Kevin Maguire on South Africa

Regular readers will know that oafish Leftist Kevin Maguire is not my favourite person.

A Mirror columnist, he keeps alive Left-Right divides which in reality died decades ago, simply so he can pour forth his hatred of those who differ from him ideologically.

This is the man who recently said: "The only way David Cameron will lose the next election is if they find Madeleine McCann in his garage."

He then refused to apologise.

Kevin is currently in South Africa. Here are his thoughts on Nelson Mandela:

Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town in South Africa, is a shrine to Nelson Mandela, the world's living saint.

Former inmates show visitors his tiny cell and the quarry where he and prisoners, including President Jacob Zuma, were made to break rocks. But the apartheid regime couldn't break the freedom fighters, which makes Robben Island a humbling experience.

I recall bigots moaning that his release interrupted an episode of Antiques Roadshow. I'd have phoned the BBC myself had this historic moment been cut short to show a Queen Anne table.

I revere "Saint Nelson", but the great man is also the gentle butt of one of the best jokes I've heard.

Who says prison doesn't work? Look at Nelson Mandela.

He did 27 years and hasn't reoffended since his release.

Well, pretty much everything he complains about in his main column can be attributed back to Mandela's failures - although, obviously, in Kevin's world such things are still the thought of the evil white minority, who just won't give ordinary South Africans a break. Can't hold the saint responsible for his actions and his mistakes, after all - then you might trace a path back to smug Leftists like Kevin.

He once ranted about how David Cameron dared to visit South Africa whilst Mandela was in prison and the apartheid regime was still in place.

Whilst you won't hear any defence of apartheid from me, I fear that someone on Kevin's side of the ideological trench has supported some far more morally reprehensible forces than the apartheid regime ever was in practical terms (oppression, torture, concentration camps, that sort of thing).

After all, this is someone who probably still thinks the USSR and Cuba are model states in theory, with a few tiny adjustments which made them go wrong in practice.

Here are some extracts from his column:

The British and Irish Lions are currently touring with 30,000 rugby fans.

And SA's already hosted a rugby world cup, two cricket world cups and cricket's Indian Premier League.

So a touch of prejudice lurks in western criticism of whether a developing nation's capable of pulling off the big one.

Yet ticket and transport chaos did see thousands of fans miss the start of games during the Confederations Cup.

Zuma has declared it was a dry run and problems will be fixed. Maybe.

...

The southern tip of the African continent remains scarred by the evil of an apartheid regime which ended less than two decades ago.

Extreme wealth, concentrated in the hands of a white elite with a small if growing black rich set, sits uncomfortably along-side obscene poverty. Johannesburg's Maserati showroom is a world away from the tin shacks of shanty towns in a nation where a quarter of people live on less than a pound a day.

HIV is an epidemic infecting nearly a fifth of South Africans - talk of legalising prostitution ahead of the World Cup is a sick joke.

Violent crime makes much of Johannesburg a no-go area, though in fairness so are large parts of American cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

Firstly, as I've pointed out, the Lions rugby tour and the Confederations Cup have been marred by violent incidents and instances of police corruption.

Secondly, what planet does Maguire live on?

As I understood it, one of the great successes of abolishing apartheid was to make white people poor too.

An estimated 25% of Afrikaners live in extreme poverty, in shanty towns and caravans. I notice Maguire managed to overlook them well enough, despite his claim on moral superiority.

He also seems to back Zuma, without asking whether such a man, a committed polygamist and suspected rapist, is the right person to lead South Africa away from its HIV and AIDS crisis.

The notion of South Africa being 'scarred by apartheid' simply does not add up. Before the end of apartheid, South Africa was a First World nation which would have been capable of holding this tournament with no questions asked.

People like Maguire are responsible, in part, for the South Africa we see today, where poverty, misery, racist violence and disease increase daily.

If smug Westerners like him had dared to question their 'saint' when it mattered about the more flawed aspects of the transition to majority rule (such as 'Black Economic Empowerment'), this outcome could have been avoided, perhaps.

As it is, South Africa seems destined to slide into the same obscure misery as its neighbours - and that can't be blamed on apartheid. If it could, why is it the case that South Africa is slipping backwards to the standard of African countries which never had white minorities or apartheid?

Maguire, as one of Mandela's cheerleaders and shills, must take his share of the blame and let go of the ghosts of the past.

For South Africa's much-maligned or ignored white minority, it is business as usual - yesterday a renowned criminologist was left fighting for her life after being attacked with a spade by a labourer she was taking a cup of tea:

A renowned South Africa academic is in a serious condition in hospital after she was brutally attacked with a garden spade at her Centurion home.

Unisa criminologist Professor Anna van der Hoven, 64, was beaten, throttled and then punched while taking a cup of tea to a worker building a garden feature for her at her Lyttelton home on Wednesday.

Van der Hoven's alleged attacker was arrested shortly after a neighbour's domestic worker saw him fleeing his victim's Glover Avenue home.

It is believed the 28-year-old man, who began working on the water feature on Monday, was waiting behind a wall shortly after his employers left to fetch more building materials and struck Van der Hoven repeatedly over the back of the head and neck as she walked into her garden.

The man is then thought to have attempted to strangle her from behind before punching her in the face until she lost consciousness.

The attack on Van der Hoven, who lived alone with her three cats in Drummorgan security complex, has sparked outrage and shock among fellow academics, who have described her as a highly respected criminologist among the global academic community. As well as lecturing, Van der Hoven, until last year, served on the council of the Criminological and Victimological society of southern Africa.

Police describing the attack said it happened shortly after Van der Hoven arrived home. "As she was walking outside taking the labourer a cup of tea, he struck her over the back of the head before throttling her and then punching her in the face. He then grabbed her handbag, money and laptop computer before fleeing," said an officer.

A neighbour, who rushed to Van der Hoven's aid when the alarm was raised, described her as an extremely kind lady.

"I was terrified. When I saw her she was covered in blood. Her face was badly swollen and she was battling to speak. She was in shock and I just held her," she said. She said people in the complex were struggling to understand how something like this could happen, "especially to a person who had such a soft heart".

I wonder when Kevin, or any mainstream British journalist, will devote column space to this case, or any of the thousands like it, instead of portraying the victims as the evil oppressors?