Final Warning!

“So you’re visiting South Africa! Been there before?” The desk clerk at the South African Airways check-in at London’s Heathrow airport was having a quiet time and was on for a chat. I explained that this was my fourth visit over the past fourteen months. She then proceeded to tell me of a distraught British couple to whom she had attended recently. They were flying to Johannesburg to be present at the funeral of a family member. He had driven home from work, got out of his automobile and was cut down by AK47 bullets ripping through his body, as a gang of black youths blandly took possession of his car in broad daylight. The clerk then continued to tell me that within two weeks of this incident, she found herself processing the flight tickets of another British couple, a husband, together with his wife in an emotional, partial state of collapse, who were traveling to Johannesburg to attend the funeral of the wife’s sister. She had been gunned down in a Johannesburg suburban backyard as she hung out her washing, again in broad daylight. The motive of yet another gang of black South African youths? Robbery of whatever they could lay their hands on!

With almost half a million people entering the job market in South Africa annually, unemployed black youths are on the rampage in the rainbow nation, murdering, pillaging and taking what they wish from whom they choose. Waiting at a set of traffic lights on a pleasant April morning at a street corner in Port Elizabeth, a knife attack by one black youth upon another took place before my very eyes. Later that year, two of our staff and our accountant witnessed the murderous result of a payroll robbery whilst waiting for service at a Johannesburg suburban bank. The new South Africa is a dangerous place! As Joseph de Courcy stated recently in a lead article entitled “South Africa’s employment time bomb,” “the already appalling level of serious crime is set to soar further still, leading to a general breakdown in law and order. This in turn could provoke a serious white backlash against the new political order, thus increasing what could become an uncontrollable spiral of violence” (Intelligence Digest, Feb. 2, 1996).

A South African correspondent for the British Sunday Telegraph newspaper recently reported, “Jo’burg is now considered as much the undisputed murder capital of the world as South Africa’s business centre. Near-anarchy prevails in city streets, townships and leafy suburbs as AK47-wielding criminals rampage with seeming impunity.”

The facts are, the optimistic claims made in 1994, at the birth of the new South Africa, that “the new multiracial state was uniquely placed in Africa to combine the fresh liberal pluralism with a sophisticated business environment of First World quality” (ibid.), ring very hollow as the new nation’s social and political order faces the prospect of collapse. The world financial markets have made their judgment on an economy faced with uncontrollable crime, a treasury now in the hands of a socialist ANC minister of finance (the two previous ministers having resigned during Mandela’s brief two-year term) and the important post of trade and industry firmly placed by Mandela in the hands of a declared communist.

True Colours

South Africa’s politically naive foreign ministry brashly called recently for the U.N. to lift its sanctions imposed on Libya for its connection with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. This approach flies in the face of the Western stand against Libyan terrorism. Deeply disturbing to Western intelligence agencies are reports that South Africa has within its national precincts five Hezbollah training camps! All this points towards a South African government which is rapidly gravitating towards a collision course with the West. Its bedfellows are increasingly being revealed as historically and rabidly anti-Western! In his masterful work, The Triumph of the West, historian J. M. Roberts reveals that it is Islam that has, for much of its history, shaped the African continent.

In April 1996, Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo visited both Libya and Iran. As de Courcy comments, “the ANC has a fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-Western heart and…countries such as Iran and Libya are the natural allies of an ANC-ruled South Africa…. Our latest information…is that the deal signed last year between South Africa and Iran for the storage of 22.5m barrels of Iranian oil at Saldanha Bay on South Africa’s west coast is likely to go ahead despite American objections. Other co-operative deals in the oil, gas, and mines sectors are being negotiated. As far as Libya is concerned, Libyan leader Colonel Qadhafi has been invited to visit South Africa by Nelson Mandela as a follow up to Nzo’s visit” (Intelligence Digest, April 12, 1996).

Hard on the heels of Nzo’s visit to Libya and Iran, “representatives of the anti-Israeli Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, are expected in the country for an Islamic conference” (The Times, April 10, 1996).

