I don’t think the average South African looks at Zimbabwe and says “I wish we lived like that”. But I bet Ramaphosa looks at Mugabe and thinks “I wish I lived like that”. Ramaphosa’s wishes matter more than the average citizen’s.
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South Africa has until recently been a decent model for other countries to orient their policies toward. But if the continent’s biggest economic engine moves more and more in the direction of Zimbabwe, then economic growth, investor confidence, and, most important, average people going about their daily lives will suffer not only in South Africa but in the nearby countries with which it trades and does business. August 21st, 2018 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The paper edition of the Times that hit my doormat this morning had an interesting headline: “Hi-tech kit keeps rhinos safe from poachers”. The online version has an even more interesting headline: “Hi-tech kit and ex-spies keeps South Africa’s rhinos safe from poachers”. Neither headline is untrue, both the hi-tech gadgetry and the spies are helping preserve the rhinos, but both are missing something. My use of the “Deleted by the PC Media” tag is a little inaccurate, as is my use of the “Hippos” tag, but we seem to lack a tag for “Rhinos” or for “Never even entered the PC Media’s pretty little heads despite the facts staring them in the face from their own reporting”. See if you can guess what the missing factor is from this excerpt:
May 25th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nongqawuse was a fifteen year old Xhosa girl who in 1856 had a vision in which three ancestral spirits told her that if the Xhosa people showed their trust by destroying their crops and killing their cattle, then on the appointed day the spirits would raise the dead, bountifully replace all that was destroyed, and sweep the British into the sea. Thousands believed this prophecy and slaughtered their cattle. But the dead slept on and the British remained in place. Nongqawuse explained that this lack of action was due to the amagogotya, the stingy ones, who had kept their cattle back from slaughter. She urged everyone to greater efforts. A new date was set for the prophecy to finally come true. The rate of cattle-killing rose to a climax. Eventually the Xhosa lost patience, and, with remarkable mercy, handed Nongqawuse over to the British. By then famine had reduced the population of British Kaffraria from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000. * City A.M. reports that John McDonnell says Venezuela is failing because it is ‘not a socialist country’. Oh, and our Chancellor-in-waiting says that he will overthrow capitalism. If you want to watch the Sunday Politics interview where he said all this, this BBC link will work for another 28 days. May 21st, 2018 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Grim news from South Africa. Just in case anyone thought that the departure of President Zuma, a corrupt man who has stripped his country (South Africa faces severe water shortages brought on by neglect of infrastructure) might lead to better things will be disappointed. The new regime has signed off on a land-grab policy of confiscating white-owned land without compensation. (About 70 per cent of South African farmland is owned by whites.) The claim made is that any white person who owns land in the country must, by definition, have stolen it. (The idea that such ownership might have come into being without theft just does not cross certain persons’ minds. That fact is simply undiscussible.) As we have found in the seizure/collectivisation of farms in the former Soviet Union, in China, and in Zimbabwe more recently, such moves herald mass poverty and violence. South Africa has ironically seen an influx of poor Zimbabweans since the vile Mugabe regime started to attack white farmers and seize land; the country has suffered a catastrophic decline in its farmland output, which may never recover. South Africa seems keen to follow suit; it has a range of largely self-inflicted woes: the current government is deeply corrupt. The country needs inward investment – seizing white-owned property hardly encourages any investor, of any racial background. As a matter of simple common sense, taking land by brute force, without compensation, from owners and giving it to those who are political cronies and hangers-on will inevitably reduce output and wealth, not the other way round. The unfolding of South Africa’s history is a tragedy, and it is easy to see why there is an element of “score-settling” at work here. Apartheid, let it not be forgotten, was introduced in the late 1940s at the behest to some degree of the white trade union movement, keen to bolster its bargaining power. Even if you were a private entrepreneur who wanted to hire non-whites for certain jobs, for example, you couldn’t. (Minimum wage laws operated in ways that hurt, not helped, non-whites.) The system was as absurd and vile as the Jim Crow laws of the US, or other examples of serfdom and oppression down the ages. It had to go; for anyone who supports a free market economy, apartheid and its cousins are absurd as well as wrong. But the solution of seizing white-owned land, regardless of the honesty or provenance of it, and giving it to people via a political carve-up, turns the injustices inherited from the old regime on their head, creating a new form of racism. Two wrongs do not make a right. And further, one suspects that the land seizures are an attempt to deflect attention from the failings of the existing regime. Compare and contrast how, for example, the “Asian tigers” threw off their old colonial masters and focused on getting seriously rich, not least by respecting property rights. And wherever one looks, there does seem a pretty tight correlation between respect for property rights – indeed their very existence – with prosperity and happiness more broadly. Hernando de Soto has