By Rutendo Matinyarare
Listening to Redi Tlhabi and Chris Maroleng in Congress yesterday, I thought of the much-talked-about black token and BEE front who, despite being below average in intellect and reasoning, still gets thrust forward as a representative of all black South Africans. Meanwhile, much more capable black people are ignored because the token speaks English with a twang and aligns with white interests.
I won't dwell much on Chris Moreleng because, between the two, he is the least intellectually endowed. When you place him alongside his peers in the country where he was born and educated (Zimbabwe), he comes across as an intellectual non-entity who lives off the favour and nepotism of his white step uncle.
As for Redi, she epitomises the South African system that advances average black people, as long as they speak with a twang and promote the neo-liberal agenda to legalise the continuation and perpetuation of modern day (neo)apartheid.
As part of her opening submission, she asserts that the South African fight is one against poverty, inequality, unemployment and a lack of humanity. But in the same submission, she is at pains to praise the ANC for protecting property rights by allowing white criminals to keep their largess from the genocide and crime against humanity of apartheid, which stole all resources from black South Africans, leaving them dispossessed, enslaved, languishing in poverty and dehumanized, due to a lack of restitution, reparations and ongoing dispossession.
Unbeknownst to her, she was ratifying black dehumanization by ignoring that white settlers don't have title to land and resources they stole and their unjustly gained property, because title can never pass on stolen property. Additionally, the law cannot legalise an illegality over time.
So, Redi was advancing a principle contrary to legal custom, by suggesting that the ANC has respected property rights by not sequestrating stolen property from thieves who dispossessed blacks through genocide.
In fact, she applauds the rewarding of property thieves and maintenance of the victims as dispossessed slaves, to please America, which is the biggest existing colonial power on earth which dispossessed and exterminated Amerindians.
So disconnected from the black plight is Redi, that she fails to give cognizance to victim restitution as a central tenant of justice, set when the Jews received over €102 billion in reparations for just five years of German pogroms.
She has forgotten the injustice and poverty she and her mother grew up in, because now she has been afforded a bond to buy a house to begin wealth accumulation, by working in a media that guarantees freedom for the neo-liberal view, while censoring the leftist view of the majority, thus creating an echo chamber of mind-controlling narratives.
This, in turn, leads South Africans to have the highest misconception and delusion in the world, according to IPSOS, as their thoughts are curated in neo-liberal echo chambers of thought censorship, driven by the likes of Redi.
In classic newspeak, she said South Africa and the US are more alike than Russia and South Africa, in that they have a free media where she has the freedom to speak. What she forgot to say is that she enjoys the right to speak to protect neo-apartheid in South Africa, by censoring Russia Today and opposing voices, to keep the masses hypnotised by one narrative.
She also adds that SA has solid democratic institutions, but fails to point out that institutions like the Reserve Bank, judiciary, investigative bodies and chapter 9 institutions, are captured by the apartheid elite to keep black people as slaves, whites as masters and figures like Redi and Moroleng serving as house negroes who suppress any slave attempting to escape the plantation.
Watching Redi and Maroleng made me feel like maybe South Africans are actually better, living under apartheid.
*Rutendo Matinyarare is the Chairman of ZASM.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Online.