The professor is staying with us overnight. I like him so. He is black enough to escape the tag of ‘Coloured’, and clever enough to be called, by those who have no better arguments to make, an Uncle Tom.
He is, I suppose, an Uncle Tom like Tom Sowell, a man whom I also like. ‘Like’ is actually too weak a word. I venerate Sowell. He is in my pantheon of great people alongside Churchill, Smuts, and Suzman. Nelson, too, but not our home-grown one, of whom I am less than a fan. One day, I shall tell you why, but only when I have prepared myself for immolation at the stake.
I gingerly hand the professor an article by Cornelius Monama that appeared in the latest Sunday Times. The heading reads Why SA still needs BEE but it is a trifle misleading. The author pleads not for more of the same, but for more than the same. Over the years, he says, our BEE programme, always a necessity, has been refined and improved, and change is required only to enhance it yet more.
Normally, I would spare my guests a task such as this. But the article is a comprehensive defence of the policy, and the author, identified as “part of the Government Communications and Information System (GCIS)”, is manifestly expressing government policy. This makes the piece both useful and important.
The professor reads the article intently. “There are several points on which we can agree. I shall identify and elaborate on them.”
He picks them out on his fingers. They are too lengthy to relay in detail, but I shall provide a summary. I hope I do them justice.
- Apartheid excluded blacks from full participation in white society — or, better put, a society conceived as white. Blacks were in effect foreigners whose presence was tolerated only as servants. Blacks were effectively Helots, migrant labourers if you like. If you want a modern parallel, look to the itinerant workers of the UAE.
- The system was tribal in nature and racialist by design. Structures of this sort have strong historical roots, but in modern times they are regarded as outmoded and, if racially based, totally repugnant. Now we believe that people should have an unfettered right to participate in a State, geographically delineated, in which they are born or have an interest strong enough to warrant citizenship.
- When South Africa became a true nation-state, it became vital to consolidate the two races and, out of the two groupings, black and white, make a single community. Considerations of social cohesion and national pride demanded as much.
How best to achieve this became the burning question.
Natural course
One way was to deconstruct the racialist system and, after outlawing racism, let matters take their natural course. Political structures would, by law, become racially blind. Commercial relationships would be responsive to racial difference only to the extent that the market permitted or dictated it. Finally, social relationships would, untrammelled, locate themselves at a level that suited their members best. In time, this would produce an integrated polity in which people would occupy the place that best reflected their wishes.
This was the liberal way. It governed for a short while — between 1992 and 1996, to be specific — but then was overtaken by an impatient determination to accelerate the process by institutional coercion.
“Without deliberate intervention,” as Monama puts it, “markets can reproduce and deepen existing inequalities as advantage accumulates over time and across generations.” In a similar vein, he urges that, since “all economies produce concentrations in wealth,” a coercive system is needed that “creates pathways for broader participation and upward mobility.” Only by such intervention, which overcomes the exclusion of the “majority of the population from meaningful participation”, can a society “achieve its full productive potential”.
Nowhere, the professor continues, does Monama explain why this has to be done by racial engineering. The belief that the only antidote to evil is to resort to an equivalent evil is very hard to understand. If, toppling over in a drunken moment, I break two legs of the stool on which I sit, I will not, when I sober up next morning, contemplate breaking off the other two as a solution. If my spouse is unfaithful to me, I will, matters of vengeance aside, scarcely believe that committing adultery myself resolves the problem.
Reciprocating in kind has this to commend it: it invokes the principles of equality and, in its application, produces an equality of outcome. A stool whose legs have been removed is no longer imbalanced but is now as comprehensively legless as its erstwhile user. A spouse who retaliates by being unfaithful has, to be sure, “got even”. But equalising typically comes at a cost and is by no means necessarily the outcome best suited to the original mischief.
Monama accepts that there is a cost but goes to great lengths to suggest that it is not considerable and is worthwhile. Gumede, whom he singles out for criticism in his article, suggests the opposite, contending that race-norming costs billions, promotes corruption, and is not merely unnecessary but positively counterproductive. What effort has the SA government made to perform its own valuation on a matter so vital? None, it seems, or Monama would surely have told us. Frankly, says the professor, I think this is not good enough.
Merits of equality
Underpinning Monama’s article is a belief in the merits of equality, but nowhere does he tell us precisely what the equalisation entails. Does he want to ensure that people are placed in the same position they would have been in had Apartheid not happened? No, he would surely answer: to stipulate for this, the State would have to enquire into matters of ability, skill, aptitude and the like. It certainly has no appetite for such a programme.
No, he would say, look to the enactments themselves. They make the outcome clear. They envisage an outcome in which black people are proportionately represented in every echelon and at every level of society. They want an equalisation, proportionate to demographics, in racial terms, so that effectively ninety percent of black faces are to be found wherever one turns. In short, they want race-norming, no more and no less.
Monama cites the equality clause in the Constitution. He would be better served by ignoring it. The clause outlaws race-norming, in effect if not in terms, and permits only measures specifically tailored to redress the damage done to blacks by past discrimination. Race-based social engineering of the sort favoured by the current government and avidly pursued by our current president is not a measure of redress.
In bed that night, I asked Noah what he made of all this. “In the famous words of a colleague of mine, we may be none the wiser, but we are a lot better informed.”
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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