Putting Pinky in her place

The Chapman, one of the ships which brought the 1820 Settlers to South Africa from Britain. About 5000 settlers arrived in Algoa Bay that year. Now, 190 years later, their impact and that of their descendants on the development of South Africa, is evident across the country.

Speaking truth to power

IN speaking truth to power, it is not only politicians one must consider as having a major influence on the affairs of state. Consider the impact which a misguided columnist in a newspaper with a readership of over four million has.

I have submitted the first seven paragraphs of this article to the Sunday Times for publication. What are the chances they will use the piece? Anyway, herewith my entire argument in response to what I consider a decidedly slanted bit of journalism.

Putting Pinky in her place

EVEN as she seeks to condemn racism, Sunday Times columnist Pinky Khoabane actively endorses anti-white racism. In “Mr President, don’t condone the racists” (April 11), she quotes from a report in The Economist which apparently said “only a quarter of black people accounted for the 4% richest people in this country”.

She adds that whites “still account for three-quarters of senior positions in the work place. Of the 295 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, only 4% have black chief executive officers”. “In short, Mr President” she concludes in her open letter to Jacob Zuma, “it is business as usual for whites in this country.”

Isn’t it time black people started thanking their lucky stars there are still skilled white people willing to invest their lives and futures in a country where they are continually disparaged? I would suggest Khoabane should be grateful that white people are still around to make this economy work. Does she not realise what would happen if four million white people got up and left? This place would fall apart. If things look a little threadbare now, after 16 years of ANC rule, imagine how bad they’d be had the racists got their way completely and all whites had emigrated.

Colonialism was a global reality. It happened over hundreds of years around the world. And it wasn’t all bad.

Where would this country have been without the skills and expertise the European immigrants brought with them? Where would this country be without the first-world trade and business links (think mining, medicine, industry, agriculture) the settlers brought with them? A simple “tour” of South Africa via Google Earth shows you the template of some 350 years of partnership between white and black in this country. It is an awesome achievement.

European settlers may have, as they did around the world, subjugated the local population, but they also ensured that today we have a relatively advanced economy on the tip of a continent which generally is desperately poor.

So instead of ranting against the role of whites, Khoabane should be counting her blessings they are still here, keeping businesses afloat and competitive in a tough global economy. Indeed, she should actively campaign for the scrapping of BEE, affirmative action and the Employment Equity Act, which openly discriminate against white people and, I am sure, are contrary to the UN’s human rights clauses.

Khoabane should be less concerned about the colour of those at the top of the business pile than about what is becoming of those areas now run predominantly by black South Africans – namely the public sector. It is no secret that service delivery has been atrocious over the past decade, with many municipalities crumbling under a sea of leaking sewage, pot-holed roads, failing water purification plants, weed-riddled pavements and gutters and widespread corruption and ineptitude. If the former white suburbs are looking bad, I hate to think how the townships are faring.

Black people should embrace their white compatriates and get the ANC to scrap immediately the clause in the bill of rights of the Constitution which allows for so-called “fair discrimination” in favour of the “previously disadvantaged”. I kid you not, there is such a clause which is used to justify all those racist, anti-white laws which everyone so blithely accepts in the name of “redressing” the inequities of the past.

This is Africa. Three quarters of the continent live in poverty. If the ANC want this country to join the likes of Zimbabwe as a failed state, then carry on complaining like Khoabane is doing about whites who successfully run profitable businesses. Where are the great new enterprises started by skilled black people during one of the longest periods of economic growth in our modern history just prior to the current recession? I’m not talking about all the suits in boardrooms who got there on the strength of their colour and BEE/AA/EEA. I’m talking about real entrepreneurship.

Creating wealth is not easy. Like Khoabane, I am a mere journalist. We are in second-tier jobs, arising from the establishment of cities by the original generators of wealth in commerce, industry and agriculture. I suggest she, and ANC cadres generally, humble themselves and look at what it takes to run a successful farm or factory, hospital or airport, you name it, before they condemn those who do so because they happen to be white.

They might discover that it is easier to criticise than it is to put in the long hours of hard work which are a prerequisite for such enterprises to succeed.