made something of a career pushing the point that the world needs more property rights, spread among more people. (Check out this recent lecture by Niall Ferguson on the same sort of issue.) As an aside, it also seems to be a pretty solid marker of respect for property rights to have a large and growing middle class. I suspect that one of the underlying problems in South Africa is that among the non-white population, persons who can be so described aren’t a big portion of the total. Lest anyone pounces on the notion that what has happened proves that certain racial groups are incapable of building a civilized political order, bear in mind that here in the UK, the oh-so-white Caucasian leadership of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, and his colleagues, want to do to the owners of privately-owned industries such as electricity, gas, and the rest what the new leadership in South Africa wants to do to white farmers. The defence of settled property rights remains a vital cause for anyone interested not just in prosperity, but liberty. As of this week, that cause took a turn for the worse in South Africa. February 28th, 2018 | 89 comments - (Comments are closed)
Under Ian Smith (remember him?), only 5% of the population of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) had votes that counted (and all but one in twenty of them were white) but the other 95% of the population did eat: Mugabe inherited a country where their prosperity was rising. By 2016, only Mugabe and a few cronies had votes that counted, and Zimbabwe produced not the 300,000+ tons of grain per year that it once did, but 20,000 tons. Or, as the poet did not quite put it,
It seems so superflous to add that non-white racism (between the Shona and Ndebele tribes) was also a feature of Mugabe’s rule; he was a Shona as well as a socialist. February 3rd, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I imagine that for many Samizdata readers, the daily diet of gossip and snark and tittle tattle that dominates the output of Guido Fawkes is not to their taste, even if they do entirely see the point of it, and are glad that it happens. But every so often, Guido does a posting that is of much more than local appeal, which would connect to a far wider audience, provided only that they are alerted to its existence. So, allow me to alert you to this posting, which features the maiden speech of Kemi Badenoch, Conservative MP for Saffron Walden. Guido describes this maiden speech as his favourite of the 2017 intake by far. I especially liked the Woody Allen reference. But basically, I liked it all. Her website is here. If more British Conservative Party people were capable of talking or even thinking like this, I’d seriously consider joining them. July 21st, 2017 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Thompson has up a most interesting post:
There follow some related links. I’m afraid I can’t remember which I read first to give proper credit. I think my brain has been frazzled by all the witchcraft flying about. A quick science lesson for the #ScienceMustFall idiots. I sincerely hope that the unnamed staff writer who wrote this reply for what seems to be a Zimbabwean online publication is more representative of the state of scientific thought in Africa than the Social Justice Witches. Tim Blair reports that science is a product of the (very pathetic) West. What did Newton know? Rioting students determined to defy gravity, reports the Times. It’s behind a paywall but sufficiently decolonised people can overcome that with a spell. Science Must Fall: it’s time to decolonise science – The Spectator‘s Coffee House blog. Fallism: Into the intellectual abyss – Michael Cardo, a South African MP for the opposition Democratic Alliance, wrote a good post lambasting the cowardly response of the UCT authorities. This might be the ur-video, posted by someone called “UCTScientist”. Oooh, here’s a good one, from the University of Cape Town Left Students Forum: “As the UCT LSF we will like to clarify our position on a recent statement by a member of the movement, captured in a viral youtube video #ScienceMustFall”. I bet you would. By the way, “#ScienceMustFall” is not a parody name imposed upon these students by imperialist Western witchcraft-deniers. It is what they call themselves. It seems these people do not want to pay fees for university, and also do not want to be taught Western science. Thinking about it, that might not be so difficult to achieve. Could they not go to learn at the feet of a shaman, who obviously would not take money to pass on his wisdom, and let the silly people willing to pay to learn Western science do that? October 17th, 2016 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Willie Penrose, a Labour member of the Irish Dáil, is singing an old song from a tradition known all over the world:
Following the link about South Africa took me to this BBC story: The BBC describes the quota in lyrical terms:
It almost seems a pity to tear oneself away from sharing these glad hosannas to look at a couple of ominous lines some grinch has inserted into the same report:
and
Going back to the report about Mr Penrose’s Irish Music Quota Bill in TheJournal.ie, some of the comments strike a discordant and ominous note:
