We have long been used to holding positions regarded as unpalatable by dominant or ‘enlightened’ opinion – but we stick to them, knowing that the more SA traverses its perilous path, the more arduous the road back will prove to be.
Prominent journalism fixture, Peter Bruce, has recently written that he finds ‘something creepy’ in the communications he receives from the Institute of Race Relations (‘SA’s liberal battlefield’, 19 August 2019). At issue seems to be some disappointment at arguments among what he regards as fundamentally liberal peers, along with a confusion about what it would offer the country in practical terms.
To wit: ‘If there is a land problem (and I think there is) what does a liberal solution to it look like and how long would it take? Does it have to be race-free? The same with health. How do you help the poor and the sick?’
In addition, the IRR is ‘strident’ – visibly more so, in Bruce’s view, than others within the liberal stable. These are well-worn critiques.
Our response is encapsulated in the words adorning the wall of our offices, and on our website: ‘We stand for classical liberalism – an effective way to defeat poverty and tyranny through a system of limited government, a market economy, private enterprise, freedom of speech, individual liberty, property rights, and the rule of law.’
This is what we believe in, and the name we give to those beliefs. It is the philosophical grounding for our vision of the South Africa that we would like to see achieved, and which we believe the country could be. Sadly, the drift of policy has in recent years been in a different direction, tending towards greater state control and more latitude for government action.
Part of our work is to critique this. At times, the immediate imperative is to simply prevent imminent or further damage – there is value in pointing to dangers even when other courses of action may not be obvious. The American economist Thomas Sowell once quite correctly pointed out: ‘No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticises it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?’
Policy proposals on both land and healthcare – Expropriation without Compensation and National Health Insurance – invite condemnation. They offer nothing to address the problems that afflict the country’s land reform efforts or the crises in its health systems (with problems existing in both the public and private sectors), but stand to do enormous damage to the prospects of the country as a whole.
Nevertheless, it should have been difficult to miss the policy alternatives we have put forward. If Bruce has not seen them in the material he receives, they have certainly been canvassed in our other media commentary.
The centrepiece of our policy proposals is Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED). The goal here would be to provide support and upliftment opportunities to people on the basis of their socio-economic status, rather than on the basis of their race. Companies would receive credit for their contributions in, say, providing housing or education. (Specific plans to deal with land reform are to be published shortly.)
Yes, this would be a race-free approach. This is the point, one suspects, on which Bruce takes particular issue with us – and in this he is far from alone. We offer no apologies for our stance. A focus on race has the seductive power of suggesting that the pernicious legacy of the past is somehow being tackled head-on. Yet race-based policies have done little to deal with the country’s developmental problems – and have in many respects aggravated them, by imposing additional costs on doing business, or by restricting the pool of skills from which to draw. Besides, there is something absurd about the notion that race can stand in as a proxy for disadvantage, rather than disadvantage being taken on its own terms.
More than that, race-based policies have incentivised the use of race in our politics. In the 1990s, such policies could be described as short-term, as measures to support those subjected to discrimination in the past and intended ultimately to give way to merit-based competition. Now they are presented as multi-generational and to be assessed according to numerical formulae.
This shows no signs of ending well, and the more this perilous path is traversed, the more arduous the road back will prove to be.
It is, however, a road back that we will ultimately need to take. As the IRR, we have long been used to holding positions regarded as unpalatable by dominant or ‘enlightened’ opinion.
Indeed, one is reminded of the 1990s. In the heady atmosphere of the time, any number of commentators felt that liberalism had either served whatever purpose it might have had, and should now accept its redundancy. Or, perhaps more charitably – an option favoured by some who regarded themselves as ‘liberals’ – liberals should position themselves as an interest-cum-support group within the ANC’s broad church. The late Allister Sparks, for example, called for the then Democratic Party to ‘build bridges to what is obviously the dominant black political organisation in order to achieve that non-racial goal’. This, he said, invoking a piece formerly written by Rand Daily Mail editor Laurence Gandar, would be ‘going the whole hog’.
There was an air of accepting the inevitable about this. Submit to an overwhelming hegemony in the hope of a charitable outcome. There were certainly those who saw this as the way forward in a changing country, some being self-described liberals and others not. Many, both institutional and individual voices, have passed from the scenes now – sometimes in profound disillusionment.
The IRR’s response was well represented by a response from Paul Pereira, then an IRR staffer. Threats to freedom and to the future prospects of society should be taken seriously and taken on robustly as they arise, and irrespective of the quarter from which they do so. ‘Mr Sparks,’ said Pereira, ‘I invite you to fly in the face of fashion and join the long, hard slog to a truly non-racial democracy. Yes, this means the whole hog.’
Terence Corrigan is a project manager at the Institute of Race Relations.
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