From Liberator To Exploiter - Comrade Capitalist

From the Socialist Banner blog

Mosima Gabriel ("Tokyo") Sexwale - former South African liberation fighter turned business tycoon. He was recruited to the ANC underground by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in the early 1970s, went for military training in the former Soviet Union and was infiltrated back into the country in the aftermath of the Soweto youth uprising in June 1976. Sexwale inflicted the first injuries on government forces when he threw a hand grenade at police while entering South Africa from Swaziland. He was caught, went on trial. He was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment and dispatched to join Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on Robben Island.

Released from prison in 1990, he rose to prominence in the ANC, becoming chairman of the party in Gauteng province and then in 1994, the first premier of Gauteng.

A newspaper last year listed his investments as worth R978 million (U.S.$143 million), but informal estimates place it at as much as R6 billion. Sexwale founded Mvelaphanda Holdings , a company of which he is still executive chairman. Mvelaphanda is primarily focused on the mining, energy and related sectors. Some of Sexwale's main interests are oil and diamond mining, for which he has been granted concessions across Africa and Russia; these interests are controlled by a subsidiary of Mvelaphanda Holdings called Mvelaphanda Resources, of which he is chairman. Sexwale holds positions in many international organizations, such as President of the South African/Russian Business, Technological and Cultural Association and Vice President of the South African/Japanese Business Forum. He is also an Honorary Consul General of Finland in South Africa.

How was his cash made? - Black Economic Empowerment (BEE)

Designed to put more of the economy in black hands, in part by forcing the country's largest industries to set targets for training more black workers, promoting more black managers, using more black-owned suppliers and - - this is where the controversy comes in - - selling ownership stakes to black capitalists. Big firms that want to do business with the state must now file a BEE scorecard to prove they are promoting "previously disadvantaged individuals," including blacks, mixed-race "coloreds" and Indians. Since government spending is some $20 billion a year, or about 20% of GDP, it's a deal not many companies can afford to pass up.

A handful of prominent and well-connected black South Africans - - Macozoma, Motsepe, Ramaphosa and Sexwale among them - - recognized the opportunity that presented. As South Africa's biggest companies rushed to meet their BEE requirements, they often turned to the same small group of black capitalists, offering to sell or grant equity stakes at favorable terms, often financed by the companies themselves, in return for connections, expertise and links to the black marketplace.

"You need to be palatable and acceptable to your white business, because white business still holds the purse strings, and Tokyo Sexwale is extremely palatable," says Alec Hogg, South Africa's leading financial analyst and broadcaster. "I think he found the right people to back him. He found one of the leading banks in South Africa, which has virtually given him an open checkbook. And as a consequence of that, he's been able to put together a number of deals - many, many deals in many different areas of the economy."

Tsediso Phofu, another political prisoner on Robben Island, who was in the same cellblock as Sexwale, founded a school for the mentally disabled, but still makes less than $500 a month, and lives in this one-room apartment with his wife and daughter. He says Black Empowerment hasn't benefited him one bit.

"I feel I've been abandoned. I feel somehow you even regret that what it is that we fought for. Why were you fighting the struggle, for the nation, or for certain individuals to be rich? Meanwhile, you remain in poverty," says Phofu.

Now Tokyo Sexwale is lobbying for the leadership of the ANC and effectively the presidency of South Africa.

Alan Johnstone

The Labour Party and the Bomb - Part Four

Part one of the talk can be viewed here.
Part two of the talk can be viewed here.
Part three of the talk can be viewed here.

The Labour Party and the Bomb - Part Three

Part one of the talk can be viewed here.
Part two of the talk can be viewed here.

What the People in Northern Ireland got for 30 Years of Death And Destruction (2007)

Latest post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

It was a great day at Stormont. The great and the good from many countries were there including the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. Centre stage, of course, were Ian Paisley, yesterday’s ‘Never-Never’ man, now grinning like death in the apocalypse, and Martin McGuinness, yesterday’s IRA commander, expensively tailored and replete with effusive grin.

The event was generally acknowledged to be the formal end of Northern’s Ireland’s infamous thirty years of internecine warfare in which nearly 4,000 people were killed and some 60/70,000 injured.

Doubtless the fare was rich and the guests ate heartily. Paisley, Adams and their followers especially may have baulked somewhat at the political menu and the public exhibition of having to eat their words - admittedly. generously marinated in personal emoluments well beyond their past dreams of fulfilment. They could all be well satisfied with the price they got for their bloodthirsty ‘principles’.

Among the less great, the voting fodder who were afforded the democratic privilege of watching the circus on television, there was cynicism and utter disbelief but undoubtedly the overwhelming majority of the people of the province looked on the spectacle with differing measures of relief. If this collection of provocateurs and proxy killers was to be endured for peace - or what passes for peace in capitalist society - they would put up with it. The more thoughtful would have scratched comfort from the realisation that its not very different elsewhere.

Paisley’s DUP and the IRA’s Sinn Fein are together in government. Sane people can only hope that the electorate put them there because it was the despicable price that had to be paid for peace - for the game was always about power - even in Mother Erin’s British subsidised Fourth Green Field.

Ironically, Paisley’s antics over the last 40 years has done more to emaciate Unionism’s power base than the IRA; conversely, Sinn Fein is now an integral part of the political structures its murder campaign was supposed to destroy.

It is reasonable to ask what the working class got in return for its suffering for the victims - the killed and the killers, the mentally and physically maimed, the prisoners - were, as always, overwhelmingly of the working class. The media clarions our reward; we are going to get peace we are told. The agencies that were making war have gone into partnership - showing once again that peace and war emanate from the same source.

Meanwhile real power will not reside in Stormont, or London, or Dublin. It will reside in the cheque books of the billionaires and the multinational consortiums whose profit considerations will decide the priorities. Ultimately it is their writ that determines how we live in latter-day capitalism - even, indeed, if we live!

Richard Montague