BLACK PEOPLE SHOULD STOP HATING THEMSELVES

Imagine a white woman cutting her European hair to a scalp. Imagine further, she then covers her bald head with a fake Afro hair. Imagine the same woman using skin-darkening chemicals in order to look Black. Imagine Mr and Mrs Smith naming their newly born son, Mbazima, or Mulomowandau, or Mohau, or any Afrikan name. You cannot imagine this, right? Yes. You can’t because it never happens.

White people are happy with being white. It is only some Black people who regret being Black. They wish they were white. The concept of beauty is associated with whiteness. The more light-skinned you are, the more beautiful you are perceived. Being dark is associated with ugliness. In order to meet the standards of beauty, Afrikan women must do anything and everything possible to look like white women. If this means they should wear hair cut from dead white women and long artificial nails, so be it. Anything to look white should be done.

Colonialism has had such a corrosive effect on our soul that we hate ourselves. As products of colonialism, we hate everything about ourselves. We hate our culture. We hate our languages. If you pay lobola and conduct umembeso and all the other cultural rites that are required for a marriage to be concluded, your wife will still be seen as your live-in concubine unless you do a white wedding. But whites are not expected to pay lobola or do any of the things that Afrikans do for their relationships to be classified as lawful marriages.

If you want to sell anything to Afrikans, all you need to do is to tell them it is imported from Germany, France, Italy, England or any European country. We hate ourselves. We hate being Afrikans.

If there are two medical doctors of similar qualifications and experience, one white and the other Afrikan, many Afrikans will opt to use the white doctor. Sadly, the opposite does not apply. You never see white people using Black private doctors, even if those doctors were specialists in their field.

If Collins Khosa, the man who was brutally beaten to death by members of the South African National Defence Force in his yard for allegedly violating Covid-19 regulations, was white, he would still be alive. Had he been white, the Black soldiers would not have even entered his yard to check if he had been drinking, let alone brutally assaulting him with a rifle butt.

Afrikans are the only people who take pride in the fact that their children are taught by other races. Again, the opposite does not apply. White people never send their children to Soweto or any other township to be taught by Blacks.

The cultural domination of Blacks by whites has been so dominant that whites have succeeded to produce what is colloquially referred to as coconuts. People who are only Black in skin but white in terms of content and outlook. The success in the colonial project can be seen by the behaviour of non-whites who unashamedly join white parties that are bent on preserving white privileges and ensuring the continuation of coloniality.

This hatred of self is the first challenge that Black Consciousness seeks to cleanse from the minds of the Black people. This is what is referred to in AZAPO as the struggle for mental liberation. A people who are mentally colonised can never attain true liberation.

That is why AZAPO’s focus is on Black people. AZAPO accepts that the white tribe is the source of the problems that bedevil Black people in Azania. And if they are the primary source of the problem, they cannot be the solution. The solution will have to come out of Black people themselves. In other words, AZAPO has made the white man irrelevant in the solution of our problems.

The first step is to make the Black person to stop hating himself or herself. To make him or her appreciate himself or herself. To make him or her accept that there is nothing wrong with being Black and that there is nothing wrong with having the type of hair that Afrikans have. Once the mental liberation has been achieved, the Afrikans will not rely on the gesture or goodwill of the white tribe to find solutions to the problems faced by Afrikans in general. Afrikans will determine their own destiny.

But what is the solution AZAPO is putting on the table for the economic problems faced by the majority of Black people. More than 70 percent of young people, the overwhelming majority of whom are Black, are unemployed. How does this philosophy of Black Consciousness and its sub-theme of self-love resolve the problem of unemployment?

The current government advocates remedial policies such as Black Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity. Sadly, the government does not ensure that these are implemented. But they are a start. But even if they were rigorously implemented, they would not solve the core issues of poverty and unemployment. This is because the white tribe constitutes less than 10 percent of the South African population. It is highly unlikely that 10 percent can affirm 90 percent of the population.

For AZAPO the solution does not lie in begging white people to open opportunities for Black people. The solution lies in Black people. AZAPO has a policy referred to as Stretch the Rand. In terms of this policy, Black people because of their huge numbers can change the ownership of the economy by simply supporting Black owned businesses.

Imagine if all Black people used Black medical doctors when they are sick, or exclusively used Black lawyers when they have a legal problem, or buy only from shops owned by Black people, or bank only in a bank owned by Black people, use an insurance owned by Black people. If the Black people who are in government were politically conscious and not apologists for white power and privilege, they would support the idea of stretching the rand by ensuring the public funds are deliberately used to support Black business to break the cycle of poverty and unemployment which is rife in the Black community.

But for this to happen, Black people should first stop hating themselves.  They should rid themselves of this notion that they are inferior to whites. When we begin to see Black people stopping wearing hair of dead white people, we should know that we are making progress. But until then, aluta continua!

WHAT AZAPO WILL DO TO CREATE JOBS

While we have repeatedly asserted that the original sin that creates poverty among Black people in Azania is the fact that they have been robbed of their land by European settlers, the immediate and biggest challenge faced by the majority of people in our country is unemployment.