The most startling signal of all, to the West, of South Africa’s current foreign policy trends, was the September 1996 visit by president Rafsanjani of Iran. President Mandela honoured this sponsor of international terrorism with a 21-gun salute!

Even more curious was the October visit to Cape Town by a four-ship naval task force. “‘The visit to South Africa highlights a beginning of military relations between our two countries, and military co-operation will be discussed,’ the German embassy said in a statement yesterday” (Cape Times, October 1, 1996).

One-Party Rule

The spectre which haunts those who see South Africa as the last domino to fall in what has been a succession of destructive takeovers of governmental power in former African colonies is—one-party rule!

Nigeria’s San Abacha, Zaire’s Mobutu, Liberia’s Charles Taylor, Kenya’s Daniel orap Moi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings, the Sudan’s Brigadier Bashir, Zambia’s Kaunda—the list goes on of African despotic leaders who squelched opposition, curbed human rights and entrenched themselves in one-party states—often for life!

Did F. W. DeKlerk, hard on the heels of gifting his nation to those who were once “the enemy of the state,” perpetrate the greatest betrayal of all, by giving South Africa over to one-party rule by his withdrawal from Mandela’s government of national unity?

In true African fashion, the country’s new president was swift to reward his favourite ministers with abandoned National Party portfolios. Of as deep concern as the now extant one-party state in South Africa are clauses in its newly adopted constitution which ease the way for state infringement of human rights, restrictions on freedom of speech and limitations on employers rights in the event of industrial unrest. The constitution also ensures equal rights for homosexuals, underwriting the prospect of a moral slide into a state of Sodom and Gomorrah infamy.

Astute Africa-watchers experience a sense of deja vu as they watch South Africa merge rapidly into the pattern set by many a post-independence government in the decolonised continent of Africa. They have memories of all of this having happened before in an often repeated but now familiar and well documented process, as former colonial powers handed control of whole nations over to former terrorists and self-serving socialist rabble-rousers.

True to the tradition established decades ago by a long line of would-be African leaders, as former colonial powers divested themselves of first one nation, then another and then numerous others in Black Africa, the new president of South Africa, voiced greatly exaggerated promises of new material wealth that should be forthcoming to the average black national in this country. A year later, Mandela repeated and strengthened those promises as he addressed a howling audience of 2,500 gathered on the lawns in front of the Union Buildings in Johannesburg on Freedom Day in April 1995, being the first anniversary of the handover of the nation and most of its assets to the ANC/SACP.

Two years later, the promises of increased housing, education, employment and material wealth have an increasingly hollow ring. There are more unhoused blacks in South Africa today than at the time of Mandela’s inauguration. Crime runs hand-in-hand with unemployment at record levels. Johannesburg, once the bastion of governmental control and big business in South Africa, has become the murder and rape capital of the world! A brain-drain of skilled professionals fleeing to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain and the United States accelerates. The country’s means of exchange, the rand, plummeted twenty-five percent in value during the first half of 1996.

However, the situation was significantly exacerbated by F. W. DeClerk’s complete capitulation to the dominant political force of the ANC/SACP. Ex-president F. W. DeClerk pulled out of the coalition government of national unity on June 30, 1996, thus handing total power to Nelson Mandela’s ANC/SACP combine! Many will say that all this action did was legitimise a situation which already existed. The coalition was in fact a sham from the beginning, with the Nationals virtually having been squelched and laughed out of parliament by the overwhelming vote of the ANC/SACP on many an issue which the Nationals regarded as crucial to the protection of business and minorities in South Africa.

“During the constitutional negotiations, the National Party pressed for provisions guaranteeing property rights, a clause giving employers and workers equal rights in industrial disputes…the right to retain single-language state schooling. It also sought guarantees of future power sharing. But in the end those demands were largely ignored” (Time, May 20, 1996).

