While the failures of dedicated global communists are plain for all to see, the reality is that postcolonial looting is just as bad.
Seldom has a word conjured up so much fear as “communist”.
Even today, long after the demise of the Soviet Union and the clear failure of the Marx-Engels vision of a better world, communists are still seen under many a bush, so strong is the stereotyping from the Cold War years.
Being seen as a communist cost Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba his life, after he horrified former colonial master Belgium and the US Central Intelligence Agency with his radical freedom day speech, in which he invited the Soviets in to his country.
The Americans and the Belgians conspired to have the army chief-of-staff, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, lead a coup that overthrew Lumumba, who was executed on 17 January, 1961 and his body dissolved in acid.
Thus began the long and bitter Cold War battle for Africa, pitting the West against the Soviet-led eastern bloc – a conflict that even drew in South Africa, as an American proxy, into the post-independence war in Angola.
Because of the association of the ANC in South Africa with the Soviet Union – which supported its armed struggle against apartheid – the party was regarded by the former National Party government as being communist.
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Yet, were the ANC’s ideological “political commissars” back in Moscow – who gave its leaders their ideological indoctrination – to see the ANC today, they would shudder.
Despite the repeated mouthing of apparently communist ideology by those in the ANC, the party is not, by any measure, communist.
Its greed and corruption exhibits a selfishness not dissimilar to that exuded by capitalism’s worst robber barons, but accompanied by massive incompetence.
And, while the failures of dedicated global communists are plain for all to see, the reality is that postcolonial looting is just as bad.
Mobutu died a billionaire, while his and Lumumba’s mineral-rich country is feasted on by foreign scavengers.
