Sunday, January 25, 2009

There will be..

ANC head of policy Jeff Radebe painted a picture of a dramatically different rural landscape in former homeland areas over the next decade. There will be kibbutz-style collective farms and “agri-villages” on either side of major roads; apartheid-era irrigation schemes will be revived and houses built; trucks will take communal harvests to market; there’ll be young, newly trained peasant farmers standing waist deep in market garden crops, using drip-irrigation methods. (from the Sunday Times)

I love it when people talk big about the plants they are "going to grow"... the ANC now has psychoponia.... And doesn't this talk remind you of some other words spoken right there in the Eastern Cape a 150 years ago?

"On a certain date a great wind and storm will come from the east and blow all the white people into the sea. From the deep sea new healthy cows will come and they will live happily ever after and never die. Those who refuse to kill their cattle will be turned into frogs, mice and ants."

Radebe said massive new budgets for support would be a centrepiece of the new policy, admitting: “We have just transferred this land without giving the necessary resources to continue this work; land support has not existed. “Most important, we must equip our people in terms of farmer support: training our people to utilise the land; making allocations of implements; reviving irrigation schemes which have been lying fallow; the construction of dams,” he said. (And despite this admission of failure the man keeps his job year after year)