In effect, what DeClerk has done is to bring on black majority rule in South Africa fully three years in advance of the date set originally in the country’s new constitution. The new constitution originally called for majority rule following the 1999 general election. The sell-out to a demonstrably incompetent majority ANC/SACP government has left thinking South Africans shaking in their boots at the prospect of their richly developed and once greatly-blessed nation rapidly descending into Third World status!

Post-Independence Legacy

The legacy of the domino effect of decolonization and the handover of well-developed African nations to petty despots and, even worse, to self-serving tyrants who have raped their own people, their land and precious resources to the advantage of self-gain and swollen Swiss bank accounts, is extremely well documented in post-colonial history.

“Africa is a painful part of the world for Westerners to come to grips with. We weep for it more out of pity than understanding. When the tears dry up, we find professionals to weep for us. Mostly, however, modern black Africa is just too depressing. It is a gloomy question mark, a part of the world where children have swollen bellies and sad eyes, where soldiers blast away at each other in endless wars for incomprehensible reasons” (Africa, Blaine Harden, p. 14).

In considering the world’s poorest continent, society will inevitably wake up too late to discover, soon, that the celebrated “rainbow nation” of 1994, will have perhaps fallen hardest and heaviest from its position as one of this world’s wealthiest nations to one of its poorest! The fall is inevitable as South African political scientist and socio-economic commentator, Arthur Kemp, clearly indicated in his factual summary in the July 1996 issue of The Philadelphia Trumpet. Consider the odds against South Africa’s ex-terrorist/communistic government succeeding in fulfilling its oft-stated dreams, in contrast with the failed experiments with similar governmental mixes in so many other African nations.

Modern African history is a chronicle of abject misery. As the 1980s decade of greed closed, African per capita income was less than it had been at the close of the 1950s when Western leadership and infrastructure were still largely in place in many a Black African nation. As we approach the end of the 20th century, seventy percent of the world’s most poverty-stricken nations are African. Commentators such as Blaine Harden of the Washington Post state that “the region is slipping out of the Third World into its own bleak category: the Nth World” (ibid., p. 15). Harden further documents that although Africa has been “the most successful producer of babies in recorded history,” it is the world’s least successful food producer! The world aids epidemic finds its epicenter in central and east Africa. “Aids is aggravating an already severe shortage of skilled manpower. It threatens to decapitate certain countries” (ibid.).

Desertification and erosion spread rapidly each year with the Sahara and Kalahara Deserts closing the gap between them by one hundred miles annually. The list of African curses seems endless—massive decline in export earnings in the 1980s; a foreign debt burden, relative to African continental income, the highest in the world; thirty percent of earned African income swallowed up in interest payments; a dependence on foreign aid more than any other part of the developed world; the panic flight of outside investment; an increasing irrelevance in the international economic arena, as the whole African continent now accounts for less than three percent of total American trade; rank failure of African nations, without Western expertise, to sustain long-term growth; failed “structural adjustment” initiatives, such as in Madagascar, where infant mortality was higher in 1985 than in 1960; coup upon coup. Bloody civil wars spawning “the world’s largest refugee population: one of every two hundred Africans was a homeless victim of war. The number of stable democracies could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The political norm was near-absolute power in the hands of a Big Man who tolerated no opposition, rigged elections, and regarded the revenues of the state as personal income” (ibid., p. 16).

Mr. Harden, well-traveled and experienced as a “voyeur amid such misery,” holds no hope for the African continent under its present systems of administration and government—“Africa’s problems, as pervasive and ghastly as they seem, are not the final scorecard on a doomed continent. They are preliminary readings from the world’s messiest experiment in cultural and political change” (ibid., emphasis mine).

Powerful Lessons

In this sin-sick, war-weary, sex-crazed, materialistic, self-seeking, anti-government society of the 20th century, the great Creator God is set to teach the whole of mankind a lesson that it will never forget! This world currently supports an exploding population which, by far, exceeds that of any previous generation on earth since the beginning of creation. Just one bad season in each hemisphere could bring famine, with resultant and huge disease epidemics, to this world on a scale of apocalyptic proportions! This scenario, prophesied by Almighty God, has been building for decades in the post-war years. As the colonising nations of Israel found themselves economically, politically and socially unable to justify, in their terms, retention of their colonial interests, many Black African nations were hurriedly handed over to inept, untrained and selfishly grasping, greedy, petty despots who rapidly became instrumental in bringing about modern-day curses pronounced by God on the rebellious house of Israel.

