Werner Smit retweeted
1. I have made the case for and look forward to Helen Zille becoming mayor of JHB. I will also probably reiterate my case for voting for her just before November 4. But now I want to reflect on the character of some of the engagement & what it means for progressive change.
Werner Smit retweeted
Delusional vs decisive
Erratic vs Steady
Narcissist vs Altruist
Quitter vs Stalwart
I have worked for both Herman and Helen and I would choose @helenzille every time in this election. JHB needs someone who is in for the Long haul, for all the residents of Joburg. Someone who won't be bought by the Shadrack Sibiya's of the world. We need someone whose governance record is beyond reproach.
Only one choice can be made here Now Joburg and it's @HelenZille4Jozi
Werner Smit retweeted
The ongoing regulatory standoff blocking Elon Musk's Starlink from officially launching in South Africa is an example of how state-sanctioned racial extortion cripples basic human advancement.
To satisfy rigid Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) policies, the regulatory body ICASA has maintained that Starlink must yield a mandatory 30% local ownership stake to historically disadvantaged groups before receiving an individual telecom licence.
A global, capital-intensive aerospace company is not going to slice up its proprietary equity and hand it over to a localized, politically connected rent-seeker class just to cross a regulatory hurdle.
Musk offered a R500 million ($28 million) program to fund free high-speed internet connectivity for over 5,000 rural schools, a move that would immediately uplift 2.4 million impoverished learners annually. Yet, the government chose to block this massive educational windfall because it prioritizes the financial enrichment of an elite few over the immediate civilizational needs of millions.
True transformation is achieved by providing world-class digital infrastructure and modern skills to rural communities, not by holding global infrastructure hostage to local equity demands.
As a consequence of this ideological theater, while neighboring countries rapidly modernize their communications, millions of South Africans remain digitally marooned in the dark.
Capital and high-speed innovation migrate exclusively to environments where property rights are secure and rules are transparent.
Until South Africa discards the cheap dopamine hit of identity politics and prioritizes institutional meritocracy, it will continue to isolate its citizens from the global economy.
newsday.co.za/south-africa/3…
Werner Smit retweeted
Replying to @MaxPatricius
This is getting worse by the day! #ActionSA is supporting & promoting the #WaterTankerMafia instead of using #Tshwane's budget to fix the Water crisis: Disgraceful!!
Werner Smit retweeted
Muslim women in burqas are out voting in the Israeli elections today.
This fact alone shows Muslim women have more democratic rights in Israel than in basically any Muslim country.
The mainstream narrative will never show you this because it ruins their agenda against Israel.
Werner Smit retweeted
Lula – The Gramsci of Latin America.
Latin America is a bit behind Europe, but it follows the same script. Lula is in fact their Gramsci, or their Dutschke.
In Europe, the turn came in 1968. The revolution had failed in the streets, so the generation of '68 took Gramsci's advice and Dutschke's slogan: don't storm the palace – march through the institutions.
Latin America had its own street revolution: Che's guerrillas. They failed too. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and the left lost both its model and its money.
So in 1990, Lula, the leader of the Workers' Party, who had just lost the presidential election, called the left of the whole continent to a hotel in São Paulo. He and Fidel Castro had agreed that his party would host the meeting. The São Paulo Forum was born: communist parties, socialist parties and guerrilla movements, all at one table.
This summer, Lula himself explained why he created it: he thought the left of Latin America could be educated through elections. The road to power was not the rifle but organizing people and winning votes. And that it would take 20-30 years.
That is the long march: not the war of maneuver but the war of position. Gramsci, translated into Portuguese.
And it worked. Within fifteen years, parties from the Forum governed Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador – and Brazil itself. In Cuba, of course, the communists never left power since 1959.
Brazil even had the long march's schoolmaster. Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the book that turned teaching into raising revolutionary consciousness, ran São Paulo's schools for Lula's party from 1989.
And the march reached the courts. The Supreme Court annulled Lula's corruption convictions on procedural grounds, then sentenced his main rival, Jair Bolsonaro, to 27 years in prison.
In Europe, the long march was an idea. In Latin America, it has a founder, an address and a membership list. Dutschke gave Europe a slogan. Lula gave Latin America an organization.
But Latin America started the march twenty years after Europe – and it may be the first to walk out of it. Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and Chile already have. Brazil, for now, stays in line.
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.
Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions.
Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.
1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.
2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.
3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.
4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.
5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.
6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.
7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march.
Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.
Werner Smit retweeted
This is your periodic reminder that Barbara Creecy is a horrible communist who has been a disaster in every government role she has ever inhabited.
Transport minister Barbara Creecy says her department is considering using taxpayer money to transition the largely untaxed taxi industry to electric vehicles.
mybroadband.co.za/news/motor…
Werner Smit retweeted
The obsession with perpetuating race-based engineering under the guise of redress is a masterclass in economic self-sabotage.
More than three decades after the fall of apartheid, South Africa is still aggressively maintaining and expanding a vast apparatus of racial classification laws to punish the white minority, who comprise roughly 6% of the population, with nearly 40% of these laws ironically minted after 1994.
You cannot build a competitive, high-growth economy by anchoring your legal and commercial frameworks to institutionalised identity politics.
