Jou Moer Max! - in Reaction to Max Du Preez’S Arrogant Call That the Secretary General of the Anc, Comrade Ace Magashule, Should Be Charged and Imprisoned

ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ARTICLE:

JOU MOER MAX! - IN REACTION TO MAX DU PREEZ’S ARROGANT CALL THAT THE SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE ANC, COMRADE ACE MAGASHULE, SHOULD BE CHARGED AND IMPRISONED

By Carl Niehaus*

Wow Max, you are quiet a breaker hey. It is so easy-peazy for you to have the solution for all South Africa's problems: Use (the better word is actually abuse) our legal system in order to charge the Secretary General of the ANC, comrade Ace Magashule, with all kinds of conjured up 'crimes', and lock him up in the slammer, so that the President of the ANC, comrade Cyril Ramaphosa, can have a free hand to 'save' our country.

You know Max, I actually did not expect anything else from a ‘boerseun’ [boer boy], there from Koppies in the Free State. Subtlety and nuance is really not part of the character make-up of you guys. The son backed you too stubbornly hard there among the iron rocks. You chaps live all the time with hammers and plyers in your hands. Everything that does not suit you, you hammer, twist and brutally beat into a shape that works' for you. Just ask the workers in your farms what happen to them if they do not exactly do what the white 'baas’ [boss] wants them to do... You with your hard ass attitude is no different.

So, 'baas’ Max is the hell in because the ANC is not doing what he wants to be done? But I read that you think you have the answer in the person of President Ramaphosa, whom you have convinced yourself is a tame black 'voorman' [supervisor](in the south of the USA they talked about an Uncle Tom), who can be used to rein in the black trouble makers and instigators.

The only problem is that the ‘jong’ [condescending Afrikaans word for a black young man], Cyril Ramaphosa, whom you were trying to bring up according to your wishes [to your hand, so to speak] is now not so pliable, and happy, to listen to what you want him to do. A problem and frustration that you and one Stephen Kossef apparently share.

It is actually quiet funny that you and Stephen now ﬁnd yourselves in the same bed, you are not a combination that one at ﬁrst sight would have expected. But hey, among whites anything is possible - for you it is always about protecting each other’s white interests and property. What the two of your certainly do have in common is white arrogance and looking down on, and prescribing to, black people.,

That much bigger Afrikaans spirit and writer than you, Etienne le Roux, who was also born in Koppies, described in razor sharp descriptive text in his book ‘Smous’ [it is difﬁcult to translate the word ‘smous’ with one word in English - but historically in Afrikaans it usually referred to a small time traveling Jewish trader that moved from farm to farm to sell his goods], the shenanigans and cheating between ‘boereverneukers’ [crooked, cheating boers] and rural small-time Jewish traders [smouse], to cheat and exploit black people, and poor black farm workers in particular. In recalling this history, it dawns on one that the almost verbatim prescriptive instructions that Kossef and you are so eagerly trying give to President Ramaphosa, is actually nothing more than old hat, hey.

I know that you have now for long been living in the big city, and you think of yourself as a streetwise city slicker, who is no longer a rural hill-billy. But, sadly Max, when you write poppy cock stories like this one, you only conﬁrm once again that one can move the ‘baas’ [boss] away from the farm, but you just cannot get the ‘boss’ out of the ‘boss’.

Apparently you do not give a damn for our Constitution, or for proper legal procedures. Why would hard-ass Max care or such matters, which according to him is just weak-ass nonsense, that every citizen should be considered innocent until found guilty through due legal process in a court of law? For you comrade is Ace Magashule is just a stumbling block in the round ahead which you, together with Kossef and the rest of your while monopoly capitalist friends, envisage for South Africa, and therefore he must at all - and every - cost be removed.

