You may have seen pictures this week of a high-level meeting between the ANC and some Afrikaner groups, fundamentally under the Solidarity banner, facilitated by the Pan Africanist Congress, to “discuss matters of common interest”. After months of snapping at each other — via the new administration in Washington — about farm murders, land expropriation and other deprivations, the meeting was supposedly rough, with neither side holding back on the insults and accusations.
Swearing would be predictable in a room where racial nationalists and ethnic nationalists meet across a table. This is the South African story at its most elemental — nationalist tensions between whites, and between blacks, and between whites and blacks, have brought us to the point now where we might conceivably begin to see an end to them.
The people around that table are our past. In many ways we are living, today, through the last days of apartheid. Same cast, same script. This mess we have here now is what the end of separate development looks like, not that rose-tinted rainbow moment back in 1994. The ANC is the final child of apartheid, and it’s dying on its feet. The Afrikaners talking to them are trying one final time to find a secluded spot for themselves in Africa. It’s now or never.
It won’t work, even though the Afrikaners may find common ground with the ANC or, if pushed, Jacob Zuma’s MK Party. South Africans are not stupid. The people around that table are fundamentally autocratic in their convictions.
The only thing that separates them is their colour and no-one likes a bully.
The photos I saw reminded me of a man I just met in hospital in Cape Town. We were in a small ward together after having had the same disagreeable operation on the same day. It turned out we were both born in Transkei and I could describe, to his delight, exactly where he had grown up.
My friend had left for the Cape as a teenager to work on farms. Now he was in a private ward in a fancy hospital. Discovery was paying for me.
His daughter, a lawyer in London, was paying for him after becoming impatient at the delays he was facing in the public health system. His other daughter was an estate agent in Cape Town. He and his wife lived in a home near Rondebosch. I met the entire family, grandchildren too, who came to see him constantly and clearly adored him.
My friend made his money the hard way, working manual jobs days, nights and weekends, but learning new skills all the time, while sending his kids to school and then university. At 70 he had, by any standards, succeeded in life. His only regret was that he couldn’t go home to his farm and animals in Transkei. Gangs have demanded protection money from him on pain of death.
It shouldn’t take laws to force businesses to hire in quotas, but nor do we build a safe future by ignoring the inequalities around us.
As someone who has worked for black employers for the past 30 years, I didn’t need reminding what great qualities these South Africans carry with them. It’s made it especially sad to follow the introduction into law of the Employment Equity Amendment Act which will now allow the government to impose racial quotas on the hiring of staff by companies.
It is madness, and it will achieve the exact opposite of the transformation the ANC constantly seeks but which constantly evades it. The most racially transformative thing for South Africa would be 5% economic growth, but ANC policies — President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Operation Vulindlela reforms notwithstanding — actively and consistently discourage growth. The unemployment figures confirm it every month.
I doubt my friend would have thought much of the new hiring rules. He didn’t think much of the government. But it’s delusory to imagine that just because black South Africans don’t support the ANC they aren’t acutely conscious, or proud of, being black.
But this is what parties like the DA ask them to discard, which is just another madness — and in the swirl of what can pass here for debate, you are either for hiring quotas because look how many whites have jobs, or against them because look how nonracial you are.
It shouldn’t take laws to force businesses to hire in racial quotas, but nor do we build a safe future by ignoring the inequalities around us. It must be possible, especially in a future corruption-proof digital economy, to design incentives that encourage the creation of taxable jobs from the ranks of the unemployed. That way more black citizens get hired, employers can choose whether or not to take the incentives and the state gets its money back from the taxes the new hires are paying. And incentives work.
Either that or our wealthy political elites carry on arguing over who is the more persecuted or virtuous. But not forever. The rich may have the watches but the poor have got the time — and eventually it will be up.
For opinion and analysis consideration, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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