South Africa is not on the brink of collapse. It is collapsing—slowly, carefully—under the supervision of its ruling elites. This is a managed collapse strategy: the deliberate acceptance of economic stagnation and slow degradation to protect existing wealth structures
🧵🧵 Under South Africa’s managed decline, public investment, industrial policy or breaking up monopolies have been ruled out. Instead, the government embarks on minimalist crisis management, designed not to solve economic and social decay but to spread it out over decades.

When people talk about South Africa’s high crime rate, they often blame it on poverty. But the thing is, many countries with even higher poverty rates experience significantly lower crime levels🧵🧵 The discrepancy in crime rates between SA and others is because the real problem in South Africa is inequality—you know, the vast gap between rich and poor. South Africa has one of the biggest wealth gaps in the world.

Here’s a brutal truth: South Africa could have the cleanest, most efficient government on earth—and would still remain poor. This is because poverty is not an administrative problem. It’s a structural issue. And it has only one solution: mass industrialisation🧵🧵 Mass industrialisation means building an economy where large numbers of people are employed to transform raw materials into finished products across many industries. Steel plants, car assembly lines, textile mills, agro-processing hubs, chemical plants, electronics, etc.

Today, on Freedom Day, the dominant culture still teaches that many South Africans are poor because of personal failure—a lack of effort, discipline or talent. It tells a seductive story: that opportunity is equal, success is earned and failure is deserved. This is a lie🧵🧵 People often say that for the economy and the country to work, people must be hired on merit. However, the truth is that although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.

The South African government & private sector repeatedly claim the high unemployment rate is due to a “skills shortage”. This is not only misleading but also deflects from the real issue: South Africa lacks the industrial capacity to absorb its labour🧵 For years, we’ve been told that the problem isn’t the economy’s failure to create jobs, but rather a “skills mismatch.” If only workers were better trained, the thinking goes, they’d find employment. But here’s the truth: You can’t train your way out of an unproductive economy.

Most of us grow up thinking taxes pay for everything the government does—schools, roads, hospitals, etc. We’re told that if we want better services, the government has to “raise money” through taxes. But here’s the truth: That’s not how it works.

🧵Thread🧵 The government isn’t like a household. It doesn’t need to earn money before it can spend. It creates the money, spends it into the economy and then it collects taxes afterward. So, it’s not a matter of “how will we pay for it?”—it’s “how will we manage the money we’ve created?”

South Africa has millions of unemployed people, unused land, idle factories—and yet the government still acts like spending on jobs, social grants, a basic income or job guarantee scheme is dangerous.
This isn’t economics. It’s ideology🧵🧵1/12 Basic economics (and common sense) says if an economy has unused capacity, the government can spend to stimulate the economy without causing inflation.
But instead of investing in people, the government raises VAT—a tax that hits the poor hardest.
2/12

There are two types of morality in the world: master morality and slave morality, according to Friedrich Nietzsche. These concepts help explain why it often seems as though bad people always win and why ubuntu is doomed to fail.

[Thread] Nietzsche believed that power and morality are neither good nor bad but simply an existential reality and that both are byproducts of human interaction. He referred to master morality, in contrast to slave morality. We'll start with master morality:

According to Professor Hermann Giliomee of UCT, in the 1870s, an idea emerged that South Africa was a White man’s land and that a “consolidated White group was needed to dominate the Black majority”. However, there was a problem: growing numbers of poor, uneducated Boers🧵🧵 After the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, Alfred Milner, the British Governor of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, stated that South Africa could not become a “White man’s country” if it were “full of poor Whites”, which there were plenty: destitute, unskilled and unemployable.

Let’s talk about Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla and her most recent tantrums🧵🧵

(The attached picture is very relevant, please read til’ the end) First, the biggest problem with Duduzile is that she believes she has real support. She assumes that everyone backing MK is doing so partly because of her and that these supporters will rally behind her campaign against Floyd Shivambu just like they did against Jabulani Khumalo.