When you force businesses to navigate a Byzantine labyrinth of racial quotas, compliance certificates, and state-mandated equity transfers rather than merit and commercial viability, you don't achieve economic justice, you achieve economic stagnation.
True transformation is a product of world-class basic education, rigid property rights, and infrastructure competence. Instead, South Africa has chosen to codify a permanent bureaucratic parasite class that feeds off the private sector while the masses remain structurally trapped in poverty.
Capital is a coward; it flows exclusively where risk is predictable and rules are colorblind.
Until the state drops the cheap dopamine hit of identity politics and embraces a cold, clinical meritocracy, it will continue to wonder why it is litigating itself into a permanent low-growth trap.
Apartheid ended in 1994. Race-based legislation did not.
South Africa still has 145 race laws on its statute books, 38% of which were adopted after apartheid.
The FMF's Dr @Martin_ASFL makes it clear: racial discrimination cannot be justified as redress. South Africa needs equality before the law, not more race-based legislation.
Read more: newsday.co.za/south-africa/3…
Werner Smit retweeted
Apartheid ended in 1994. Race-based legislation did not.
South Africa still has 145 race laws on its statute books, 38% of which were adopted after apartheid.
The FMF's Dr @Martin_ASFL makes it clear: racial discrimination cannot be justified as redress. South Africa needs equality before the law, not more race-based legislation.
Read more: newsday.co.za/south-africa/3…
In a close and divisive election, the worst thing you could possibly do is immediately arrest your opponent right after the election.
But what do communists care about that when they’re in power.
Werner Smit retweeted
They’re going to arrest and prosecute the guy who lost the election. You really need to see the people celebrating the Lula win for exactly who they are.
Werner Smit retweeted
We have DA councillors celebrating Lula’s dodgy win. It’s important to realise what time it is.
Werner Smit retweeted
South Africa doesn't need a revolution, a war, or bloodshed. It simply needs meritocracy, competence, and institutional discipline.
All of South Africa's problems are governance and policy problems. The problems are cadre deployment, B-BBEE, property rights, and racially discriminatory laws.
The decline of South Africa is caused by the decline of industry, production, and investment. Unemployment and poverty are a direct result of a failing economy.
To solve these problems, you don't kill the Boer or shoot the farmer. There must be a change of strategy and a shift away from corruption, extortion, and incompetence.
Blocking investors because they're white isn't smart policy. Extorting investors isn't a logical way to develop a nation.
South Africa will make big strides forward when state-owned enterprises hire on merit, competence, and expertise rather than partisan alignment.
When the red tape is removed, big investments and global capital will flood into the South African economy, and the industrial boom will be massive.
South Africa needs free markets, an ecosystem that is conducive to investors, and proper governance.
South Africa's economy was performing well until scam politicians showed up to kill it.
Poverty in South Africa is the result of a shrinking industrial base, not the presence of producers.
Manufacturing and industry were the backbone of the economy. It's why people from across Africa came to work and build in South Africa.
Cadre deployment, BEE policies that discourage investment, and widespread corruption have eroded that base.
When you weaken the system that creates jobs, you get unemployment and poverty.
Yet Malema tells you the cause is a white farmer, a white industrialist or a white investor.
It isn't. South Africa is what it is because of its base of producers. That is what set the country apart from other African economies, and it's what South Africans should be rebuilding, not blaming.
Poverty isn't caused by the people who create jobs. It's caused by the people who make creating them impossible.
Producers build economies. Politicians who blame them just build brands, using the emotions of poor people as fuel.
Basic math and economics will show South Africans the scam.
Werner Smit retweeted
7. Zille is the only candidate if we want power, water, services & honesty & competence. Zille is the only candidate if JHB is to survive. Getting the largest vote will also not be enough. We cannot have coalition govt. Zille needs more than 50%. This is the only way JHB returns.
Werner Smit retweeted
6. I said before & I say again; JHB is dying. It’s being destroyed by its incompetent leadership. Replace them! Vote for Zille. Her race should not matter. Her age should not matter. Her label for the atrocities in Gaza is not the priority. The sole issue is can she deliver?
Werner Smit retweeted
5. If I have to choose between an incompetent mayor & a competent one who cannot pronounce genocide, I will take the competent one. People should remember, the poor cannot buy out of failed services. They have to live through it. For them a competent & honest mayor is paramount.
Werner Smit retweeted
4. We are not choosing between saints & sinners. There does not have to be a trade off, but there is one now. I would prefer my mayor to pronounce on genocide, but if I had a choice between a corrupt mayor & an honest one who cannot pronounce genocide, I will take the honest one.
Werner Smit retweeted
3. Zille is the only person to vote for. But let me address the complaint against her from a few middle-class intellectuals,some from Dbn.They say we don’t have to choose between services & human rights.They speak of Helen’s position on Gaza where she refused to call it genocide.
Werner Smit retweeted
2. I was in CT for a conference & redirected through JHB to see a sick aunt.The contrast between CT & JHB was shocking.The drive from the airport to the city was dark.None of the street lights worked. The roads were a mess.There is also the water shortages & collapse of services.























