Elon Musk owes it to South Africa to take the time to understand properly what is going on in South Africa. The issue at stake is not about saving white farmers, it is about saving South Africa. And his casting it in racial terms is not helpful.
He needs to send one of his assistants to South Africa to talk to conservative and liberal organisations like the IRR. He might then understand that it is an issue of an affluent elite and the betrayal of the poor and disadvantaged.
According to the World Bank, the GINI coefficient which measures the discrepancies of wealth was 0.59 in 1993 and is now 0.63, the highest in the world. The poverty headcount (measured as those who live on less than $6.85 per day) has improved since 1994 (71%) but was still 62% in 2014 and possibly has become worse over the last ten years. GDP per capita in 2024 is the same as in 2006. Per capita GDP growth is almost the same as it was in 1994. The unemployment rate has also grown – it was 20% in 1994 and in 2024 was between 33% and 40%, depending on who is included.
We can add to this the collapse in services and the dependence on government grants of more than 50% of our population. We are all aware of the dire state of our country under ANC rule, we can see the corruption and the mismanagement. As regards municipalities, Sakeliga talks of cascading failure: as small towns fail, people move to the larger towns which cannot cope and the failure cascades, so that we now have the slow but relentless collapse of Johannesburg, our economic hub. This is the situation of most of our people.
A luta continua
If you want to compare that to the situation of the ANC elite you can google the net worth of Ramaphosa, his brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe, his sister-in-law Bridgette Radebe, and her husband, Jeff Radebe, and also Tokyo Sexwale and Saki Macozoma. Most of their wealth is due, possibly except for Patrice Motsepe, to the handouts from BEE. And this is just the tip of the ruling elite iceberg floating on the shoulders of our middle class, working class, and unemployed South Africans.
It is not just the ANC, it is the complicit trade union leaders, the municipal councillors who ignore the plight of their communities, the leftist media who support the ANC’s race-based policies, the politicised NGOs who turn a blind eye if they are not actually complicit, and big business which is quite happy to go along with the plundering of our country as long as it is allowed to largely retain its wealth and move its money overseas.
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation was never meant to uplift or empower black South Africans, it was meant to enrich a small elite. There is virtually nothing in the legislation about empowering the poor, the working class and the unemployed. The law is about ownership of businesses and the percentage of black people in management, and it was the connected ANC elite who were in a position to take advantage of this.
It was never about black South Africans; it was an accommodation between the existing (mainly white) elite and the new black elite. That it has not improved the situation of the disadvantaged is not unexpected. The economist Hayek, over 50 years ago, showed that race-based legislation enriches a small elite and impoverishes the poor. We can see this clearly in South Africa.
Cost is enormous
The cost to South Africans of race-based legislation is enormous. The connection between BEE and the dire state of the poor and disadvantaged is clear:
- Few businesses are likely to invest in South Africa if they must hand over 30% of their assets to people who have provided no benefit to the company. After the end of Apartheid there was a brief surge in investment, but since then it has seldom risen above 2% of GDP, and in 2024 was 0.9% of GDP, according to the World Bank;
- Annual GDP growth has been less than one percent for most of the last 15 years;
- There is a huge costly bureaucracy to manage BEE compliance both in government and the private sector. I wonder how much this alone costs South Africa every year; and
- We can also suppose that the BEE requirements have led to inefficiencies being introduced into the economy. If you make decisions based on race rather than competence, that is inevitable. This is shown in the inefficiencies in the provision of services to our communities and in the mismanagement of our municipalities and government departments.
This is, though, not enough for our ruling class. BEE has been relatively limited until now, in that you could operate a business in South Africa without handing a large part of it to the elite. Though you would, of course, not get any government contracts. Third-wave BEE intends to change that. Through extending the number of economic areas which require a licence to operate, and by introducing BEE requirements into the licence, the government intends to prevent most businesses from operating in the economy unless they conform with the BEE legislation.
The Expropriation Act is not only about white farmers, I fear that it is possibly laying the groundwork for the expropriation of a part of businesses who do not conform with the third-wave BEE requirements.
So, what is to be done?
GNU
The establishment of the GNU brought some hope that the DA and other parties could join with the reformists (are there any?) in the ANC to influence government policy. That hope is fading. Helen Zille recently made the point that the DA is the junior partner in the GNU and therefore has to compromise. That is true, but is it compromise or surrender? I am having difficulty thinking of one positive legislative change that the GNU has achieved.
Certainly, the DA is more efficient at governance, but that just means that the ANC policies are implemented more efficiently. The root cause of our problems are the National Democratic Revolution and the race-based policies, and the ANC is not going to abandon these unless they are forced to do so. The GNU is not going to achieve anything significant.
Change is also not going to come through politics. The removal of the problematic legislation will only come through the election of liberal and conservative parties, and their combined support is less than 30%. But liberals and conservatives certainly need to start talking, becoming organised and working together. We need a South African version of the new conservative reformation which is starting throughout the Western world. The issues are too important to allow our differences to stop this from happening. In the USA, Trump’s election is the result of a decades-long ferment amongst conservatives.
In South Africa today, a number of interesting conservative podcasts are developing; there are important journals which are starting a discussion; there are political parties that need to start properly working together; there are a number of important liberal and conservative organisations; there are the churches and I suspect that there are many well-meaning community organisations that are frustrated by the current situation. The aim should not be to get rid of the ANC, the aim should be, as with the anti-Apartheid movement, to get rid of race-based legislation.
Ramaphosa’s response to Trump brought to mind PW Botha wagging his finger at the world during the Rubicon speech. Maybe we should give some thought to the parallels, and whether, as under Apartheid, we are again faced with a government and a ruling elite which is imposing disastrous race-based policies on our country. We need to think again about how the Nationalist Apartheid government, which was electorally secure, was forced to abandon Apartheid. And, in this, we need to think about what role Trump and Musk can play.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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