The IRR believes that this is one of those moments when, with a small apology to this week’s Spectator, ‘you need to be blunt and assert that you will not be drawn into denying reality to appease a noisy political group…and thereby overlook what truly afflicts the vulnerable and marginalised in favour of prioritising manufactured political rows’.
The fact is that the evidence is overwhelming that South Africans do not in the main believe racism to be a particularly serious crisis and that the contemporary crises of joblessness and poverty have nothing to do with racism. These crises are caused by the corrupt application of taxpayer funds, government policy that is hostile to investment and job creation, and schools that fail to properly prepare the great majority of young people for employment.
Particularly in the week before an election that may see South Africa’s ruling party, the enforcer of these destructive policies, suffer a further loss of support, there will be vested interests with a motivation to deny this reality and supplant it instead with the view that South Africa’s contemporary problems arise from racism and not from government policies.
Third parties should be cautious of endorsing this view in order to be seen as popular, because the implications of doing so will be to promote a false narrative and thereby delay the reforms the country needs if the plight of the poor and the marginalised is ever to be addressed.
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