Why Jeremy Cronin is wrong

The Sunday Times did not see fit to use my letter attacking Deputy Transport Minister Jeremy Cronin's article in the newspaper last weekend, although four other letters on the issue were used. This is what I submitted:


How convenient for Jeremy Cronin to ignore the numerous positive impacts which colonialism had on the world, including South Africa.

In “How history haunts us” (April 29), he bemoans the “introduction, from the outside, of an advanced, capital-intensive, mining-based, industrial revolution” in SA in the late 19th century.

He speaks of “500 years of colonial conquest” and “persisting patterns of global inequity and neo-colonial domination”.

Yet this begs the question: where would we have been without  European colonisation?

Colonisation was the product of human intellectual evolution, which just happened to place European powers in the ascendancy at a time when ships and navigation made huge strides about 500 years ago.

All manner of other scientific advances placed those nations at the forefront of the not-unsurprising quest to explore, and indeed conquer, vast swathes of the hitherto undiscovered world.

With those colonisers came all the technological, scientific, medical and other advances which today define a successful modern state.

Cronin’s anti-colonial tirade is little more than an attempt to conceal the failings of the ANC government over the past 18 years, especially in education, health, job-creation and safety and security. Another howling failure has been in the maintenance of the infrastructure bequeathed to it in 1994 by the very colonisers he decries. Just look at our roads.

Being a communist, one assumes Cronin’s idea of  utopia was the former Soviet Union, since he became a communist at a time when this repressive ideology was at its most powerful in that country.

How he can still cling to an ideology which is the antithesis of freedom is difficult to fathom.

Response to Pallo Jordan article

Last Sunday, September 18, 2011, the lead on the letters page of the Sunday Times was a good one. It dealt with two articles the previous week on the Review pages of the newspaper, one of them by Pallo Jordan, the ANC cabinet minister. I submitted a letter in response to the same article, but it was not published. It is carried below.

I was pleased to note that Pallo Jordan adopted a far less virulently anti-colonial stance than usual in his article on Tiyo Soga, “The first African modernists” (September 11, 2011).

Normally, all we hear from him and other African commentators is how the European settlers “stole the people’s land” and suppressed them.

But the case of the Rev Soga tells a different tale. This was a 19th century Cape colony where the British, for all their early faults, later, through strong missionary and other humanitarian movements, promoted the advancement and integration of the Xhosa people.

That was how Soga came to be taken over to Scotland, where he trained to be a Presbyterian minister and married a local teacher, Janet Burnside, before returning to the Eastern Cape to help uplift his people.

Consider these words from Jordan: “The secular cultural impact of the movement initiated by the Christian converts [like Soga] led to the spread of literacy, modern education, technical training and the acquisition of modern skills among Africans.”

One of the reasons I have a keen interest in Soga is that, in the early 1980s, I played a small part in helping ensure that the historic hamlet of Mgwali, where Soga established a Christian mission, was not destroyed and its people forcibly removed to the Ciskei at the height of grand apartheid.

As an organiser for the Progressive Federal Party in East London at the time, I helped publicise the issue. But my role was minor compared with that of PFP MPs like Helen Suzman, Andrew Savage and Errol Moorcroft, not to mention the Legal Resources Centre under Geoff Budlender, who finally helped ensure that Mgwali, near Stutterheim, survived.

I invite readers to google my name and the word Mgwali, which will take you to a section of my blog where you can read a bit more about this fascinating place and the trauma it was subjected to under apartheid.

Putting Pinky in her place

The tendency of black South African columnists, with a few treasured rare exceptions, to paint our entire history - and hence white people's role therein - in as negative a light as possible, prompted me to again submit a letter for publication n the Sunday Times. Alas, last Sunday it was not used. Indeed, no letters critical of Ms Pinky Khoabane were used. Anyway, for the record, this is what I submitted:

Pinky Khoabane simply bristles with a Mugabe-like desire for revenge and retribution in “Sorry arch, but now it’s too little and too late” (August 21). And of course it is her white South African compatriots who are again in her sights.

