South Africa Farm Chat

If you live in South Africa, there is a political episode going on....where farm redistribution is being discussed.

The emphasis here centers on four facts (truth value is relative).

1.  Whites have held a high ownership level, from day one.

2. 13 percent of the nation is farmable, which is debatable. Irrigation figures into this.

3. The ANC Party says no compensation is required, which worries banks and export folks.

4.  The opposition folks say compensation would make this legit but would mean tens of billions of dollars of value.

I watched 15 minutes of regional news cover this last night.  The ANC folks felt compensation was a no-go.....it would not open for discussion.

The odd pieces?

1. Vineyards, worth ten of millions are part of the episode. Some have irrigation systems and private dams.

2. Orchards play into this.

3. The ANC has has two decades to figure out the profitable operations, and one might suspect they have a list ready to go.

4. The odds that an orchard owner would cut down his operation if state papers arrived?  I would suggest a 90 percent chance....same for vineyard owners.

5.  Trump?  He could stop import of regional fruit and wine...suggesting the EU do the same.

6. Banks stand to lose billions in farm debt.

7.  Ownership by companies?  Some exist, but no one suggests how this would be handled.

8. Breaking farms apart?  No, that isn't being discussed.

9. Ownership by ANC political folks, their relatives, proxy players, etc? It is suggested but nothing on paper exists and you have no idea who the new farm owners would be.

10. The round number of 50 percent black ownership?  Does it mean total farm land in the country or just farms?  Again, this is not clear. Could you end up with 80 percent of their goal in just one state or province? Well, in theory,  yes....but again, there no law to say how this works. Could every single vineyard end up with state papers? In theory, yes.

I will guarantee that this law will pass, and a list of a dozen farms and vineyards will be seized to make headlines in the first month.   But I suspect after the owners have burned down the operation, blown up dams, and cut the orchards and vineyards down....things will get awful quiet.  Cleaning up the mess will be impossible.

South Africa and Numbers Distrust

I've had five or discussions with locals over the past ten days.   What comes up often is the chatter about facts, numbers, statistics, and reliability.  It doesn't matter if you talk to a black, colored, or white...they all laugh over data given out by the government,  in essence....fake data.

The true population numbers?  Some folks in Cape Town suggest there's one to two million uncounted residents...mostly from Zimbabwe. 

Murders?  No one believes the monthly police reports.

Robberies?  Same story.

One older guy said that when you see some 45 minute interview with a ANC Party official on TV, you can figure that he will 'dump' sixty facts or numbers....of which one or two might be true and the other 98 percent are fake.

So I asked, how can this continue?  No one can really answer that.  Their perception was that when the TV and news era came....you had to fill empty data columns and false good numbers were better than true bad numbers.

The truth is....there just isn't much to say for news.  A lion attack would make for front page news....but that rarely ever happens.  I noticed today some hype over a lady locally suing a bed company, when the bed collapsed during a moment of passion and she injured her back falling on the floor.  The lawsuit and discussion got front page discussion.  In this case, folks don't get fed fake data, and they believe the whole story.

I have three days left on this trip....with potentially  200 fake facts to receive.