When I wrote the last installation of this series looking into the geopolitics of Cape independence (previous parts here and here), I was looking mainly at trade balances, and the effect of the BRICS expansion.

Since then, South Africa has consistently missed opportunities to benefit from this global power shift, and instead taken costly risks.

The Chinese loan restructuring has not reduced our debt servicing costs by any significant amount, and the Chinese assistance to our electrical grid mostly consisted of a couple hundred small personal diesel generators, which mostly just caused embarrassment, as the public had been expecting serious, industrial-scale generators. We also missed the Russian embargo boon despite having received a direct shipping route with them for the first time - something I really can't adequately explain.

The Red Sea shipping crisis, precipitated by rocket attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Western and Israeli ships headed for the Suez Canal, rolls on. The ships redirected past the Cape of Good Hope, however, have not exploited our world-beating port incompetence, and shipping companies have in fact continued to impose tariffs on ships going through Durban and Cape Town.

Meanwhile, as the rest of our transport infrastructure collapses, Botswana and Namibia have teamed up under international investment pressure to build the Trans-Kalahari Railway, connecting Botswana’s mining industry with the port of Walvis Bay.

We’re already sending enough of our road freight through Maputo that they are having truck drivers sleeping overnight at the Lebombo to wait out the queues. Our ports are notoriously ranked worst in the world by the World Bank.

Maersk and the other big shipping companies have even imposed tariffs on ships using South African ports, in order to prevent the catastrophic disruptions that our sometimes weeks-long shipping queues impose on international supply chains.

While we have attempted to rescue our ports through private partners, these plans insist on the 50%+1 local black ownership requirement, tanking the deal with Karpowership, which was essential for averting the electrical disturbances at port. We have managed to secure a Filipino company to manage Pier 2 in Durban, though it remains to be seen how long they can operate without succumbing to ANC interference and patronage demands.

Amid this embarrassment is the industrial bloodbath of late 2023, when tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs went up in smoke, from Volkswagen to Arcelor-Mittal; even the mines have seen personnel cuts, to the deep chagrin of our legacy Charterist unions.

We also decided on a rather ill-considered court case against Israel, in which we decided to base our case, rather than on an analogy to apartheid, and of more circumscribed war crimes charges, to base it on the more hysterical charge of genocide, and proceeded in stentorian tones with the denial of Israel’s right to offer any material defence against Hamas’s incursions under any conditions, while sending Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, something of a genocidaire himself, to present the case.

This has split international opinion on South Africa, and drawn attention to our colossal failures, not now as a popular spectator sport, as in the case of 2021’s riots, but now as a deeper issue occupying the minds of the world’s diplomatic circles. We do not look good, even to those who wish to celebrate us for our stance. Just to dig ourselves in deeper, we have chosen to take the United States and the UK to task too.

And finally, we have sent our troops into the heart of darkness itself – the Kivu Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo – to fight the ethnic proxies of Rwanda, the most competent military state on the continent. The quid pro quo here is a bilateral trade agreement which hands vast Katanga mineral deposits to South African investment structures, with specialist expertise from the Chamber of Mines, all under the financial suzerainty of Standard Bank.

President Tshisikedi of the DRC has promised to invade Rwanda as a core feature of his election campaign, and war is creeping closer each day. Our mandate is not peacekeeping, as was the case for the departing UN mission of which we were a participant. Instead, we have committed troops to the eradication of Rwandan proxies. Rwanda considers these proxies an essential defence against the dormant threat of Hutu Power, and other “Rwandaphobes” (a clumsy term, but descriptive enough).

The last time this conflict was waged in earnest, the cost was several million lives. At back then, we and the other participants had a greater stock of hardware and fresh soldiers. But today, South Africa’s troops average 46 years of age, and are overweight and incompetent. We have only a handful of helicopters and aeroplanes of any description, and hardly enough pilots for these. We are locked into conflict in Cabo Delgado, and are still reeling from our 2013 defeat at the hands of the Centrafrique rebels.

This all means that South Africa has made two serious enemies, who are capable of projecting covert power across thousands of kilometers – Israel, and Rwanda. This comes in the wake of South Africa’s loss of American approval following the clumsy attempt to covertly support Russia while overtly remaining neutral in the Donbas War.

