Amazon says a Black Economic Empowerment project it is working on must exclude whites completely. Not a single white is allowed. Even a 1% white shareholding is too much. This, Amazon says, is the law of the land in South Africa. The most striking thing about it all is the contradiction. When the Trump administration went after the South African government for doing “bad things” and persecuting the whites the government’s defense included that BEE was not compulsory, there was room for all races etc. Business in South Africa and the legacy media all endorsed that. Now Amazon’s legal people say the opposite is true and that in this case the government’s rules demand complete white exclusion. It won’t be long before the matter ends up in the US Congress and on the Resolute Desk.

But what US Congress will inherit that problem?

America’s overall election result in November could not be closer. The House is being called for the Democrats (time will tell…) but the Senate rests on a coin-flip. Millions of computer simulations returned a 50/50 result as the most likely. In that event the Republicans would hold it via Vance’s casting vote – but a single dissenter is all it would take to undo that.

The South African government has spent the last year hoping for exactly this and that both the House and the Senate go Democrat. Their sense is that a Democrat Congress will endorse things such as what Amazon is up to because that is what many Democrats would like to see happen in America too. A reason for much of the South African foot-dragging on an American deal is that Pretoria hopes it can wait out the Trump administration, that America’s Congress will turn, and two years later the White House too, and that South Africa will then face a friendly US administration that endorses all its race, nationalisation, and expropriation ideas. What makes that doubly pathetic is that those ideas – BEE, EWC, NHI – are the reason why South Africa’s domestic economy is sunk (and therefore why the ANC lost the country). But because the government still cannot bring itself to accept that, Pretoria’s policy towards the richest country in the world is to wait it out until that country’s politics again endorses the ideas that made South Africa poor!

Could things be more pathetic?

Well, yes, say the informed. Just think that the ANC forgot to register some of its candidates for South Africa’s own “mid-term” elections in November. That includes its leading candidate as mayor in Johannesburg, where it trails the DA at the moment by something in the region of 40% to 20%!

But News24 and the Daily Maverick said last week the ANC was leading and may win the race for the city? A free press where anyone can say what they think is a wonderful thing. The trouble is that only one set of ideas is correct and all the others are wrong and a necessary step to you having a prosperous and good and happy life is being able to tell which is which. That is the key life decision – and nothing you do will ever be more important than getting that call right. Get that wrong and you pay a very real financial, investment, career, business, and family price by committing to the wrong side of a currency hedge, or the wrong investment strategy, or buying your home in the wrong place, or choosing to live in the wrong part of the world, or picking the wrong career, or buying the wrong business, or, worst of all, setting your children up for a life of failure.

It is a very serious matter to get your information from people who know what they are doing.

You might remember reading that the National Development Plan marked a certain turnaround for South Africa and that the economy would be growing by 5% today. Or that Cyril Ramaphosa was a great reformer and would accelerate moves towards that growth rate while state capture would be stopped and the culprits arrested. Or that the ANC would win at least 50% in 2024. And that Helen Zille was so toxic that unless she was fired from the DA, and banished into irrelevance, the party would never make inroads in a place like Johannesburg.

There was another set of ideas that circulated, albeit not at the same level of prominence because the legacy media froze them out.

On Ramaphosa, that idea was that he was not a reformer and that the man the media was writing about did not exist given that the “great trade union leader” was actually just a project manufactured by Anglo American in the 1980s to help facilitate the transition, that the real pre-1994 negotiations did not take place between Ramaphosa and anyone else but between Mandela and De Klerk via intermediaries, that the “great industrialist” was simply a front of the South African business community who had been given shareholdings because, as one insider put it, “he came to our cocktail parties”, that Ramaphosa did not understand what gave rise to South Africa’s low growth rates and had decided in addition to prioritise party unity over economic growth, that he was ditherer who always dithered and could not take a firm decision but would under pressure split any difference, usually by simultaneously backing two mutually annihilating policies, and that even Fidel Castro, who had cautioned the ANC off many of its leftist ideas, had warned the party that Ramphosa was so unfit for office that if he ever got to the top he would collapse the ANC.

On state capture, the advice was that in pursuit of unity it had been agreed that no mass arrests and prosecutions would take place, that the ANC was afraid that if arrests started the whole leadership of the party would go down, that key prosecutorial appointments were therefore made to ensure those arrests never took place, but that a great show would be put on to convince the public something was being done via commissions and enquiries and a few show trials for low-level officials, while taking great care to ensure the overarching state capture networks were not brought to trial.

On the ANC’s future, the advice, in writing since 2012, was that the party would lose its national majority in 2024 – because demographic projections, read against polling that clearly showed the ANC base turning, read against the fact that the National Development Plan was garbage meant the economics would make it so by that date.

And on Zille, the advice was that she was respected across the electorate because she is tougher than anyone else, takes no nonsense, and fights like hell, and that the more she continued to do so the more she would be respected and the closer the time was approaching when, as the country saw it had been duped on Ramaphosa, she would emerge as the DA’s most powerful asset in taking down the ANC – as it has now come to pass and in the very heart of the country.

It is good that Willie Aucamp, the new Minister of Agriculture, has moved to have the head of Onderstepoort Biological Products, the state-owned animal meds company, suspended over foot and mouth disease pricing and procurement issues. The suspended chap had been appointed under the watch of John Steenhuisen, whose mad policy of centralising vaccine procurement and distribution in the state was an open door to price fixing and corruption. The DA has done well to get ahead of this issue as there has been a lingering idea that skeletons dating from Steenhuisen’s tenure as minister have been gathered to sink the DA’s good governance credentials.

The DA has been pleased of late to celebrate recruiting all manner of dissidents peeling off their rival parties. Often there is nothing in the track records of the people in question to suggest that they share the DA’s values – nor that their careers in their former parties were coming to an end. As the line from a film (cannot think of its name) goes, “Why are you always so suspicious?” to which the answer was, “It is my job to be suspicious”. There is an upside to all this new recruitment for the DA, of course, as it can make ANC voters see the DA growing. But there is a risk to weigh against that of Trojan horses primed to detonate in some or other fake racism scandal just when convenient. In the past that sort of thing has done much damage to the party when the legacy media blew the fake racism reports up into fake news storms in an attempt to convince the public that the DA did not want any black leaders. Just think about that. The media fed the idea into your mind over and over and over again that the DA did not want black leaders! Helen Zille, her life dedicated to fighting racism and racist policy, not wanting black leaders in her party. If you even thought to believe any of that, even for a moment, then you were probably not getting that key life decision right either.