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...international sanctions began to bite in the 1970s, Sasol became integral to the survival of an isolated South Africa--and a frequent target of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) guerrillas. In 1980 the ANC's military wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, blew up parts of Sasol's plants in Sasolburg and Secunda, both south of Johannesburg. In 1983, '84 and '85, the rebels returned to launch rocket attacks on the plants. (The rockets missed, but the attacks are commemorated to this day in an ANC song whose chorus goes, "Whoosh! Whoosh...
White supremacists using Nazi technology is a Venn diagram of bad p.r. Yet Sasol survived the end of apartheid. Why? Because it's an energy company. Precisely those qualities--size, profits, energy security--that made it a target of the ANC as a rebel group made it vital for the ANC as a government. Today Sasol has a market cap of $32 billion and is South Africa's biggest private-sector employer, with a workforce of 33,000, earnings that account for 4.4% of GDP and a production output that satisfies 38% of South Africa's fuel needs...
...revival of the graft case has spurred some Zuma supporters to hysterical defenses of their man. ANC Youth League President Julius Malema even declared that he would "kill" for Zuma. The power struggle between his supporters and those of Mbeki has been immensely damaging to a party whose moral authority as a liberation movement has plunged in its era of governance, buffeted by corruption scandals, an inability to tackle rising crime and unemployment, and the unseemly spectacle of some its core members and backers becoming billionaires while much of the country remains mired in poverty. At the weekend, former ANC...
...This year, judges on South Africa's constitutional court accused Cape Judge President John Hlophe of trying to influence their deliberations on the constitutionality of the case against Zuma in favour of the accused. Advocates of judicial independence in South Africa were hardly reassured when the new Zuma-allied ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, shot back that the court was showing signs of being "counter-revolutionary...
...Apartheid era President F.W. de Klerk, who also served as deputy president under Mandela, has begun a campaign to highlight what he claims is ANC abuse of power. "Everywhere the dividing lines between the state and the ruling movement are becoming more blurred," De Klerk told the Cape Town Press Club in June. The "rights and values" which he and Mandela enshrined in the country's 1994 constitution, "are under severe pressure," he said. It says something for how far the ANC has fallen from the moral high ground that in today's South Africa, a former apartheid ruler...