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Max Du Preez
The accomplished and popular actor/director Hlomla Dandala remarked on Twitter on Sunday: “I still can’t shake the feeling that voting for the DA is confirming that black people can’t self-govern.”
He was reacting to an opinion piece on the DA by the young intellectual Mabine Seabe in City Press and he remarked: “Come 2014, it will be difficult to choose between the ‘Blue House’ and the ‘Revolutionary House’.”
One may argue that Dandala wasn’t being very rational and that his assessment of what the DA is about was unfair, but many black South Africans share his view.
I can certainly understand his uneasiness. I also find it difficult to face the reality that the once-proud liberation movement that I considered my political home until recently is failing the country – and that a party with white liberal roots could possibly do a better job.
But I would argue that this kind of thinking belongs to our past – as does the discomfort (mostly on the side of whites, I suspect) at the sight of DA leader Helen Zille’s public singing and dancing and use of liberation symbolism. After almost 18 years of democracy, we should all try to progressively move towards a place where good governance, accountability, sound policies and responsible leadership play a more important role in our choice of political party than race.
We should honour and celebrate our history, not become its victims.
The flawed premise underlying Dandala’s thinking is that if the ANC is failing as a government, they’re failing as a black government. I think our present government is a terrible bunch (most of them, not all), but not because they are black.
They are simply self-seeking, visionless, power-hungry politicians with a serious ethics deficiency. There are many examples of such politicians with very pale complexions all over the world – and in our own past.
The problem is that the ANC itself is largely responsible for people like Dandala’s unease by punting itself as a “black government” or “government by blacks” and by blaming most of its government’s failures on racism, on whites in general and on “white minority capital” specifically.
AfriForum, the reconstituted Broederbond, the “Stellenbosch mafia”, Agri SA and the Anglo-Saxon/Jewish industrialists can perhaps be accused of just looking after their own interests, or even of not “coming to the party” to make our new order blossom, but they can’t be held responsible for the government’s many failures, nor can they be charged with being the primary reason for our poverty crisis.
They may be “un-transformed” themselves, but they are not solely to blame for the “lack of transformation”, a phrase that has become the ANC’s mantra. They pay billions in taxes and that money is available for the elected government to govern on behalf of the people.
Examples? Frans Cronjé of the Institute of Race Relations painted a depressing picture at the weekend of the education most black youngsters have to endure.
Despite spending a very substantial 5.4 percent of GNP on education, he says, only 5 percent of our schools have science laboratories (1.9 percent in Limpopo and 1.5 percent in the Eastern Cape); only 10 percent have computer centres; and only 7.5 percent have libraries with actual books.
There were more than a million pupils in Grade 10 in 2008, yet two years later there were only 537 543 in Grade 12 – almost half a million youngsters fell out of the system with little hope of decent jobs or a dignified life. On top of that, only about a third of the original Grade 10s passed matric. And that all with drastically lowered standards that top educationist Jonathan Jansen calls “disgraceful”.
I can’t really fault Cronje’s conclusion: “It is therefore groundless to blame black poverty on white racism 21 years after former president Nelson Mandela’s release. Rather, such allegations are an effort to transfer the growing black anger on to the white minority.”
Similarly, the continued neglect and decline of many of our universities; the failure of land reform; the catastrophe that is local government; and the tragic track record of the SABC and other parastatals cannot be blamed on a lack of money or on white racism or intransigence.
This doesn’t free the white minority from a special responsibility to go the extra mile to correct the injustices of the past, but putting the burden of present failures on them can only serve to disempower the black majority.
It is not in any citizen’s interest to allow the present ruling party to get away with this kind of blame shifting – the Zimbabweans did, and look at where it got them.
It really should not matter whether most of the party and government leadership are black or white. What matters is that we establish a just and equitable state, a society where human rights and dignity are uppermost, a country with economic growth and decent jobs. A country of hope.
