Life is full of delicious ironies. Including how a young Albert Einstein, the personification of human genius, was systematically turned down by virtually every European academic institution.
We saw another example over the weekend.
On Saturday, rising politician Julius Malema basked in the adoration of thousands, repeating his mission to transform South Africa into a socialist utopia. Yesterday, the reality of this vision played out in violence-wracked Venezuela where its deeply unpopular president took a final step to dictatorship with a rigged election for a supreme political body.
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Nicolas Maduro’s creation, a constituent assembly, is endorsed by a supreme court packed with his supporters. It will effectively replace Parliament where the opposition won a two third majority in recent elections. Its first task is to draft a new constitution turning Venezuela into a one-party communist state like Cuba.
This is the latest instalment in a nightmare for a well-endowed country, once the richest in South America. Venezuela is now wracked by hyper inflation; its GDP per capita is back to levels of the 1950s; and 93% of the people cannot afford the food or medicine they need (last year three quarters lost weight and maternal mortality jumped 66%).
I’ve paid particular attention to Venezuela in recent years. Partly because of increasingly popular Malema’s unbridled desire to replicate its social engineering disaster. And because of a growing engagement with the country’s exiled former Trade Minister Moises Naim, whom I met in Davos a decade back.
In 1998, Venezuela elected populist Hugo Chavez, a former Army officer whose “Bolivarian revolution” effected the economic ideas closest to Malema’s heart. Indeed, such is his admiration for the South American that virtually from the outset, the EFF leader even adopted Chavez’s revolutionary’s red beret.
When the price of crude surged, this oil rich nation flourished (its reserves are the highest on earth) despite Chavez’s huge expansion of the state, massive reallocation of resources into social programmes and the forced takeover of more than 1,500 private businesses and farms.
But when the oil price came back to earth, Chavez’s economic insanity was soon exposed for what it is. In the last five years debt has ballooned, and default looks likely next year. Even once generous China has shut off the taps. After the wilful destruction of private enterprise, Venezuela no longer produces much of anything. With nationalised oil production down 400,000 barrels a day and the lower crude price, the country no longer has the money to pay for imported necessities.
By the time Chavez died of cancer in 2013, the writing was already on the wall. His anointed successor, former bus driver Maduro, added grease to an already slippery slide by following the Mugabe approach of simply printing money to address the growing fiscal deficit.
That sent inflation towards 1,000%. Worse, Maduro then introduced price controls and put the army in charge of a food distribution system modelled on Cuba’s ration books – creating ever longer queues and turning generals (whose number has mushroomed from 200 to 2,000) into corrupt overlords.
In typical dictatorial style, Maduro and his closest cohorts are guarded by foreign mercenaries (several thousand Cuban security personnel) and blame their problems on the “imperialist West”. The regime retains the support of around a quarter of the population who work for the State. In return for allegiance, they receive free housing, generous rations and steady salaries.
On the streets it’s chaotic. Over 100 people have died in battles between protestors and a militarised police force called the National Guard. Hundreds of the protestors and Maduro’s political opponents are in jail. Masked young activists have now organised themselves into what they call “The Resistance”. Many pundits fear that after yesterday’s sham election, civil war is brewing.
The Economist, which features “Venezuela’s agony” as the major focus of this week’s edition, concludes: “the Bolivarian revolution has created a state run by rival mafias and undermined from within by corruption. It is a textbook example of why democracy matters: people with bad governments should be able to throw the bums out.”
Led by Argentina and Brazil, much of long suffering South America has managed to do what the magazine suggests, and is tossing out corrupt and tyrannical leftist regimes. But Venezuela shows what can happen when those who hold power refuse to yield.
Watching the unfolding tragedy should be noted by those who would lead SA. At the very least it would force them to replace Chavez-invented idiocy for something aligned with the brilliance of Einstein. A man who, biographer Water Isaacson notes, was “allergic to nationalism, militarism and anything that smacked of a herd mentality…with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.”
