By Olivia Murray
Julius Malema, one of South Africa’s most notorious anti-white political figures, is threatening destruction if he and his ideologues don’t get a seat “at the dinner table.” Now, I’m not exactly sure from when this video is, but over the past few days it’s been making the rounds on X (formerly Twitter); it can be seen below:
Well, let’s look at the facts now shall we? For decades, the South African government has made “land reform” a priority, which really just meant redistribution from white to black, and it’s been a total and utter failure. From a Los Angeles Times article in 2010, after more than 15 years of “reform” and reparations:
Michael Zulu trundles a wheelbarrow along the track to his farm homestead, where chickens peck at the carpet and skinny cats curl sleeping amid the bird droppings.
He’s the farmer now, not just a tractor driver for a white farmer named Engelbrecht, like he used to be.
But he has a shirt full of holes, the roofless ruins of a dairy and a stretch of farmland whose only crop is cow manure, bagged up and stacked against a wall as a substitute for firewood.
‘I thought I’d be much better off. But I think it was better with Mr. Engelbrecht. We lived high with Mr. Engelbrecht. We got money from him and we could look after our children.’
The land program had noble intent: redressing the wrongs of apartheid, when blacks were denied access to farmland, and lifting black rural people out of grinding poverty by buying farms from willing white owners and giving them to blacks.
It has done neither.
Nearly another 15 years on, things are still the same. One in-depth analysis, published in January of this year, revealed just how bad “reform” has been for everybody, with the data to prove it:
The South African government has been buying farmland for black farmers. It’s not gone well
The main findings were that the performance on most farms bought under the acquisition scheme had been disappointing. More than half the current beneficiaries were not reporting any substantial production. The same percentage were evaluated as having a low capacity to achieve commercial status.
…
More than half the current beneficiaries were not reporting any substantial production, and more than half the beneficiaries were evaluated as having a low capacity to achieve commercial status.
…
Nearly half (47%) of the farms that had been acquired were found to have some degree of degradation, while 13% were seriously or severely degraded.
…
Of concern is the significant number (350) of farms that produced no commodities.
Of course, opponents of the results, like a journalist for The Guardian last year, will suggest that the “system was stacked” against the black farmers, but the analysis referenced above debunks that too, asserting this:
Most farms acquired under the initiative had high potential. It’s therefore possible to dismiss the myth that the land acquired for land reform was of poor quality.
The assessment showed that land acquired through the programme was generally of good or fair quality, and 98% of farms had fair to good natural resources.
Couldn’t the South Africans like Malema take a hint from what Zimbabwe already did? Under Robert Mugabe, white farmers were violently (often murderously) evicted from their homesteads, and eventually, food production came to a grinding halt, with food insecurity reaching crisis levels just a few years back. Now, white farmers are returning, and lo and behold, people are being fed. From a Telegraph article this past September:
‘Agriculture is taking off in Zimbabwe again and it’s because the government has realised [sic] you need the best people on the land, regardless of what colour [sic] they are,’ said one white farmer who declined to be named.
This isn’t to suggest at all that a black man can’t be as successful as a white man at farming, but any man (regardless of color) who views the world as Malema does? He’ll never contribute anything more than violence and hate. Riddled with envy, clinging to a status of victimhood, Malema isn’t suggesting earning “a seat at the dinner table,” but rather he’s coming to conquer, and the whites better move aside. As someone in the comments noted, “This is why they stuck at where they are. No build[ing]. Only destroy[ing].” Progress and prosperity comes with personal responsibilty and initiative.
The irony is, Malema and his like-minded comrades have had a seat at the dinner table… which is why the dinner table is bare, and much of the farmland is now desolate and non-arable.
