TigerOC

A very good analysis of the disturbing, but not unexpected, decline of democracy and law by Professor Extraordinaire Shadrack Gutto can be found here .

His background;

Prof Shadrack Gutto

Shadrack Gutto is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits. He graduated with a Bachelor of Law (Hons) from the University of Nairobi, Kenya in 1975 and was awarded his PhD in the Sociology of Law by Lund University, Sweden. Prof Gutto lectured for a number of years at Lund University, and before that at the Universities of Zimbabwe and Nairobi. He currently teaches, writes and researches in the areas of jurisprudence, constitutional property and human rights law. Prof Gutto is currently an executive member of the Wits Black Staff Forum and a member of the Wits University Advisory Committee on Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunities.

With this background he can hardly be described as tainted by right wing leanings or propaganda and is probably well connected within the political structures ( especially being at Wits). This makes this analysis all the more disturbing and worrying for the future of South Africa.

Dutchie

Hi TigerOC,

I lived and worked in Durban, left just a few weeks before they released the Black Angel from prison. Just for the record? I'm not a racist, neither have I read most of the Professors work. But what I've seen and witnessed in the last few scary weeks of my stay there made me realize I was watching the first stages of a country dying a slow and very painful death. Sure Apartheid wasn't the answer, but neither was Mandela's unrealistic dream. Even in prison he knew what was going on under the protection umbrella of the ANC, and did nothing to prevent it. That in my eye's made him just as good or just as bad as the white's once where. Or am I the only one that has stood in a morgue trying to recognize the raped, beaten up female remains of someone that was once my colleague? Mandela knew of the rape and murder gangs, until today I haven't seen a single South African judge even trying to convict one of them. Murder is murder regardless of race or religion.

Black South Africa took over a system they never knew how to manage, and in all honesty? Never cared to how manage either. With the easiest victims erased out of their equation, to whom is the anger attention now drawn? Their fellow Africans. That South Africa as a country has survived until today borders that of a commercial and social miracle if you ask my humble opinion. With an economy that is going down the drain, and has been for the last few decades, one tends to look at the long term plans the current SA government has drawn up to rescue what once was the best Africa had to offer. To say it polity? It's a joke, and anyone with a little bit of commercial sense will confirm it.

Neither religion or hope makes the fat Lady called Earth turn round, but commerce itself. You can not give an overrun country back in a few years time and expect it to survive. Look at the plans that helped Europe survive after the second world war. A same plan, by a leader that really cared about his country should have been set up for South Africa itself. Mandela, knew this but ignored it and choose the emotional path instead. Black rule was the opium that would keep the black masses calm. But with no easy victim to point your finger at this time I wonder who will become South Africa's next victims? The surrounding countries that economy wise are now bypassing South Africa? The star of Africa called South Africa has burned out a long time ago if you ask me, and it takes one hell of a leader to realize that, regardless of skin color or tribal history. And with a weak (current) South African president, it doesn't help in building the foundations of trust South Africa so badly needs now. Professor Gutto is a product of recent South African history, nothing more, nothing less. Dare to look reality strait in the eye's and that I call a real leader.

Dutchie

Stanley10

Thanks for sharing that, I would never have guessed.

Dutchie

Hi Stanley,

You can always take a persons words out of the context in which they where written and add comments to it. I've read some of the Prof's work, added my own experiences to it. That you translate what I wrote into what you want to see? Is your choice, I don't agree with it, but accept it. Strange words for a "racist" aren't they?

Dutchie

Daxk

Actually Stanley10, I'm starting to become a racist.it may have been latent all these years, but the objectivity of distance coupled with Broadband is starting to lead me that way.
But then,I've always been an elitist, could never ,even as a child, be comfortable with bad manners, bullying,name calling, burping or farting in public,people haveiong highly emotional private arguements in public,the loud conversations cross the valley that would be a supermarket aisle or Taxi stop,
but mostly stupidity.
And I happen to be reading about a lot of stupidity from people in power in SA who happen to be of a different colour to me, and as the political Party in power has exactly 9% of its MP's who also happen to be "Blush" rather than "Brown" but the majority of stupidity and chance taking I read about seems to come from "Those" people,I am being made a racist,
So its actually their fault.

Tegwyn

Bijilo123

I laugh too but I remember RSA from some time back and really did not think that the government then always got it 100% right then or that the current government always gets it 100% wrong now. By co-incidence the racial issue was distinct but both successfully fked it up.

Now I'm living in Gambia which really is a basket case - but nice and safe and non-racist.

I don't think that what Dutchie says is racist to be honest.