I am always alarmed at the knee-jerk response of black South African commentators to the realities of a modern economic system in which they still do not feature as prominently as they should. Certainly, since 1994, the ANC has ensured that the bulk of state jobs have gone to people of colour – even if this has often been at the cost of efficiency as underqualified people have been promoted.

But it is the private sector that worries Khoabane most, as she again cites with disdain the fact that whites are still in the vast majority of managerial positions, while it is also still white farmers doing most of the commercial agriculture.

The way she writes, you would think that when whites first started arriving in this country over 350 years ago, there was already a thriving, modern economy which they then stole. The reality is that way back in history, Europeans explored and often colonised vast tracts of the earth. The British empire was immense, and South Africa was part of it for about 150 years. Before that, it was the Dutch who impacted on the Cape. The end result of this long, often ugly and discriminatory, association between settlers and natives was the development of modern towns and cities; the establishment of a first-world economy. Apartheid, from 1948, undermined what should have been a gradual deracialising of the economy – and drove a wedge between black and white.

Instead of blaming the ANC for failing, over the past 17 years, to institute a working education system which would have helped economically empower black people, Khoabane falls back on the old trick of blaming whites themselves. Whose fault is it that, despite throwing billions of rands at the problem, our schools are still not providing the vast majority of black children with essential skills?

The new South African propaganda

Was the wealth of South African whites acquired by "bloodshed and robbery"? Too often, today, black commentators in our media are expressing such views as "historical fact", when in reality our history was far more complex and ambiguous. I recently wrote the following piece based on the row over an editor being called a "black snake in the grass deployed by white capital", and that she would have been necklaced in the 1980s.

Truth or Propaganda?

The nature of propaganda is such that the more you repeat a lie, the more people begin to accept it as the truth.

A classic example was Nazi Germany before the Second World War, where the Jewish community was demonised by the fascist leaders under Adolf Hitler to such an extent that eventually they used this “truth” as justification for a policy of genocide.

So I write with a sense of growing concern at the direction in which the national dialogue has been moving of late. And something Veli Mbele said in his “In my view” column in the Port Elizabeth newspaper, The Herald, of August 22 encapsulates the way in which African South Africans have become so steeped in the “black is right, white is wrong” perception of our history that they refuse to see the many uncomfortable nuances, the vast expanses of grey.

Mbele wrote a largely commendable analysis of the row between City Press editor Ferial Haffajee and Sowetan columnist Eric Myeni, who was fired after writing a racially charged diatribe attacking Haffajee. We all know the most jarring aspects of what was written – things like calling her a “black snake in the grass deployed by white capital to sow discord amongst blacks” and that in the 1980s she would “probably have had a burning tyre around her neck”. Scurrilous stuff.

Mbele explored further Myeni’s argument about how the use of state tenders to enrich black people could be justified. Mbele commendably says the point is whether “when they get rich through state tenders ... they do so legally and ... use their wealth to materially improve the living conditions of African people in general”. On this point, of course, one has to ask: how many of the many state tenders awarded to BEE companies since 1994 have been above board? How many of the companies were equipped to do the job, and indeed completed it properly? One only has to look at the RDP housing fiasco – with houses crumbling – to realise that far too many of these companies were ill-equipped to tackle the projects for which they tendered. Often they simply sub-contracted the work to established (read white) firms, thereby increasing the cost of the project.

But that is an argument for another day. More worrying for me are Mbele’s comments with regard to our history. He notes that Myeni had stated that the DA “receives money largely from white business, which is the main economic beneficiary of the government tender system”. Firstly, that is a dubious claim, since white firms are by and large only given the contracts when, as noted above, black firms find themselves unable to do the work. In terms of the BEE loading formulae, contracts will go to black firms first. Indeed, the whole BEE concept was almost custom made to facilitate corruption. As soon as you put race above things like competence, price and track record in the awarding of tenders, you’re asking for trouble. So we are stuck with a system literally designed to promote just the sort of moral malaise which Mbele correctly identifies in Myeni’s argument.

However, what really concerns me is this sentence by Mbele: “It is common knowledge the DA is a historically white party and that our national wealth, which now resides in white hands, was acquired through bloodshed and robbery.”

He goes on to talk about “these historical facts”, as if his biased view – which is widely held thanks to decades of indoctrination – is holy writ. The historical reality is far more nuanced. There are indeed vast grey areas where Mbele sees only black and white, good and bad.

A brief resume of the counter-argument would go like this. Bantu-speaking people came down from central Africa and “colonised” what is now South Africa and was occupied by the Khoisan. European whites started “colonising” the same area, starting in what would become Cape Town, from 1652. That’s over 350 years ago. The world was a very different place. The great powers of Europe were taking to their sailing ships and exploring a world they had only recently discovered was indeed round, not flat. They were motivated by both a desire to find wealth through trade, and indeed colonisation, and among their scientists and intellectuals, by a fascination with the complexity of this planet. Charles Darwin is a fine example.

It was as much an age of discovery as one of imperialism. Yet imperialism did occur, and Britain was the key imperialist for a century and a half. Of course “weaker”, less advanced indigenous people were conquered and governed by settler rulers. (Just as the Romans did to Britain for nearly 400 years until 410 AD, the Normans did after 1066 and in a sense the Roman Catholic Church did to much of Europe for 1000 years up till the 16th century.)

The local populations of colonised countries were exploited and marginalised. But Britain did abolish slavery in 1833, and by the mid-20th century gradually loosened its grip and eventually handed over the reins to the locals in countries around the globe. A fine example is India, which is now a thriving democracy, though still beset by widespread poverty.

Most important of all, the European settlers brought with them – especially in the 19th and 20th centuries – all the benefits of the scientific, intellectual, industrial, agricultural and economic advances that had made their home countries the powerful states they were. These were introduced into South Africa as a direct result of colonialism, leaving us with an advanced, industrial economy that is the envy of the rest of Africa.

Certainly black people often suffered grievously, particularly under apartheid post-1948. But the broader picture is one of a country provided with the building blocks to succeed by the ingenuity of its white settler community in partnership with the indigenous population.

Mbele and Myeni can distort this history as they please, but each time they make use of anything that has its origins in the West – the products of centuries of rigorous intellectual endeavour – they should pause to reflect on whether they shouldn’t be just a little grateful for that legacy.

I suggest the Internet – a western invention – might be a place to start looking. Or computers themselves. Or cars, trains, internal combustion engines, cellphones, telephones, radio, television, CDs, DVDs, fridges, stoves, electricity. Look at the history of science and ask yourselves, should we not be grateful for these gifts, the atom bomb notwithstanding? Think too of things like freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, human rights, modern medicine, formal schooling, universities, police forces, democracy. All were, by and large, a product of this western European age of enlightenment.

We have a choice. We can accept this broader, more balanced, picture of our history. Or we can just swallow the “white is wrong, black is right” propaganda hook, line and sinker, until in the end all manner of cruelty is justified in addressing this supposed “truth” – as Hitler did in Germany and Poland.

Nationalising South Africa's mines

Julius Malema and the ANC Youth League have been calling for the nationalisation of South Africa's mines. What sort of impact is this having? This is how a Reuters correspondent reported on the issue on August 10, 2011. Consider what effect such a report might have on potential investors overseas. This is the report:

By Jon Herskovitz

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa’s ruling

African National Congress is at war with itself over calls to

nationalise a mining sector that has been the backbone of

Africa’s largest economy.

Nationalisation could bankrupt the country and destroy its

credibility among investors. But the idea resonates with the

country’s poor black majority who see it as a way to spread the

wealth from a sector that grew powerful along with

white-minority apartheid rule.

Here are a few questions and answers as to what may result

of the nationalisation debate.

WILL SOUTH AFRICA NATIONALISE ITS MINES?

Not unless the ANC wants to ruin the economy by trying to

take over a sector that accounts for about half a million jobs

and 6 percent of GDP.

The country cannot afford to buy out listed mining firms

which have a market capitalisation of about 270 billion, equal

to about two-thirds of GDP or twice the annual state budget.

Running the mining firms would cost tens of billions more a

year and given the loss-making track record of state-owned

enterprises, nationalised mines in South Africa would place a

huge drag on the economy.

Threats to tweak laws in order to expropriate shares for a

fraction of their value would run up against international

investment guarantees that would almost certainly a trigger

severe backlash from South Africa’s trading partners.

