Comrades, cadres and revolutionaries in the African National Congress (ANC) may stamp their feet. The communists in Luthuli House may scream their lies. The designer-democrats in the Democratic Alliance might threaten sanctions against Dianne Kohler Barnard, but here is the reality. And I will state it most categorically and even repeat it with conviction.

It is 2015 and apartheid is dead! Democratic South Africa no longer practices apartheid. Why practice it, when racism under the ANC has become a fine art?

Yes, for security reasons my government made legalised racism our policy. Today the ANC just uses racism as an excuse. Of course we served the members of the public far better under my regime, because we only had 4-million of them! Yes, it is true we had a functioning education system simply because everyone did what they were told! And yes, our health system worked because God was on our side because we did not recognise same-sex marriages, interracial marriages or so-called human rights as fabricated by communists! And our police force did not murder miners. There was no time; we were too busy shooting terrorists down the road in the townships!

Think back to the 1980s! Where in the world did you find a society that was as just as ours in South Africa? In Australia? After the systematic massacre of its aboriginal peoples, the Australians so easily pointed a finger at South Africa and accused us of racial genocide. Let me remind you: then we had 23-million blacks alive in our country, while the Australians only had a few hundred thousand left in theirs.

And the mighty United States of America? After hundreds of years of racial discrimination and slavery, the Americans ignored the black ghettos of New York and Chicago, while they pointed a finger at our black townships of Sharpeville and Soweto – cities of which I held the Freedom. Has any US president ever really been given the freedom of Harlem?

And the United Kingdom on their moral high ground? Today they practice their own version of separate development between their Christian and Muslim citizens, while democratic South Africa has no intolerance based on faith, all thanks to my government’s policy of practising religious freedoms on every segregated front?

We in the former National Party are truly sick and tired of constantly being represented as Nazis and thugs. I warn you! If you allow apartheid to be blamed for every incompetent misstep in governance; if you as democrats do not practice what you preach, you will unleash red-beret’d forces in South Africa the end result of which cannot be foreseen. By trending on Twitter in October 2015, I can now remind you all that I managed to keep law and order in South Africa. And no one in the world ever bothered to stop me!

PW Botha

DM

Photo: Former President PW Botha gestures after an appearance in the George Magistrates Court in this January 1998 file picture. (Reuters)