Everyone knows about the CODESA series of meetings that took place at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park in 1999-92. What's not commonly spoken about are the other secret meetings.

[Thread] While CODESA meetings were in session discussing constitutional matters, some ANC members secretly met with corporate leaders to discuss economic matters. Unlike CODESA, which was held publicly, these economic talks were mostly private, thus not open to public scrutiny.

Between 1995 and 1999, Zambia’s exports to Switzerland were just 3% of the Zambia’s total exports. However, between 2003 and 2023, exports to Switzerland made up a whopping 42% of Zambia’s total exports! How did a tiny EU country thousands of km away dominate Zambia’s economy? Zambia’s economy was turned upside down in 2000 when a company called Carlisa Investments bought a controlling stake in the State-owned copper producer Mopani Copper Mines. Carlisa was a shell company registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands and owned by Glencore.

Everyone just “knows” that “corruption” is the primary cause of Africa’s continued underdevelopment. However, Professor Grieve Chelwa holds a different view and argues the West has, in fact, “Wielded ‘corruption’ to privatise life in Africa”.

[Thread] Contrary to popular belief, the concept of "corruption" as we know it today, has not always been part of the dominant narrative. In fact, it was not until the early 1990s that corruption became an important part of political and economic discourse.

For the past 40 years, the South African Reserve Bank and the government have been working systematically to degrade South Africa’s economy to position the country as a modern foreign investor colony.

[Thread] An investment colony is a country primarily used by foreign entities for investment opportunities that prioritise external profits at the expense of local development, with economic policies designed explicitly to serve foreign financial interests.

A Study from the London School of Economics estimates that Black South African households only hold about 1% of the assets held by White households and that 45% of White adults own inheritable wealth of at least R250K compared to just 3% of Black South Africans.

[A Short Thread] According to the researchers, SA’s wealth inequality is a result of decades of “non-White” people being “severely limited” from accumulating wealth, in part by being “[prevented] from living and owning property across most of the country’s land area reserved for White settlement”

When mining tycoon Brett Kebble was murdered in 2005, he was eulogised as a “maverick” and a “flawed genius” who revolutionised the South African mining industry by employing unorthodox and innovative methods.
I was curious, so I went to check these techniques out.

[Thread] In 1992, at 28 years old, Brett Kebble and his father bought a small decrepit mine called Rand Leases in west Johannesburg for 1 cent a share. Within a year, the mine was worth 1 rand a share. Kebble had paid R40 000 for the mine. Within a year, it was worth R4 million.

Many people believe South Africa sold Libya out to the United States and its vassals after South Africa voted to pass the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. Did Jacob Zuma’s government betray Libya?

[Thread] On 17 March 2011, the UNSC passed Resolution 1973 on Libya which called for the protection of civilians and a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid. It’s important to note that members of the UNSC interpreted the resolution in different ways:

Why are Asian scholars the best in the world, far ahead of everyone else when it comes to mathematics? Is it their curricula or do they have superior genes purposely built for maths and science?

{Thread} Asian students are known to be the world’s best in mathematics, and most people just assume it must be because they’re naturally gifted or that their education system is just better. It turns out the real reason has nothing to do with talent or the education system.

Everyone uses the Internet, yet few people know what it is, where it came from or who owns it. So, let’s talk about it.

[Thread] The Internet began as an experimental technology developed by the US military in the 1970s. Over the years, it evolved into a publicly-owned computer network primarily used by academic institutions before it was privatised in the 1990s.

Let's talk about this company once again🧵🧵 When US banks caused a financial crisis and then collapsed because of it, their government decided to bail some of them out, because they were “too big to fail”. To analyse the damage and disburse the money, the government chose a little-known company called BlacRock.

OK, let's talk about this image🧵🧵 The image above depicts a creature known as the Baphomet and it is the artwork of Eliphas Levi, an occult author and ceremonial magician. It is impossible to discuss the origins and implications of this image fully. So I'll just stick to what it symbolises.