Is South Africa Becoming Like Cameroon?

There is a recent report on how some South African workers who work for a gold mining company headed by relatives of former President Nelson Mandela and current President Jacob Zuma are going without pay. Some are starving and at least one person has committed suicide due to frustration. If such shabby treatment of workers were being done by a white owned farm, for example, the African National Congress (ANC), especially its Youth League leader, Julius Malema, would have cried racism. Now that it is being done by a company headed by relatives of top leaders of the ANC, one does not hear any protest. The very people the ANC had pledged to defend are now being marginalized as those who are politically connected make fat pay checks. The company is even said to have written a very fat check to the ANC so that the ANC may be quiet about this dismal situaton. The fact that those who are politically well connected get to make it big reminds me of Cameroon where only the politically connected get to enjoy a better life. Even more, like Cameroon, some ANC leaders are now bribing the workers of this mining company with food handouts so that they may vote for the ANC in the upcoming elections. In Cameroon, politicians aim to make their people poor so as to better control these people. Perhaps this is what the ANC government in South Africa also wants to do to its people. After having claimed that black people have a common purpose of overcoming apartheid and making a better life, the elite are now giving the lie to that claim by seeking their interest rather than that of the people they had claimed to be defending. This is a shameful state of affairs.