflict, and where even the apartheid whipping sport that rugby was despite being the only thing still winning after thirty years of the new devolution the government seems to want to put the cosh on that unqualified success too), we will, I fear, remain directionless and adrift retaining such skewed values..
You presented me with Paul O'Sullivan's "Stop Me If You Can". I much look forward to reading it (not immediately I'm afraid as I am struggling to finish the record of some of my own involvements in the stuff of South Africa) and thank you greatly for it.
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