Unemployment has had a dehumanizing effect on people. It has made people to operate on survival mode, making them to commit some of the most inhumane acts in their quest to survive. Unemployment has broken down families. If AZAPO is to make a strategic intervention to end the suffering of the majority of the people in the short term, it should answer the question: what will AZAPO do to create jobs?

Sadly, this theme of job creation has been reduced to an election slogan. Every political party contesting the election promises the creation of jobs as a matter of urgency. Some are even bold to state that they will create a million jobs during their term of office. The election promises remain that, just promises. No delivery. As a result, people are increasingly losing faith in the electoral system. In the past election of 2019, just over 30 percent of registered voters cast their votes. The country’s democratic order is less than 30 years, and the majority of the voters ought to still put their hopes in the electoral system. Regurgitating the promise of employment creation is certainly not sufficient to convince the voters that there would be delivery of the promise of jobs. AZAPO has a plan for job creation.

One of the key contributors to rising unemployment is the de-industrialisation caused by the dumping of cheap products from other countries, mainly China. Take a look at the textile industry. Many factories in the Western Cape and throughout the country have had to close down because we are told that they could not compete with clothing products from other countries. We are told that the cost of labour in the country is huge, thus creating unfair competition between locally produced products and those imported.

This is partly true, but it is not the entire truth. The primary reason why most of imported products are cheaper in the country is because of under-declaration. Corruption is rife in the customs and the country is losing billions of rands because importers are paying only a fraction in duties of what they are supposed to pay.

These imported products are then distributed to all shopping centres in the country. In many parts of the country, there are Chinese malls mushrooming. There is no regulatory control of how these products enter the country. An average person could not care less about the origin of the product as long as he can afford it.

In order to address this problem, the first thing that an AZAPO government will do would be to ensure compliance of the imports’ regulations. By doing that, illegal importation of goods into the country will be drastically reduced.

There is an access problem in many sectors of the economy. Our people have got skills, but they lack access to the markets. There are tailors who make suits and wedding dresses, but they have no access of supplying their products to main retail stores. An AZAPO government should not only create the markets for local players in the textile industry but should empower these players that they create new retail stores where locally produced brands are created and allowed to compete with foreign brands such as Nike and Gorgio Amani.

The same concept of producing local products should be extended to other sectors such as the motor industry. Instead of the country priding itself as the manufacturer of German and Japanese cars, the country will make its own car brand. The South African State has capacity to make its own car. How can we not be able to make a car when we can produce army tanks and defence helicopters such as Rooivalk? The capacity is there but there is no vision. There is no plan to re-industrialise and ensure that the country produces a whole range of products that can be exported to the rest of the Afrikan continent and to other continents.

South Africa is a member of BRICS. The question we should be asking ourselves is what are the products that the country can make that can be supplied to these markets.

We have high rates of unemployment because the jobs have been exported with our exports of raw commodities. The local jobs have been decimated when we fail to protect the illegal imports of goods into the country.

For this program of employment creation to succeed, AZAPO will also have to convert all public servants into patriots. The influx of illegal products into the country could not happen if the public servants working in customs appreciated the link between the dumping of cheap products into the local market to the unemployment rate that is also affecting their sons and daughters.

AZAPO has a plan for this country. The premise of the plan is that Black people are capable of running a country.   

AZAPO GOING TO NATIONAL CONGRESS

The Azanian People’s Organisation emerged from its 25th National Congress held at the University of Johannesburg on December 4, 2021 with a Political Program to reLionise AZAPO and make it a political weapon and shield for Azanian people in the struggle for the repossession of the land, total liberation and socialism.

The main thrust of this program is to enable AZAPO to meaningfully engage in a struggle for the restoration of humanity and dignity of Black people. This should be understood to mean that the organisation is being repositioned to adapt and prosper in the unforgiving electoral political landscape of competition and money while maintaining its political posture that is anchored on Black Consciousness whose mission is to dismantle the colonial architecture of our Azania for the deferred liberation of its people. For this, AZAPO must reLionise and be built brick by brick to become an action-oriented force of our people.

AZAPO will meet at its Mid-Term National Policy Congress from 5-7 May 2023 in Tshwane to evaluate progress in implementing this Political Programme and chart the way forward. This congress is organised under the theme :

Towards Dismantling the Colonial Structure of Azania – ReLionise AZAPO to Champion the People’s Struggles

AZAPO must be a force that is able to confront the observable conflation between the ruling party and the State where those leading the State cannot prioritise the interests of the country over those of the party. AZAPO must challenge the corruption and misgovernance that give rise to the erosion of the legitimacy of the State. If the colonial architecture of the country is to be removed, patriotism must be built among the civil servants and mechanisms for creating an engaged and responsible citizenry found. A reLionised AZAPO that is the weapon of our people must be in a position to offer the country options for restoring patriotism and order in the running of the State. These are the necessary building blocks towards dismantling the colonial architecture of our Azania.

See you all at Congress!