The main question here, especially after going against America in international court, is whether the tipping balance of international forces has leaned far enough away from the United States to justify such an aggressive diplomatic stance. South Africa is still dependent on the West for most of its trade, but could survive this action unscathed, provided they can win in the ICJ and at the same time, see the Red Sea crisis pivot the control of sea trade to China.

Ships flying under Chinese flags are already passing through the channel unmolested, and the Houthi rebels are predominantly targeting Western ships. The inability to ensure safe sea travel will likely undermine the US fiat currency hegemony if they cannot get the crisis under control soon, which will take away America’s capacity to shape events in South Africa and elsewhere, and leaves only the possibility of supporting Cape independence as a means of asserting retribution.

We are becoming increasingly dependent on Eastern diplomatic support, while remaining institutionally and economically dependent on the West, at a time when our local industry is struggling to maintain itself.

Centrifugal forces now threaten to tear us apart.

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Party politics

At home, all the factions have split. The Moonshot Pact, so insiders tell me, is a farce, mostly maintained for the sake of appearances in the lead-up to the election. I hardly think that is news to anyone even paying attention to external signs, though. But I can't really provide any confirmed details here, just a few vague rumours.

The Cape independence movement itself has reached a stage where almost all pieces are on the board, and there is only the battle to be fought. The CIAG has succeeded in creating a political party in the Referendum Party, an organisation with liberal or centrist messaging that aims to eat at the DA’s support base, and is making a major impact in the small towns as its recruitment campaign spirals toward the City. Their aim is to force the DA to form a coalition in the provincial parliament to force a referendum.

The Vryheidsfront Plus has a firm commitment to Cape independence, and will aim to eat up disgruntled conservatives just as the RP eats up disgruntled liberals. The National Coloured Congress of Fadiel Adams is struggling with dissent from new left-wing recruits, but remains broadly supportive of a referendum internally, and has fair support for independence among rank and file.

The DA has such a commanding lead over the Charterist parties (ANC, EFF) at the moment that it would be impossible to see them get into power, though the creeping gains of Gayton MacKenzie’s gangster-dominated Coloured-nationalist Patriotic Alliance, which has so far hewed to the ANC in municipal coalitions threaten to erode their lead, and offer the throne to the secessionists.

Amongst the Charterists, threats have been widespread and various. Black voter apathy has preserved minority bloc gains even as minorities decline as a proportion of the population.

Zulu nationalism, revitalised with the passing of the ageing giant Buthelezi, has seen massive gains in support, while the DA stagnates at the usual 10% in KwaZulu Natal.

But their potential to seize the province is now checked by the return of Jacob Zuma, with his uMkhonto weSizwe party (MK), soaking up disaffected radicals and victims of Ramaphosa’s partisan “anti-corruption” drive. This is the RET faction of the ANC, commanding the loyalty of many civil servants, even within the intelligence agencies.

Zuma’s clearly fraudulent membership counting and blank slate party constitution give little indicator of the scale of his real support, but he is likely to take at least 5% of the vote, enough to cut down both ANC and IFP support in a very close race.

Zuma now has the potential to become the kingmaker who can preserve the ANC’s national majority through coalition, both in KZN and nationally.

He has recently taken aim at Cape independence, proposing a merger of the Western and Eastern Cape provinces to preclude the possibility of secession and crush the possibility of minority representation. The potential to capture dormant black voters with the promise of a significant change poses the risk of actual electoral impact, however small.

Clearly, Cape independence is seen as a credible threat on the national stage, and behind the scenes, a lot of powerful and shadowy people are starting to look for radical solutions.

The EFF has consolidated all the support they can get, and are making no more major strides, perhaps having saturated their base.

The battle for 2024 will now be a contest between the ANC’s courtiers, like young gigolos courting an ageing dowager. Its lead over other parties is an uncontested fact, but its majority is no longer guaranteed, nor even widely believed.

Yet they are still likely to see only a narrow defeat, enough to make up through a partnership with other smaller parties.

The DA, after flirting with the idea of a coalition with the ANC, while lambasting their other potential allies and treating them with high-handed disdain and arrogant imperiousness, may now be confronted with the cold hard reality of their solitude in a crumbling palace.

The anti-Charterist coalition cannot hope for more than 35% at the ballot, by any reasonable estimate, and the ANC electoral machine has yet to truly turn on.

