In only the second week of the year, Eskom has already announced stage 6 power blackouts. On 10 January Stats SA released the manufacturing production and sales statistics for November 2022, which showed a decline in manufacturing production of 1.1% compared to a year earlier (November 2021). This underlines the continuing deindustrialisation of South Africa under the ANC.
We are now a year away from 2024 and the next general elections. Seeing that South African voters have given the ANC a majority even as their power and other infrastructure crumbled, their economy stagnated and unemployment exploded higher, we cannot put too much hope on the political process. However, we must participate in that process.
The rationale for participating in the political process is that it’s one more lever to pull in trying to remove the destructive party from power. It’s a matter of conscience more than anything else, you cannot say that you did everything you could if you did not vote. This year should also be one where South Africans would abandon completely their obsession with race if we were a rational people.
Never be socially acceptable
On the one hand, it must never be socially acceptable to disqualify competent people for critical positions like legislator, engineer, police officer, and so on because of their race. The media has played the most important role in sustaining South Africa’s obsession with race and they should be held accountable for this. How many times have we heard the old trope of “if only the DA had enough black people so we could vote for it” or “transformation is an imperative” (even as this transformation drove away skilled people)? Middle-class black people should realise that they can compete without special legislative privileges, just as Afrikaners and white people in general realised after 1994, in fact these so-called privileges tend to harm most of the people making up the privileged group.
On the other hand, we should recognise that some people will forever be racist and that we can’t really do anything about this. Some people will always see people of other races as inferior to them or inherently evil. What we can do is prioritise competence and racists will end up by becoming irrelevant over time. Our race obsession has been allowed to grow to the point where it’s hurting everyone except the politicians and rent-seekers who use race to get ahead in life, because they do not have anything else to offer.
The race-based tender system in the public sector has hollowed out South Africa’s once great infrastructure. Eskom, apart from the economic reasons why a monopoly provider of electricity was likely to fail, lacks the skills to maintain its plants. When it needs to procure supplies, these are procured at inflated prices. The latest outrage was the news that the Eskom CEO had his coffee spiked with cyanide. Clearly the entrenched interests will not give up their positions of privilege very easily.
Blind faith
Crime is another area where South Africans are getting punished for putting their blind faith in the ANC and its media-driven race narrative. We need competent people running the police service. Yes, we can argue about policy changes in how law-enforcement works such as decentralising the function of law enforcement. However, the simple fact is that if we always hired the best person for the job regardless of their race, we would start seeing improvements in the fight against crime, especially serious crime.
It seems that the only people that the South African police can protect are the politicians, through their VIP protection unit. Now what’s the point of having a transformed police service if it can only protect the “leaders” and none of the rest of us? Everyone in South Africa would love to be able to afford private security. Those who cannot afford this have to resort to vigilantism as can be seen in many communities in South Africa now.
Stupid and counterproductive
The simple fact is that black economic empowerment (BEE) and affirmative action (including prioritising women and young people for positions) is stupid and counterproductive, and it is actively harming us. The only benefit it gives us as black people is a sense of justification, a sense that something is being done to acknowledge our pain from the past and that we were in fact victimised by the apartheid system. Yet it gives us this sense even as BEE victimises mostly black people. We have a small part of the population making up the affirmative action middle-class and an even smaller part making up the BEE beneficiaries list. The rest of the population wallows in unemployment, poverty and crime.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend.