South Africa is going down the plughole. What do the anti-apartheid campaigners have to say about that?

Posted By: Ed West - Telegraph.co.uk

I've never been to South Africa and am in no rush to do so. As a rule I prefer to holiday in countries where murder and rape are not part of everyday life. And I know the scenery is great and the climate is similar to that of the Mediterranean, but then again the climate in Italy and Spain is just like the Mediterranean and I don't have to worry about carjackings when I mince around Florence in my socks and sandals.

And if it's so wonderful, post-apartheid, why do the Afrikaaners seem to be building a volkstadt in south-west London?

So I don't claim to be an expert. However, the experts agree that the country is going down the plughole, and even the biased BBC can no longer polish the turd that is the ANC.

New leader Jacob Zuma has 783 counts of fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and corruption to his name. He's a polygamist and was, or maybe still is, a Communist, and is lampooned in the press with a shower nozzle on his head because of his belief, which came out during his 2006 rape trial, that having a shower after intercourse prevented the spread of the Aids virus (although previous president Thabo Mbeki isn't exactly Ben Goldacre either when it came to his views on the disease).

This article is particularly depressing. I know Hitch the Younger is not exactly the most optimistic chap at the best of times, but his take on "Comrade Zuma" is particularly downbeat.

Zuma is wholly African. He has at least four wives and 18 children. He has for years avoided standing trial on fraud and corruption charges. Nobody seriously believes he ever will: his approaching election is already spreading fear in South Africa's legal establishment.

Mr Zuma joined the Communist Party in 1962 (he only left a few years ago), and has a dark and inadequately examined past as a much-feared intelligence chief in the ANC's ruthless armed wing, Spear of the Nation. He underwent 'military training' in the old Soviet Union in 1978, when the KGB was very much in charge of such things.
Many fear it will rapidly become a lawless kleptocracy when he comes to power, which he will do after a hopelessly one-sided and rather crooked election.

The grisly Winnie Mandela, a convicted fraud with a creepy past, is number five on the ANC's parliamentary election list, despite the fact that as a criminal she is legally banned from being an MP. She is expected to be a minister in any Zuma government.
Zuma's old friend and business partner, Schabir Shaik, has just been released early - on medical grounds, although almost nobody believes this - from a 15-year sentence imposed in 2006 for fraud and corruption, including a payment to Zuma himself.

I've always suspected the true motivations of many in the anti-apartheid movement.

By the mid-1980s almost every single country in sub-Saharan Africa was a failed state. People were starving in man-made famines. Many of the governments oppressed the people far worse than the racist South African government abused the Zulus and Xhosa. Even in the 1980s Bob Mugabe, then an anti-racist hero, massacred the minority Ndebele ethnic group and there were no films made or songs sung about that.

Did the anti-apartheid movement in the west - including musicians like Paul Simon, The Specials AKA, in fact pretty much everyone in the music industry, a bright, flashing warning light in itself - really believe that a "democratic" South Africa would work? Were they actually that naive and stupid? Or did they concentrate on South Africa, not several other far more evil African regimes, because it made them feel better? Did they not understand that mass emigration of the country's whites might contribute to the total impoverishment of the blacks might be connected?

Apartheid was an awful system, and was morally indefensible, but if South Africa is going the way of Zimbabwe then the anti-apartheid campaigners should ask themselves who, exactly, will be to blame for the death of millions.