Thread by @Will_Tanner_1

“We will expropriate land without compensation whether [whites] like it or not. If they object, they can seek refugee in America.”

South Africa is going full Zimbabwe. Never go full Zimbabwe.

A reminder of what happened in Rhodesia and why that's a warning for South Africa🧵👇

As a reminder, Rhodesia was essentially the opposite of either Zimbabwe or modern South Africa

It was prosperous, had no anti-black or anti-white apartheid laws, had functioning civil infrastructure, and was a breadbasket rather than a land of fallow farms that have been handed to incompetents out of a desire for racial redistribution

That held true, for reference, even into the later stages of the Bush War, when you'd think things would be falling apart, a la Germany in March of '45

Instead, it was more functional than modern South Africa, which is at peace and aided by the world

Here is how Dr. Theodore Dalrymple described it:

I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England. There were no electricity cuts or shortages of basic food commodities. The large hospital in which I was to work, while stark and somewhat lacking in comforts, was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency. The staff, mostly black except for its most senior members, had a vibrant esprit de corps, and the hospital, as I discovered, had a reputation for miles around for the best of medical care. The rural poor would make immense and touching efforts to reach it: they arrived covered in the dust of their long journeys. The African nationalist leader and foe of the government, Joshua Nkomo, was a patient there and trusted the care implicitly: for medical ethics transcended all political antagonisms.

Then Mugabe destroyed all that

First came his decade and a half of relatively stable rule after the 1980 "election" that saw his thugs ensure his rule; the British paid for what land expropriation there was, and things remained somewhat stable

Then, the British got tired of paying for Mugabe's slow campaign of compensated land expropriation, and the program ground to a halt because the Zimbabwean regime couldn't afford to pay for farms.

As a result, the terrorist veterans of the Bush War began agitating against the government, which at that point was no longer receiving British aid dollars and so could afford to spend little on the purchase of land, even if its transfer was compulsory.

Out of that toxic stew eventually came the Fast-Track Land Reform Program that was first pushed and then carried out by those veteran terrorists.

Showing up to white farms across the country, they took the farms using violence. The Supreme Court of Zimbabwe allowed it, and by 2013 there wasn’t a white-owned farm left in the country.

All were stolen by the regime and its former terrorist clients, many of whom used violence to take the farms

That destroyed what was left of Zimbabwe; as the whites died or fled and their farms ended up in the hands of corrupt, violent thugs who had no idea how to farm them

So the farms ran fallow, the farming sector collapsed, and the breadbasket of Africa decayed into a famine-riddled disaster zone.

Farm output fell by 45%

But that wasn’t all. The collapse of the farms also meant a collapse of farming jobs; the stolen commercial farms had once employed thousands upon thousands of people, somewhere around 30% of the workforce.19 When they collapsed under the weight of their new owners’ incompetence, all those jobs followed too, throwing a huge proportion of the population out of work. Unemployment rose to 80%.

Then came the hyperinflation, which ripped through what was left of the country

As the disaster occurred, hyperinflation hit unimaginable highs, and shredded everything

At its height in mid-November 2008, the rate of hyperinflation reached an estimated 79,600,000,000% per month

South Africa is now glimpsing into the same future

The expropriation without compensation described by Malema in the video at the top, allows the state to seize land without compensation in the name of the "public interest," which includes racial economic "equity"

So, as with Mugabe and the Fast Track Land Reform, the state can, and presumably will, expropriate the land of white farmers and hand it to black clients of the regime who have no idea how to farm

Destroying the white farmers would likely destroy what is left of the country

As of now, the white farmers produce 80% of the food

If agricultural production falls with expropriation, as was the case in Zimbabwe, that's the end of all that food.

Further, South Africa has tried paid land reform before (again not unlike Zimbabwe), and it was a massive failure, as discussed by @twatterbaas here

So, land expropriation, as appears to be on the near horizon, will be disastrous for South Africa

In fact, it will probably mean the final push of the country over the edge into Full Zimbabwe status

Trump can and should exert what pressure he can to prevent that