Therefore, President Ramaphosa, according to your cabal, must together with the National Prosecutor wangle and scheme up whatever is necessary to ensure that comrade Ace Magashule will be prosecuted for ‘corruption’, ‘fraud’, ‘theft’ and all and everything thinkable. The more, and the worse, the better, as long he sits for months, preferably years, in the dock and can be removed from his leadership position in the ANC.

That is exactly the plan that was brewed up for President Zuma, and how you cabal have eventually succeeded to remove him as President. The only problem is that you have dismally failed to erode the continuing mass support that he enjoys in the country ... Our people have a way of showing the middle ﬁnger to schemers and plotters!

From your impatience - born out of your arrogance and impatient identity as ‘baas’ [boss] - you have become an instant police ofﬁcer, prosecutor, ﬁnal authority that gives the National Prosecutor instructions as well as judge too! Finish and klaar, all in one! In short: The ‘baas’ [boss] of the ‘plaas’[farm]. Wow, as I have said, you are a real breaker hey - to hell with our constitutional state and independent judiciary.

For you the means justify the end. This is exactly what happened in Brazil, where an unholy rightwing coalition of prosecutors, judges and reactionary politicians raped their own constitution and abused the legal system, in order to avoid President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from being re-elected as President of Brazil.

Eventually there scheming and manipulation backﬁred and President da Silva was last week released from jail. In your article you are trying to shove the same kind of rubbish as ‘advice’ down President Ramaphosa’s throat. Just like Kossef you are arrogant enough to think you can prescribe to President Ramaphosa what he must do, and have the temerity to threaten that if he does not ‘get rid’ of comrade Ace Magashule and other supporters of Radical Economic Transformation (RET), such as comrades Supra Mahumapelo and Mosebenzi Zwane, whom you (oh so predictably) describe as the ‘Zuma-faction’ in the ANC’s National Ececutive Committee (NEC), who must be ‘ontman’ [a crude word in Afrikaans meaning that their balls must be cut off], otherwise the economy will just “go faster down hill”.

Those of us who suffered under apartheid know that when the likes of you are on a roll, you know no limits. Therefore I am not really surprised that you could not even feel a twinge of embarrassment, and all too easily agree with Kossef that the state’s salary bill must drastically be cut (therefore that thousands of workers will be have to retrenched), and furthermore that ‘large parts’ of State Owned Enterprises (SOE’s) should be sold off to the private sector (therefore that thousands of workers will become unemployed). Just like fellow baas’ [boss] Kossef tried to instruct President Ramaphosa last week, with these arrogant words: "I don't care whether you call it, privatisation, or anything else. Just do it!"... You are two peas in the same pod, hey ...

You know Max you have always been an arrogant self absorbed piece of work, but there was a time during the early years of the ﬁrst publication of Vrye Weekblad (not this pale watered-down digital propaganda rag, which now do cynically also call ‘Vrye Weekblad’), when you actually did show a little bit of backbone with your carefully balanced opposition to apartheid.

Obviously you never fully associated yourself with the ANC, and there was never the slightest chance that you would have risked your oh so ‘precious’ white bad-ass Afrikaner life in the struggle for liberation of your fellow black South Africans. That was always a step to far too far for you. Yet, none the less, you were arrogant enough to appropriate for yourself the ‘right’ to be judgmental towards those few white comrades of us who were actually prepared to join the liberation struggle full-out, and were prepared to sacriﬁce our lives.

I still remember, as if it was yesterday, how at the University of Groningen, in The Netherlands, when I was the South Africa’s ambassador, you tried to humiliate me and called me an ‘apparatchik’, only because I was defending our ANC majority government. You behaved in this most unpatriotic manner as a fellow South African, while being in a foreign country, where we as fellow South Africans should have closed ranks in defence of our country!

I then already told you that you should be ashamed of yourself, but I still held back to take you on fully, because the memory of Vrye Weekblad’s opposition to apartheid was still lingering in my mind.