“All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it. The Lord hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he hath thrown down, and hath not pitied: and he hath caused thine enemy to rejoice over thee, he hath set up the horn of thine adversaries” (Lam. 2:16-17).

Colonies formerly governed by a few sterling characters schooled in the administration of a global empire, found themselves the victims of African presidents, most of whom were set to “buy and bully the loyalty that allows them to survive” (ibid., p. 19). Many of these new African leaders were the sworn enemies of the Israelitish colonial powers, of their systems of government and administration. Yet, if the present-day descendants of Abraham were to experience the financial curse of the draining of their wealth in the form of huge quantities of foreign aid to their former colonies, it seems that the greater curse is upon the new petty despots’ own subjects—their own people!

The Failure of African Independence

In a striking portrayal of the extreme nature of the perversion of just one African economy, Harden quotes a European diplomat as maintaining that, “At this point, corruption is absolutely essential to Zaire’s stability.” Corruption, by definition, bespeaks unethical or immoral behavior. The great shame is that, having reached such a point where its most stabilizing influence is the corruption of business and governmental processes, such a socio-economic system can then be perpetuated by “being rewarded by the West for being less crooked than it used to be”! The moral corruption of Western-based systems is revealed in just this one example. In the four years from 1983 to 1987, the world bank gave $602 million to Zaire. To compound the problem, the IMF, together with a collective of Western creditor governments, including the U.S., granted Zaire up to six years grace on its international debts and extending payment periods to this nation for up to fifteen years. One explanation for such ridiculous generosity is that the American CIA was at that time being granted by Mobutu free reign in the airlift of arms from Zaire to the anti-Communist rebels in Angola. This “tit-for-tat” deal just served to drive Zaire deeper into debt, with Zairians being reduced to greater individual poverty each year, real wages being reduced to ten percent of their pre-independence value.

The well-developed economy of the colonial Congo, once a net food exporter, possessing some of the richest mineral wealth in the world, has, since independence, been reduced to the status of eighth poorest country in the world, spending nearly a quarter of its foreign exchange on food imports. The hand-out mentality of the West, exploited to its fullest potential by the slavering greediness of Black African despots, has done more over the past forty years to destroy whole African nations than any misguided colonial government within Africa did in the previous 150 years! The reality is, African peoples were generally better fed and housed, educated, medically treated and more stable in their intertribal relationships under colonial rule, than under independence!

Why, given the history of so much misery imposed on nation upon nation in the great continent of Africa, have the South Africans been doomed to follow in their wake? “What experience and history teach is that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles from it” (Biography of History, Hegel). What Hegel did not know was that the Eternal God, who created man, declared that the human mind, of and by itself, is anti-God: “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom. 8:7).

Further, through the inspired pen of the prophet Jeremiah, God states, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9).

In a powerful castigation against carnal mankind, God declares: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good” (Ps. 53:1).

The outcome of this historically foolish mind and nature of man is expounded in the Psalms: “A brutish man knoweth not; neither doth a fool understand this. When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever: But thou, Lord, art most high for evermore” (Ps. 92:6-8).

The mind of man is innately selfish, self-seeking, vain, thinking of that which it can get for itself, alone, often at the expense of others. “A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself” (Prov. 18:2). “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Prov. 14:12).

Man’s apparent incapacity to learn from his own historical mistakes, seemingly destined to repeat them over and over again, is succinctly and vividly portrayed by God: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Prov. 26:11).

End-Time Warning!

God declares through His unchangeable word, “Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:6-7).

