Accusations and counter-accusations of being apartheid-era agents, spies or collaborators have flown around the South African political landscape for decades. One of those who frequently faces these allegations is the country’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa’s opponents claim that he was planted in the country’s liberation movement in the 1980s by the White elite to protect their economic interests in a future Black-led government after the fall of apartheid.
In this February 2024 clip, Economic Freedom Fighters party leader Julius Malema adds his voice to those who allege that Ramaphosa is a sellout. According to Malema, Ramaphosa was a project of the Oppenheimer and Menell families, rich White South Africans that have owned and controlled a vast segment of the country’s economy, especially the mining sector, for decades. Malema asks how Ramaphosa, who has never been a mine worker, set up and rose to the top of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), a powerful union and a strong ally of the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1980s. He concludes that Ramaphosa’s rise was a result a backroom deals with the Oppenheimers and other powerful White South African capitalists. He also accuses Ramaphosa of bringing these businessmen into the inner circle of Nelson Mandela, the country’s first post-apartheid leader, hence compromising him as well.
While no solid evidence has been provided to back the accusations against Ramaphosa, his meteoric rise from an activist to a businessman worth more than $450 million, according to Forbes, will always raise questions and speculations.
Credit: Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)
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Please can you analyse the comments around the planned economic blackmail and assault of economies, including in Africa, made by Yanis Varoufakis on Rania Khalek’s dispatches show:
Here comes the story about the tariffs…I have read policy papers circulating amongst his team…
Something they explicitly state in their policy papers:
[PHASE ONE: ECONOMIC ASSAULT]
-We slap tariffs on them [foreign countries].
-Their Central Banks will immediately reduce their interest rates to absorb the recessionary shock to their own economies from our tariffs.
-As they reduce their interest rate, their currency is going to go down, the US Dollar will go up.
-In the end, the import prices, the price that Americans pay, will not have changed much but something will have changed.
The foreigners will be paying us money. They will be paying for the tariffs.
US Congress holds the purse strings for tax receipts but not tariff receipts…
Trump is first going to slap the tariffs and then says to the Chinese, the Germans, the Saudis and so on, you are now going to revalue your currency. But how?
[PHASE TWO: ECONOMIC BLACKMAIL]
You [foreign economies] are going to take a chunk of the dollars you’re holding and you’re going to sell them for your own currency, that way you will revalue the Euro, the Yen and so on.
Alternatively, if you don’t have many dollars…I know you have US Treasuries. You’re going to swap them with new treasuries that I am going to give you that are 100-years in duration.
In other words, you will subsidise long term US interest rates and if you don’t do that I am not going to remove the tariffs.
In a piecemeal negotiation, he is going to isolate one economy at a time…
He is going to say, Choose your poison…this is the plan.
This is clearly stated in documents.
I am not saying his plan is going to work.
I think it is going to fail in the end for political reasons.
Now, of course, whether it will work or not depends on:
-social movements,
-trade union movements,
-political movements,
rising up against the governments that participate in this deal with Trump and also within the United States…”