Since then my tolerance for you totally dissipated in the face of your shameless self- promotion and opportunism, using, abusing and grossly inﬂating your little bit of watered down opposition to apartheid in order to get editorial positions at the SABC and promoting your rather ﬂat, mediocre, journalistic splutterings, and little propaganda rags that you parade as excuses for ‘books’.

It always surprises me how tolerant we South Africans are with such opportunism, and what thick skinned ‘skurminkels’ [scumbags] such as you can get away with. Fortunately we are now ﬁnally seeing you for the low-life 'boereskelm' [crooked boer], that you have always been.

As far as I am concerned any goodwill from me towards you disappeared, like mist before the sun. You are nothing more than a 'hanskakie' [Afrikaans word that was used during the two Boer Freedom Wars, for Boere who joined the British invades - they were also derisively called 'joiners'), who sold you soul to the moneybags and ﬁnancial power 'rooinekke' [red necks] of London, Washington and Brussels.

Your boer freedom ﬁghter forefathers who fought against the British colonial invaders, to whom you so self-servingly and opportunistically like to refer to, must be turning in their graves every time that you so slavishly parrot Stephen Kossef and his fellow neo- imperialists. Even right-down to the treasonous gutter-low point of justifying the blackmailing of the ratings agencies Moody, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, to the effect that if we do not implement their privatization demands we will be downgraded to junk status, and will be at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yuk, you are bloody ‘hensopper’! [derisive Afrikaans word for sell-out]. You ought to shame yourself to death!

Having said all of this, Max, I have news for you: You do not understand the ANC at all. Since 1912 the ANC occupies a very special place in the hearts of the majority of black people, especially Africans, as the leader of society. The ANC is always far more than any individual person - regardless of the importance of the position of any leader. As Madiba always reminded us: “The ANC always makes us. We do not make the ANC”.

If you, and your fellow cabalists, like Stephen Kossef and Colin Coleman et al, think you can hijack the ANC by trying to capture or buy President Ramaphosa, then a rude awakening awaits you. As I have tweeted just the other day to Stephen Kossef: “No sir, we [in the ANC] are NOT going to let this be done. We will work tirelessly to unite @MYANC, & shield President @CyrilRamaphosa from your prescriptive #WMC arrogance.”

Forget about the delusion, that you are so pathologically nurturing, that our Secretary General, comrade Ace Magashule, or those of us who that stand for Radical Economic Transformation (RET), will through attempts to illegally manipulate our country’s legal system, be removed and thrown into prison.

Those of us who believe In Radical Economic Transformation (RET) are the very core, the essential heart, of the ANC. As the Dutch always say: “We are in bone and marrow ANC”. I do not know if you still recall, but I have reminded you of this saying that day at the University of Groningen, when you tried so hard to trash us in the ANC.

Different from the watered down bleak traitors blood that ﬂows in your veins, our blood is black, green and gold!

In conclusion, your name will not be Max du Preez if you will not try, even against all odds, to launch a counter-attack on me by trying to dig up stale old media propaganda stories of more than a decade ago, that I have been found guilty of so-called ‘fraud’. Whether you like it or not, old Max - I am going to call you that because neither of us are any longer spring chickens - but I have never been charged with fraud, nor obviously did any court ever ﬁnd me guilty of anything else but High Treason because of my membership of both the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). The court records are public, and available for anyone to peruse.

In my sixty years long life I have - like all of us - made mistakes, but different from you, Max, I know exactly what I stand for, and I will never sell out my liberation beliefs and my beloved country. Even less so, will I ever try to rape our country’s Constitution and judicial system, in order to keep foreign monopoly capital powers happy.

I know very well who I am, and I really cannot care less about what you have to say about me. In short: ‘Jou moer Max!’ [Go to hell Max!].

*Carl Niehaus is an ANC veteran with forty years of uninterrupted ANC membership in good standing. He is a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA)., and the National Spokesperson of MKMVA.

Carl wrote this article in his personal capacity.