What questions remain unanswered regarding out journey to independence? There are several. The parties whose will is as yet undetermined include the DA, the Afrikaner nationalists, the oligarchs, and the foreign powers. And there is one last dark question to ask, which haunts us all – how far will the ANC go to stop us?

So let us start with the first - how far will the DA go to crush secession? This is hard to tell, because they are a very cowardly group of people, incapable of imagining other futures, married still to the end of history, zombie-stumbling through Huntington’s world with Fukuyama’s rose-tinted goggles on.

The are careerists, desperate to preserve their paychecks and clear the next rung above them on the ladder of power. They are also, despite appearances, old – their legacy stretches back to the SAP of Jan Smuts, the man and the party which made South Africa.

And they are spiteful – they have already gone out of their way to deny the movement any cooperation, even if it costs them power – suffocating the People’s Bill, which would have leveraged international treaties and constitutional articles to hand autonomous governance to the Cape, in order to give life to their stunted and impotent little chimera, the Provincial Powers Bill, which not only rubs against the grain of the Constitution, as their own lawyers inform them, but amounts to a mandate to beg the ANC for more powers, even as the national government promises to strip their Metro police of their limited authority and merge them with the SAPS.

Extraparliamentary factions

The Afrikaner nationalists are split by many invisible faultlines, but among them is the pernicious influence of liberal collaborationists who insist on staving off radical action in order to seek concessions and partial victories within the liberal constitutional order.

Beneath the elite layer is also a swathe of Afrikaners proud to be South African, though they may not understand what that means. They are terrified of the blood libel levelled against them by their fellow countrymen, and desperately want to be loved by their fellow Africans of other hues. Their membership of Afriforum or Solidarity emerges from a pragmatic calculation, and a desire to stick it to Malema and the ANC.

These people are at odds with an increasingly pessimistic and impatient ethnonationalist faction, which sees the end approaching, and no hope of reforming the system. They want a radical solution, that saves us for the long term. I am one of these men.

But to take action in this direction threatens to split the movement in twain – both within the civic movement of the Solidarity movement and within the small party representation under the VF+. Any Afrikaner leaders with even a passing acquaintance with their own history are afraid of broedertwis. The Afrikaners very nearly fought a civil war over loyalty to the crown in 1915. But the reaction to it led them down the path of fusionism, which saw the nationalist movement delayed by over a decade, as their leaders folded into the liberal SAP.

The same dilemma presents itself now – does one cross the Rubicon, or try to preserve some marginal self-interest within a hostile system?

The Rubicon we are talking about has three components – an independent Cape, an autonomous Pretoria, and a constellation of Anchor Towns – small settlements which can be dominated by Afrikaners migrating to be with their own kind in a similar manner to Orania.

There are ways to do all three, though they are complicated, and require a great deal of inter-organisational cooperation. And yet all three must come to pass for minorities to have a future – the Cape must preserve capital against the threat of expropriation. Pretoria must preserve an Afrikaner metropole in which culture and technical nous can be preserved and advanced. Anchor Towns must exist, to protect the countryside and absorb flight from fallen settlements.

Fortunately the Federal Plan of the movement is being reformed this year, and we will know for certain what way we are headed by October.

Regarding the oligarchs, I cannot say much.

Most have migrated to the DA, which has now become the most well-funded party in the country.

However, a segment of them ahs attempted to capture them and the anti-Charterist coalition with a cluster of former ANC members, communists, financiers and tenderpreneurs, under the leadership of Roger Jardine. Their policies are to the left of the ANC, and they are likely dead in the water now.

For some time now, the so-called Stellenbosch Mafia have been trying their hand at various versions of resuscitated rainbow-nationism, under various projects, often compromised by attachments to left-wing international groups with stereotypical globalist tendencies, and a perennial attachment to black economic empowerment. These are men and women like Songezo Zibi, Mmusi Maimane and Lindiwe Mazibuko.

Their campaigns are slick, but their policies are weak – they are afraid to cut welfare, afraid to privatise state-owned enterprises, too greedy and jealous to embrace nonracialism. Yet they are all too aware of the impending fiscal crisis discussed in Part 1 of this series.

