With increasing frequency, I hear that the old-school apartheid racists were right: hand over control to black people, and you’ll end up with a corrupt, socialist, dysfunctional mess.
‘Maybe you should have listened to the ooms back then,’ said a pseudonymous commenter recently, in relation to the Rooi Komplot (red plot) and Swart Gevaar (black threat) that were such prominent features of the apartheid regime’s propaganda.
The argument goes that the ANC has misruled South Africa, as predicted, by turning it into a stagnant, corrupt, dysfunctional, and socialist dump.
It is, of course, common cause that the ANC has done exactly that. The pages of the Daily Friend, and the website of the Institute for Race Relations, are filled with analyses that warn against the ANC’s ideological lodestone, the communist-penned National Democratic Revolution, to which it pledges allegiance at every opportunity it gets.
Many other publications have documented South Africa’s slide into economic stagnation, caused by the failure of its socialist policies, the burden of its regulatory bureaucracy, the corrosive impact of cadre deployment, the dysfunction of state institutions, and state-owned enterprises, and the corruption or incompetence of officials at all levels of government.
Most agree that the fault is that of the ANC, and that the ANC is exceedingly unlikely to be able to reverse South Africa’s slide towards a failed state.
False dichotomy
The old National Party (NP), under P.W. Botha and his predecessors, warned us this would happen, a certain kind of apartheid apologist would argue. The implication is that the National Party should never have ‘sold out’ the country by surrendering it to the socialists and African nationalists.
There is a false dichotomy at play here, however. Racial segregation and white rule were ipso facto immoral, and ought to have been rejected entirely on their own merits.
That the Nats were correct in opposing communism does not imply that South Africans ought to have preferred NP rule, or worse, minority rule. That they claimed black majority rule would fail does not justify their attribution of that failure to the colour of the majority’s skin.
The Greek playwright Euripides once wrote: ‘I would rather die on my feet than to live on my knees.’
He also wrote: ‘A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.’
And: ‘What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land.’
All of these quotations apply to South Africa under apartheid.
Although white people have as much right to call South Africa their native land as do people of historically maligned races, they never had the right to assert racial supremacy or the right to rule over what they considered to be the lesser peoples of South Africa.
Moral obligation
The Nats did not have a moral obligation to turn the country over to the ANC. But they did have a moral obligation to turn the country over to a universal franchise; to accept that all its people are equal and imbued with the full human rights of free citizens.
There was also a more pragmatic obligation: South Africa was headed for certain civil war and economic failure until the National Party agreed to come to the table, free its political enemies, and negotiate a new dispensation.
That South Africa has not turned out the way classical liberals had hoped does not justify nostalgia for the apartheid regime. That regime was fascist, racist, and exercised brutal control even over its most privileged citizens.
It read our mail, censored our news, denied us television and later monopolised it, condemned troops to fight unwinnable wars in neighbouring countries, dictated and policed our personal lifestyle choices, and persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered dissenters.
It is true that democratic majoritarianism is a dangerous political system. That is why South Africa’s liberal constitution was so important: to protect individuals (as opposed to minorities) from the predation of the electoral majority.
That a liberal constitution was negotiated between two nationalist factions is remarkable. The constitution has not proved strong enough to limit the abuses of the majority government, but that does not imply that we ought to reject a liberal constitutional democracy in principle, in favour of fascist minority rule.
Socialist agenda
One also has to ask why exactly the ANC adopted a socialist agenda, and why it eventually succumbed to systemic corruption.
Apartheid nostalgics forget that the National Party was itself substantially socialist. It exercised burdensome control over the economy. It largely opposed free trade and set production quotas and regulated prices in many industry sectors.
That it has been associated with the capitalist West is quite ironic, given its heavily interventionist policies.
The economist Ludwig von Mises, in his treatise Human Action (freely available here) described the dynamic by which both the NP and the ANC have governed South Africa: ‘All varieties of interference with market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which – from the point of view of their authors’ and advocates’ valuations – is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go farther and farther until the market economy has been entirely destroyed and socialism has been substituted for it.’
The Nats also implemented ‘cadre deployment’, by placing high value on Broederbond membership in appointments and tender awards. It practiced a form of corporatism that favoured Afrikaner businesses, and echoes in broad strokes the preferential procurement policies of the ANC.
The ANC learnt many of its economic lessons at the feet of the Nats, changing only who those policies were designed to benefit.
It is also worth remembering that socialism and communism were invented by white people in Europe. Liberation movements became communist because white communists in the East supported them in a proxy battle against the white capitalists of the West.
Decent education
The greatest tragedy of South Africa’s history was expressed in the words of apartheid architect Hendrik F. Verwoerd, when he said: ‘What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.’
If he had instead introduced decent education for all who merited it, in a society in which everyone had equal rights and opportunities, the liberation movement would have been neither necessary nor communist, and the black majority would have been far better equipped both to govern and to make educated decisions come election day.
The ANC is failing not because its members are mostly black, or because they are stupid, but because they are socialists and corrupt. And this is in large part a consequence of white people’s stupid, short-sighted, and hateful policies during the Cold War and apartheid.
Constitutional democracy
It is entirely legitimate to criticise the ANC government’s ideology, corruption, and policy failures. It has a lot to answer for, and classical liberals ought to point to a way out of the quagmire to which it has condemned the country.
It is not, however, legitimate to argue that the masters of apartheid were right, and we ought to have listened to them. No system of government that condemns citizens to servitude and segregation in their own country can ever be viewed as morally acceptable.
No matter how much the country deteriorates under ANC rule, arguing that South Africa should never have become a constitutional democracy is reprehensible.
South Africa’s democracy should replace the ANC in power, by all means. It should strengthen the constitution and improve adherence to its principles.
It ought to be governed by people who understand the dangers of socialism, who put their country before their own greed, and who are capable of rebuilding failed institutions. Classical liberals ought to advocate to bring about such a state of affairs.
But South Africa should never again deny any part of its population the right to choose their own government.
The ‘ooms’ were racist, patriarchal, bigoted fascists. If we had ‘listened to the ooms’, we would have been morally wrong, and very likely would have ended up in an even worse situation than we are now.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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