Guest essay on life in South Africa

By Hellequin Gentleman Bastard with much thanks!

Fortuna, it is said, wears a Blindfold, but somehow I don’t believe it.
When fancy takes her, she moves her pieces far to exuberant an esprit.
I salute her for it, but I rather doubt she cares.

When I arrived in South Africa in 1996 from Malawi – a country were you couldn’t buy decent food for the love of money – I was pleasantly surprised how cheap everything was, from Food to Fuel to Rent.
At that time I made about R 2000 (US$ 400) a month working at Oak Lodge Backpacker in Cape Town, and with this amount I could pay my one bedroom apartment inclusive Water and Electricity, Meat or Fish on a daily basis if I should choose so, Clothing and going out 2 times a week with my Girlfriend/later wife, and I even managed to put something away to start my own little business.

All this started to change when the Mad-cow disease hit the UK, Meat-prices doubled, fuel and electricity went up.

It leveled out for a while until the Twin-towers, then everything increased again until it stagnated, then in 2006 ESKOM – our Eletctricity Provider- started their rolling Blackouts – still going on – because they hadn’t done any maintenance since they took over in 1994, then came the crash in 2008/09 and since then everything has been steadily increasing.

What last week was the current price is this weeks SPECIAL.

But when I speak to some of our Farmers I’m getting a completely different picture painted than what you hear from Government and Media.
For instance, a Dairy Farmer gets R 1.50 per liter of fresh Milk, but when it arrives in the Supermarket the selfsame Milk, minus the cream, costs you 10 times as much.
A pound of Butter was around R 5 in 1996 and is now around R 75 a block.

And when the Dairy Farmers cows give to much Milk, he’s (the farmer) been forced to pour that milk down the drain, because nobody, besides the Farmer and Consumer, is interested to “flood” the market with affordable Dairy Products.
The same goes for Beef, Pig and Poultry Farming.

You cannot even go as a private person and buy produce directly from a Farm, some Farmers still do it, but only to people they know and that aren’t going to finger them to the Authorities.
Also, as the consumer, you have to be careful not to speak too freely about your cheap purchase and where you got it from in case of a “Karen” around.

A lovely World we’re living in.

Everything has been so regulated in favour of big business that the small business owner can’t possibly survive in the long-run on it’s own.
Some Farms have what we call “Farm-stalls” little shops where you can go and buy, but the prices there aren’t really worth the trip, because they are forced again to sell in a certain price-range so that they can’t be a serious competition to the big guys.

The alternative are Farmers Markets, but not many Farmers are making their own Butter, Cheeses or Yoghurts any longer, which is a pity.
Same goes for decent Meat-products, except Biltong.

Many of the smaller Farmers have already been driven into Bankruptcy and their land lies now fallow, has been taken over by some ANC-cadre or some big Corporation.
What is happening now is that many small grocery stores have come together and buy in big bulk instead of singly.
It helps them to survive, even if the prices aren’t always cheaper.

Keep the prices high, the production low and punish everyone with the might of the Law that goes against it is the rule of the thumb or should I rather say thumping.
And the same is going on all over the World and is in my opinion done deliberatly to control the Food, because those that control Food and Water control the people.
But as usual, these people have forgotten something that has brought down many Empires before and that is when you make people desperate enough, then there’s no telling what horrors they’re capable of since they have nothing left to lose.

Lets hope this can be stopped before it is to late and the Rubicon has been crossed.
Luckily the Future is written in the Dust and the slightest breeze can alter it.

It should be noted that South Africa’s ruling party is the ANC. The ANC’s political philosophy is officially “Social Democracy”. But anyone reading through the Wiki on that ideology can see in a flash what it actually means, and that is authoritarian communism.