Black oligarchs like Patrice Motsepe and his brother-in-law the President have been seeking Pan-African aspirations, tying us to the Congo and buying into Bill Gates’s vision for a united African health policy under the African Medical Association of the AU, and the dismal and crushing promises of the National Health Insurance policy designed by the Gates Foundation in 2009, which promises to liquidate our entire healthcare industry, due to be enacted this year.

But the white oligarchs appear to be getting restless. As Rob Hersov, the limelight-loving scion of a Le Cercle family has often averred recently, the great desire is the end of the ANC, and the rainbowist puppets are losing their charm. Cape independence is gaining in traction in their circles, only the plans for the interior are not yet legible to them.

I cannot speak too much on what for me are only rumours, but it appears there is the serious chance of a local funding pivot to secession.

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The rightward turn in the West

The international community however, has swung decidedly to the right. The right wing AfD is now the biggest party in Germany. The PVV is now the biggest party in the Netherlands, and their senior member Martin Bosma, a staunch advocate for minority rights in South Africa, is now speaker of the Tweede Kamer.

The Tories, faced with the worst defeat in 20 years, are now reportedly turning to Nigel Farage to lead the party, and Farage is a staunch proponent of Cape independence. Hard to tell if this will come to pass. But rumour has it the Blairite faction of Labour is also sympathetic, being increasingly resentful of the ANC’s disgusting corruption and hostility.

The United States will need a miracle or an act of unconscionable fraud to save the Democratic Party from a Trump victory next year, which will being with it an increased enthusiasm for projects like ours, especially as BRICS deepens control over the world’s trade networks as America loses conflict after conflict on the international stage, and fires are lit even in their own hemisphere.

Argentina has been a true wildcard, and Ecuador and El Salvador’s hard pivot rightward, along with Chile, has seen the rise of an increasingly hostile world for the left.

Ethiopia’s support from the West will be pivotal, especially as it seeks to recognise Somaliland, a de facto state that has been a bastion against the forces of chaos in Somalia for 30 years, and which will be granting Ethiopia Red Sea access.

Morocco has seen a degree of populist support for secessionists in South Africa online, especially resenting our government’s recognition of secessionists in Morocco’s Western Sahara.

Israel and Rwanda have already been mentioned in our opening paragraph. They may be first on the list.

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Spoilers and foilers

So what of the ANC themselves? I have spoken in the past about the dismal failure of both formal and informal power in South Africa. Our military is a moribund wreck, incapable of maintaining even the most basic supply lines in local deployments in peacetime. Our informal Charterist partisans ran out of steam and failed to take a single life in the anti-minority pogroms of 2021, losing hundreds to neighbourhood watch militia and private security.

Municipalities have been dealt a crushing defeat, as Bloemfontein ratepayers won the right to deprive the local government of rates to provide services denied by the corrupt and incompetent ANC government. This rate substitution strategy could see taxpaying residents usurp local governments across the country, as local tax boycotts emerge also in Durban.

The last tendril of ANC patronage in the Western Cape, where the party is incapable of even holding leadership selection competitions due to low participation, is the taxi cartels. But these were roundly defeated in Cape Town last year, when the metro police impounded their vehicles and cleared their barricades from the streets, bringing them to their knees.

The final calculation will depend on the strength of will within the DA and whatever coalition partners they have after this election.

Private security vastly outnumbers the government, and is vastly more competent, but supply of firearms and ammunition is still dependent on imports and purchases from factories outside the province. They could seize control within two weeks if they were deputised and coordinated to foil any ANC spoilers.

But those spoilers could include terrorism and union strikes, mass demonstrations, arson and sabotage. It will be costly, but it will make enemies out of the Charterists with a violent intensity, and the awakening of Coloured nationalism has just begun. Untethered, their desires and intentions, yet unknown beyond a fierce desire to defend what little of theirs remains, may find a fiery outlet in confrontations with urban representatives of the South African ruling party.

If the DA chooses to hesitate once given the mandate for secession, this will become a river of blood, emboldened by their weakness, and compounded by the increasingly authoritarian legislation of the national government who, likely with Jacob Zuma beside the steering wheel, will show a ruthlessness not seen in decades.

A moment’s hesitation will cause all that is bright and beautiful to be crushed beneath a wave of mutilation.

And so, while the first battle, the battle for a referendum, commences, we must begin looking to the second, and the third, and follow through with gusto.

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