I have never been convinced by the argument that contemporary race-based measures intended to empower and affirm black South Africans amount to ‘apartheid in reverse’, as the accustomed phrase has it.
In the first place, their effect on white South Africans is barely comparable even to the smallest degree with the devastating decades-long impact of apartheid on black South Africans. The absence of equivalence renders the claim not only trivial and groundless, but insulting to the history and the millions of people who suffered it.
But, more importantly – for what matters now is less history than the present and future – today’s race-based measures are not a reversal but a perpetuation not just of the demeaning logic of apartheid’s reducing people’s worth, attributes and potential to their appearance, but also of the effects, for black people especially.
Combine these toxic ingredients in a society like ours and the poison spreads far.
How it works has been ham-fistedly demonstrated by the African National Congress this week when its Covid-19 mask slipped to reveal an administration appealing on one hand for a genuine national effort to protect lives and save the economy and insisting on the other that state aid for struggling firms would be disbursed not by need but by its own wrong-headed fascination for racial social engineering.
Plain common sense
Even in the biggest national crisis it has faced in government, the ANC cannot see plain common sense.
During a joint meeting between the Portfolio & Select Committees on Small Business Development, minister of small business development Khumbudzo Ntshavheni confirmed that the Black Economic Empowerment framework would in fact be a key determinant as to whether the relief would be extended to any particular firm.
You can tell from the minister’s words just how muddled the ruling party is about what the national interest is, and what it really thinks about fairness and equality.
BEE, she said, was ‘a fundamental requirement for transforming the economy of this country, we cannot choose as and when we use it. BEE is a critical requirement, we need South Africans, all of us, to own and have a share in the economy of the country. So when applications come through, we evaluate them on their need but we consider demographic representation which does not only include race, it includes gender, it includes geographic location, it includes age, which is youth, it also includes people with disabilities. So those are fundamental to the transformation of this economy. As much as we build South Africa we must build a united and equal South Africa and that’s what I commit to. We are committed to building a free, fair and equal South Africa for all South Africans to have a shareholding in the economy of this country.’
Perhaps the ruling party is too accustomed now to profligacy and patronage and mouthing the dated homilies of the likes of Amílcar Cabral to see that successful businesses have no colour and neither does their benefit to society – creating jobs, generating demand for other goods and services, raising tax income, stimulating investment and reinforcing economic growth. Denying some businesses aid on the grounds of a racial nationalist conception of citizenship exacts indiscriminate penalties on the economy as a whole.
This is the first tragic irony.
Sustains the delusion
The second, whose consequences reproduce themselves, is that sticking to this course sustains the delusion among policymakers that they are addressing the deficit, the disadvantage, the consequences of discrimination, the cost of apartheid, when, in fact, their policy guarantees that they will continue ignoring these things at the primary cost of the very people they pretend to want to help.
Cynically enough, the ANC knows it, but doesn’t care.
As my senior colleague Anthea Jeffery wrote recently: ‘So great is the gap between the few who gain and the many who suffer that even the SACP has identified BEE as the primary reason for mounting inequality since 1994.’
She reminded readers that, in 2017, it was the communist party that warned that the ‘intra-African inequality’ which BEE has fostered was ‘the main contributor to South Africa’s extraordinarily high Gini coefficient’ of income inequality.
The SACP could not have been clearer when it stated: ‘Enriching a select BEE few via share deals…or (worse still) looting public property…in the name of broad-based black empowerment is resulting in….increasing poverty for the majority, increasing racial inequality, and persisting mass unemployment.’
Why, then, three years later, with a new president cheered to the rooftops as the harbinger of reform and growth and all good things, is the ruling ANC in a time of such crisis persisting with a policy that its own leading partner blames for ‘increasing poverty for the majority, increasing racial inequality, and persisting mass unemployment’?
This is where the indifference tips over into contempt.
The well-connected usual suspects who do benefit (what IRR surveys suggest is a mere 15%), Jeffery writes, ‘have entrenched interests in its retention and expansion and will strongly resist any change’.
‘Deeper reason’
She goes on: ‘But there is a deeper reason too. The ANC has long undermined black achievement by claiming that black upward mobility has nothing to do with individual skills, acumen, or hard work, but is solely the product of BEE and would never have happened without it. This message is deeply debilitating, encouraging even the born-free generation to see itself as BEE-dependent.’
All the while, the numbers of jobless and starving mount. The contemptuous indifference of the ANC will only deepen the plight of the more than 9 million black people who have no job and steadily dwindling prospects, because, instead of focusing on removing the very considerable obstacles of actual disadvantage (lack of skills, education, access to opportunities, health, decent living standards), it is willing to maintain the pretense that racial preferment will do the job.
So long as it persists in this, the ANC will continue to underestimate the lasting consequences of apartheid, and willfully ignore the consequences of its own post-1994 policy choices.
South Africans have a deserved reputation for stamina and resilience – but they also have a long memory of seeing these qualities sapped by a weak and careless state.
All that was good in the country used to be undermined by racial superstition. It still is.
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