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South African ruling party is dying of AIDS

 

Adriana Stuijt   

Aids is a white man's disease famous last words March 17, 2009 - The ruling ANC party under its president Jacob Zuma recently split straight down the middle and is holding elections on April 22 to determine whether the breakaway faction COPE will win hegemony of South Africa. However, the entire membership of both factions is being threatened much more by the devasting AIDS-epidemic, which is killing 28,000 voters a day, a researcher warns.

AIDS is killing so many politicians in southern Africa now that their deaths are threatening the ability of governments and local authorities to function properly, a Cape Town researcher warns. A full 2.6-million registered South African voters aged 30 to 49 years died between 2000 and 2005.

And it's all due to AIDS, says Kondwani Chirambo, lead author of a new study on deaths among local city councillors in South Africa. The vast majority of South Africa's wall-to-wall municipalities are run by councillors from the ruling African National Congress party.

Security forces, prisons:
The problem also emerges in the South African security forces, where the large number of young, infected soldiers and police officers are posing a growing security threat due to the physical side-effects of the deadly syndrome, according to a warning issued late last year by one of the country's top psychiatrists. see A secret report about the massive AIDS-death toll in the South African Prison system also was highlighted in another, seperate report last month. In the secret prison study, it was found that both the guards and the inmates were dying of AIDS in nearly equal numbers. see

Ruling African National Congress councillors dying of AIDS
This study thus also indicates that the local-level leadership of the ruling party of South Africa -- the African National Congress - now are dying by the tens of thousands each month of AIDS. see

The AIDS-epidemic is of course not limited only to the ANC-membership - other political party members are also suffering in a similar way.

However because the ANC is the ruling party which holds the most parliamentary and local-authority seats, the effect of the AIDS-epidemic could have a devastating impact on this political party 's ability to provide municipal services countrywide - with their members and town councillors dying so fast and often also being too ill too work while they are still officially employed.

Chirambo, the lead author of this new study on deaths among local city councillors in South Africa, told Agence France Press news agency that he had studied six other southern African countries where unnatural numbers of deaths of lawmakers could also be attributed to AIDS.

"If you look at the statistics, MPs have been dying young and dying in large numbers. These trends are similar to the trend seen in the general population," said Chirambo, of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa.

Life expectancy in South Africa down to 51
Life expectancy in South Africa has been dramatically reduced by the epidemic: from 64 years during the apartheid years which ended in 1994, to a mere 51 years in 2008 -- and only as a result of the AIDS epidemic.

The 2004 South African Department of Health report "The Democraphic Impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: National and Provincial Indicators" concluded for instance that 70 percent of all deaths in that year in the age group 15 – 49 years were due to AIDS and often also of co-infection with Extremely-drug-resistant Tuberculosis.

Municipalities can't function properly
Municipalities depend on appropriate knowledge and skills in order to deliver quality service to local communities. The study warns that loss of skills as a result of AIDS, job migration to other sectors of the economy and increasing demands for service delivery may all ‘conspire to undermine service delivery’.
“Apart from local government losing skills to other sectors it is also suffering a depletion caused by an unexplained illnesses which could largely be associated with HIV and AIDS. And that might introduce institutional weakness because most of these are the most trained and most experienced councillors”, says Chirambo.

Death of young voters
And, Chirambo says, they have determined that South Africa is losing 28,000 registered voters a month -- this alone should be a concern to those charged with providing municipal services to residents.
It's a death-blow to the future of South Africa’s young democracy. see

2.6-million young voters died in 2001-2006 alone…
“Pressure on cemetery space grows. Pressure on clinical services also grow as younger people are showing up ill. Between 2001 and 2006 we noted that there were 2,6 million voters who had died, and the majority of them were between the ages of 30 and 49 years. And that has to be quite worrying”.

Over the last eight years, almost half of the 589 municipal by-elections in South Africa between February 2001 and December 2007 were caused by death of councillors at a young age. see

Chirambo said this "does not bode well" for South Africa, where the poor government services are a major public complaint. Countrywide protest actions are held regularly to demand better 'service delivery' in municipalities. At least 226 municipalities were in fact functioning so poorly that local ratepayers created Trust Funds in which they deposited their taxes, so that they could start running their own municipal services.

Councillors are not the poorest people in the world...
Yet in the whole of southern Africa, the study found only one elected official who had openly disclosed her HIV status, and Chirambo attributes the failure of all these officials to seek help to a fear of stigma.

  • "It is not a very healthy profile. Councillors are not the poorest people in the world," he said. "It is clear a great deal of them feel to disclose your status is a form of political suicide."

South Africa undoubtedly has the world's highest new AIDS infection statistics. Depending on which source is used, these statistics range from 5.4 million people infected in 2008 (SA Government); to 6.1-million (international medical agency MSF).

At least 18% of the AIDS-victims in South Africa are working-age people, still active in the work-force. According to Chirambo, 2.6 million registered voters have died since 1999, the majority of them at far too young an young age.

Senegal
In Senegal, with a national Aids prevalence of only one percent, there were only three vacancies in parliament caused by deaths of politicians.

Zambia
However in Zambia, which recorded the first AIDS-death in 1995, AIDS is cited as the most common cause of deaths which are leading to parliamentary vacancies. see

Oil-rich Nigeria soon will be Islamic state

Dutch MPs warn of Jihadist campaign in the crucial Nigerian state of Plateau  – and with Nigeria under Islam, will the rest of Africa be far behind?