The Eternal God prophesied the modern condition of loss of empire, loss of power, loss of the ability to effectively govern nations which is the present sad lot of the nations of biblical Israel. In a powerful chastisement of biblical Israel, and primarily Britain and America with their former dominions and possessions, God declares: “Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people; Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not: yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not. And the pride of Israel testifieth to his face: and they do not return to the Lord their God, nor seek him for all this. Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart: they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria. When they shall go, I will spread my net upon them; I will bring them down as the fowls of the heaven; I will chastise them, as their congregation hath heard” (Hos. 7:8-12).

South Africa is a former British possession settled largely of Israelitish stock—the Dutch (Zebulun and Issachar), the French (Reuben) and British (Ephraim). God is warning South Africa!

No power on earth can stop God warning the nations of Israel! The trumpet of alarm is being blown in South Africa and thousands are responding, requesting our literature! Under the apostleship of Herbert Armstrong, the latter-day Elijah, the good news of the coming Kingdom of God was powerfully preached and published within South Africa (Mat. 24:14). The day of reckoning is now at hand! Of all of the nations of Israel greatly blessed by a merciful God, South Africa has been the only country to gift her God-given birthright to those to whom it was not promised!

As this crazy world lurches towards the dawn of a new millennium, reality and common sense are increasingly sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. One of the greatest untruths thus perpetuated in society is that race has no bearing on the achievement levels of the various ethnic groups that abound in the melting pot of the earth’s teeming billions of mankind. Thus, a world ignorant to the great realities of the promises of race and grace, made to Abraham, father of the faithful, became delirious with surreal emotion at the handover of a whole nation, South Africa, by the offspring of its founding fathers, to its declared enemy, the ANC/SACP combine, in April 1994.

Notice, once again, in the book of Genesis the birthright promise conferred on Abraham and his seed: “And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22:16-18).

Notice what Herbert Armstrong says about this birthright promise: “A birthright is something which is one’s right, by birth. It has nothing to do with grace, which is unmerited pardon and a free gift which is not one’s right. It has to do with race, not grace. Birthright possessions are customarily passed down from father to eldest son” (The United States and Britain in Prophecy, 1980 edition, p. 29).

The Israelitish nations within South Africa have capitulated—given up—their birthright! That is a gigantic national sin!

“God warns us through prophecy that our sins are fast increasing. And now the day of reckoning is here!… Yes, we are God’s chosen people Israel! Think what that means! Chosen, not for favors while we defy our God, but chosen for service we have failed to perform” (ibid., p. 183).

Notice Hosea 4:17-19: “Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone. Their drink is sour: they have committed whoredom continually: her rulers with shame do love, Give ye. The wind hath bound her up in her wings, and they shall be ashamed because of their sacrifices.”

“This terrifyingly severe punishment is simply the correction our peoples have made necessary to bring them to the ways of living which cause desired blessings, instead of terrible curses. It is correction—for the peoples’ good!… As God lives, this punishment is soon to strike!” (ibid., p. 183).

Will South Africa heed? Will the Israelitish nations heed their God as this final warning is powerfully preached, published and broadcast increasingly around the world?

Let the Elijah have the final say! “But if you—you now reading this, you as an individual—will be corrected, voluntarily, before God lets this indescribably horrendous chastening strike; if you come to real repentance, realising how terribly wrong you have been; if you can see yourself as you really are—as a rebellious wrong, evil person; and if you can surrender to the loving, all-merciful, yet all-powerful God—and make it an unconditional surrender, coming to Almighty God through the living Jesus Christ as personal Savior—then no plague shall come near you! (Ps. 91:8-11), but you shall be accounted worthy to escape all these frightful things and to stand before Christ at His return (Luke 21:35-36).

“Those in the true Body of Christ shall be taken to a place of safety, until this Tribulation be over (Rev. 3:10-11, applying to those faithful in God’s Work now going to the world; Rev. 12:14; Isa. 26:20).

“But you must make your own decision—and to neglect doing so is to have made the wrong decision!…

“The decision is now yours!” (ibid., p. 184).