Unlike Mr Penrose, I am not musical, and I don’t keep up with these internet thingies the young folk use … but isn’t there a thing called “music streaming” now? October 1st, 2016 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Between watching other things last night my television briefly showed me Ross Kemp in Africa talking to a park ranger about elephant poachers armed with AK-47s. In voiceover he said that in the last 10 years 1000 park rangers have been killed. I looked it up. The Game Rangers Association of Africa are quoting the same figure. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature are saying the same thing, adding that the numbers are as reported by co-operating countries to the International Ranger Federation. My first thought was to wonder how the nature conservationists think it is worth that much human life to protect some animals. But as David Moore succinctly puts it in response to a Tim Worstall post about “waste [disposal] crime”, this is really another case of “government regulations creating massive incentives to bypass government regulations”. Now there are objections. A one-off legal ivory sale intended to reduce the price of ivory apparently increased demand for poached ivory because researchers Prof Solomon Hsiang at the University of California Berkeley and Nitin Sekar at Princeton University, “think the legal sale reduced the stigma of ivory, boosting demand, and provided cover for the smuggling of illegal ivory, boosting supply”. This strikes me as a problem with one-off sales specifically, which are distinct from the long-term balance of supply and demand seen in a free market. A couple of years ago Simon Jenkins argued in favour of ivory farming, and Will Travers responded with some impertinent arguments and some teenage emotional outpourings echoed by the commentariat that seem to amount to little more than “why can’t we all just get along?” Case in point:
It does sound awfully easy when typed by a middle-class Guardian reader coddled in his air-conditioned public-sector office or a newly-vegetarian thirteen-year-old girl. Here is how this middle-class libertarian blogger would solve it from his air-conditioned office: Abolish Cites, legalise the trade, and privatise the reservations so that the owners have an incentive to keep producing ivory, therefore preserving the species. There will still be poachers, but at least the profits could fund some proper security. Addendums: Ivory is in the news very recently and I commented there; we do seem to talk about ivory a lot here; this is a small problem compared to, say, mosquito borne illness (which I am planning to write about soon). September 22nd, 2016 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ethiopia again:
The ruling party in Ethiopia is the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The name says a lot. Wikipedia details concisely their ideology.
That would be the kind of decadence that lets us feed ourselves when the weather is bad. The Wikipedia article cites an article in the Addis Ababa university paper.
They fucking know what they have done, and what they should do to fix it.  April 7th, 2016 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day, driving around Liverpool (a fine but faded city), I heard on the radio a short item looking back on the experiment of a 1980s military government in Nigeria, whereby the General in charge, President Buhari (later to become a civilian, elected President, but only after being overthrown and jailed in another coup) had got his deputy to launch a ‘War Against Indiscipline‘ or ‘WAI‘ (why?) in March 1984.
This was, like most government ‘wars’ these days, directed against its own populace. But it was one with immodest objectives such as to get officials not to take bribes (rather than getting rid of officials’ jobs), stopping students cheating in exams, and getting people to learn the national anthem, not merely to get people not to fight for a place on a bus. I wonder what government’s programme inspired it? It seems to have a touch of a Lenin Saturday. Some elements had a slightly comical aspect, such as making civil servants turn up for work on time (anyone see that as a good idea?) with soldiers making them do star jumps in front of colleagues if they were late for work. Someone also named an album after the WAI, so it has some resonance in popular culture. There were others programmes too, a ‘clean-up’ campaign to improve hygiene, which I’m told persists to this day. I had not heard about this ‘war’ previously, in the 1980s a military government in Nigeria seemed to be about as regular as the US Congress hiking the Federal debt limit, it was more ‘when’ not ‘if’. Nigerian acquaintances and a family member doing business there had told me plenty of grim stories about the behaviour of police and soldiers in Nigeria as it was, I had not realised that a whole new justification for State thuggery had been dreamt up. Of course, there was the implementation, the basic idea seems to have been that the common soldiery would go around the country and would ensure that the civilian population ‘behaved themselves’. What, might you think, could possibly go wrong?
So was patriotism the first resort of a scoundrel? The radio programme reports beatings being handed out by soldiers. The ‘war’ ended when another faction in the military overthrew Buhari, and the effort at expressly changing popular behaviours by force was more or less at an end. One might hope that the example of this dirigiste thinking, which I now see faintly echoed in old Labour Party proposals for yobs to be marched to cash machines by police in order to pay an on-the-spot fine, might be enough to make those who seek to change behaviour (other than aggression) by force think again.
Impractical, is it not also tyrannical? Is living with other people’s annoying behaviour (when not affecting you or your property) that hard for people? Let people be, if they see a harmony of rightly-understood interests in queueing and civil behaviour, then fine. If not, then that is how they are. A government ‘war’ isn’t going to be the right answer, unless your end is war itself. And of course, there are the Nudge Nazis. But there’s nothing like nostalgia, and some are calling for the President to re-start this war. And in Benin, if this report is believed, a woman motorist lashed out at their own, newer, better WAI officials.
Back in Liverpool, this facade on the oddly-named State House caught my eye; the motto ‘Trade and Navigation‘, the State playing the biggest role in that city now. April 7th, 2016 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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