Adriana Stuijt - vote here! Subscribe to author

March 17 2009 - Oil-rich Nigeria, population 140-million, now is very close to an all-out"Islamic takeover', warn two Dutch MPs. And this would have a massive impact: from Nigeria, Africa's islamisation would spread fast -- resulting in hundreds of millions of refugees.

This would have a massive impact on the future of all of Africa and of the West, warn Dutch parliamentarians Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma of the Party for Freedom, writing in an editorial in the Dutch religious daily, the Reformatorisch Dagblad.

Oil crucial in Sudan and Nigeria:
Although the Dutch MPs didn't say this, a similar situation of course, also exists in Sudan on the Eastern side of the north-African continent: in this rudderless northern African state, the Jihadist-north's warlords are carrying out an ethnic-cleansing campaign against all the southern tribes, who are mostly animist and/or Christian followers. Nigeria and Sudan also have another important feature in common: Nigeria is rich in oil, and Sudan is located very strategically, straddling the shipping lanes to all the Middle-Eastern oil export terminals.

They said in their joint Dutch-language editorial that the international news media 'often describes such warfare erroneously as isolated conflicts, without placing any importance on the wide-ranging effects these 'isolated local conflicts' will have on any other countries, but especially on the West.

"A conflict is far too often described as a 'civil war', and journalists will write of 'religious tensions' or 'sectarian violence' - thus also constantly creating the immediate impression that these are mere dog versus cat fights which would not affect Western countries in the least. see video and also this video

"However, when one examines such 'civil wars' closely however, these often are imperialistic wars of conquest - in which Islam is always the engine which drives their stated end purpose of Islamic world dominance'. In Islam's most important 'hadith', that of the Buchari, it's stated very clearly that 'Islam is there to rule, and not to be ruled'.

  • "Jihad, the holy war, is the duty which has to be carried out by every Muslim - and those Muslims who reject Jihad are no longer viewed as Muslims, but as heretics, and thus become marked for a Fatwa, a death sentence,' the two Dutch MPs write.
    Nigeria situation is very serious

"A very important expansion of this aggressive islamic war of conquest is now taking place in Nigeria. The situation there now is very serious and will have a most devastating effect on Africa and on the entire Western World."

Nigeria, they point out, has Africa's largest population, namely 140-million people. It also has the second-strongest economy on the African continent because of its oil and other minerals.

Islamic Apartheid: Sharia law:
"Already, in twelve of the 36 states of Nigeria, Sharia has already become the law - this is the Islamic Apartheid law which discriminates against all non-muslims and which treats women as inferior creatures'.

  • "And once the Jihadists have gained the majority in only seven more Nigerian states, the federal government of Nigeria will be forced into adapting the country's constitution to include Sharia law - which means that in effect, all of Nigeria will then become an Islamic country'.

Plateau province: it's not 'sectarian violence' but a Jihad
"A crucial Islamic Jihad now is being fought in the centrally located Nigerian Federal State of Plateau - one of its 36 states. see situation in 2003: and compare this with the situation in December 2008:

Wilders and Bosma point out that Plateau is the key: it stradles the fault line between the Islamic North and the Christian South of Nigeria. "And once Plateau falls, it will have far-reaching consequences for all of Nigeria - and indeed all of Africa,' they warn.

Plateau's governor Jang now has to defend himself against jihadist pogroms in its capitol city of Jos (described by the BBC as 'post-election violence'). see

An eye-witness report in this BBC report however is describing a typical pogrom - an ethnic-cleansing campaign -- with burning houses, people who have to flee for their lives from Islamic murder gangs, and mothers who have to run while carrying their children to safety," they point out.

Indeed: a Christian teacher was quoted by the BBC as follows:

"He'could see the burning houses, all the smoke and hear the gunshots. Women were running away carrying their children, clothes, foodstuffs and water. Men were using petrol to douse the grass-roofed houses and then lighting with a match. I could hear shouts of "Allahu Akbar". Some of the Christians came running to safety at our place. I saw all this on Friday and again on Saturday but on Saturday there was even more shooting and a lot of shouting...." see

The Dutch MPs warned in their editorial article that all this 'post-election violence' is carried out by men shouting "Allahu Akbar'. Christian organisations report churches being torched, Christian ministers of religion are being murdered. These actions are clearly carefully planned and probably financed from outside the country..."

  • Non-muslims now are fleeing Plateau enmasse, driven away by the Hausa-Muslim colonists who follow in the wake of these jihadist murder gangs, they point out, warning:

Islamisation of all of Africa:
"When Nigeria falls to Islamic jihadists, this will have a powerful symbolic impact but also means that yet another oil-producing country will end up in the hands of Islam. In turn, those oil-dollars will be used to finance the worldwide Jihad.

"(And) an Islamic Nigeria also will become the starting point for the further islamisation of all of Africa. Once Nigeria has fallen to Islam, it will become even more difficult to remain positive about Africa's future.

Descent into "Inshallah Fatalism...'
"The continent will descend into 'Inshallah Fatalism', with disastrous results for the economy, education and women's rights.

  • It will also create a massive surge of refugees, millions upon millions of Nigerians who will flee from the continent - for Islam only gives people falling under its rule three ''choices', namely death, conversion to Islam, or the status of 'Dhimmi', i.e. a suppressed, constantly harassed non-believer.

“Many Nigerians will avoid having to make these choices by voting with their feet," they warn.

“Nigerians are living in genuine fear of a massive genocide according to the dictates of the prophet Mohammed's version of the perfect human, the ”al-insal al-kamil” - who doesn't mind undertaking one genocide or more," they conclude.