The debate is largely kept alive to settle political scores

in the ANC and will stay on the agenda at least through the end

of next year when it holds a conference to elect its leaders.

IF NOT NATIONALISATION, WHAT DOES THE GOVERNMENT WANT?

The government has been clear on what it expects from mining

companies: more black ownership, more jobs and social justice

for the black poor who have been marginalised for decades by

mining barons.

Nationalisation will not happen but keeping the debate alive

provides leverage.

The government has created a state mining company which will

focus on strategic minerals including coal and uranium, although

it has yet to be decided how the firm would operate. Analysts

said this may be the extent of state ownership in the industry.

WHAT MIGHT MINING FIRMS BE PRESSURED TO DO?

The government will likely apply more pressure on mining

firms to achieve a government mandate for them to have 26

percent black ownership and 40 percent black management by 2014.

Mining firms could be pressed into joint ventures with the

public sector in the downstream processing of minerals. The

government’s national growth strategy sees mineral processing as

a pillar of growth and job creation. It has laid out 10 mineral

commodities and five value chains it wants to develop, saying

mining firms will be called on to help.

WILL MINING FIRMS FACE INCREASING TAX AND ROYALTY BILLS?

Changes may come at the margins but there will probably be

nothing major. South Africa’s royalty system is considered one

of the more advanced among mining giants.

WILL MINING FIRMS AVOID EXTRA COSTS?

Probably not. Mining firms may face greater pressure to

increase shareholdings to local communities where mines are

located and pay a larger bill for infrastructure development.

The energy-intensive sector may see higher tariffs from state

utility Eskom, which is scrambling for funds to build much

needed power stations.

Mark Cutifani, chief executive of mining power AngloGold

Ashanti, said in an opinion article last month the mining sector

is willing to help end “inequality and the demons of its past".

Separate from nationalisation, mining firms could face a

huge bill from legal cases from miners seeking compensation for

deadly lung diseases, especially in the gold mining sector.

WHAT ARE THE DANGERS?

High-minded ideals of social justice could easily fall prey

to crass corruption.

Foreign investors, South Africans and the ANC's governing

partners have grown increasingly worried about the

implementation of a black economic empowerment policy introduced

by the ANC after apartheid ended 17 years ago.

BEE is aimed at righting the economic wrongs of apartheid

but critics say it has only enriched a few politically connected

businessmen in a country where millions live in poverty and over

a quarter of the work force is jobless.

An increased push for more black ownership could deepen the

pockets of a few while the impoverished majority see no gains.

Nationalisation could be used to bail out BEE firms that

made bad investments in the sector or to revisit mining rights,

which would deal a blow to regulators already being probed by

police over a sweetheart rights deal that benefited President

Jacob Zuma’s son and his backers.

Joint venture firms could end up as money pits that create

few jobs while piling costs on mining firms.

The biggest risk is that South Africa will place too high a

burden on mining companies, hurting the competitiveness and long term prospects for Africa’s largest economy.

Sadtu's baleful influence

This short letter was published in the Sunday Times on July 24, 2011. I wrote it in response to several examples of people in power demonstrating that when it comes to acting morally, they are prepared to fudge issues at random. Anyway, the national newspaper chose to edit my letter quite severely, so I am including my original below. However, the letter may have spurred ST journalist Chris Barron to grill a senior Education official along similar lines.

My published letter is above. Click on it to read it in larger format. Below is my original, which cited two further instances of moral torpidity.

A reading of the Review section of the Sunday Times last week (July 17) provided a disturbing insight into the moral malaise afflicting this country. Three points stood out:

- In his article on education, the DA's Wilmot James referred to the Education International congress in Cape Town from July 22 to 26. While many of Wilmot's suggestions for resolving the education crisis hit the mark, it did not seem to occur to him that the fact that Sadtu was hosting the gathering during a school term was symptomatic of the very union-induced failure besetting education. Three of the days earmarked for the conference are school days. How many teachers will sacrifice time they should be spending with their pupils to attend this conference? This just a week after their three-week midyear holidays.

- President Jacob Zuma's new (old) spin doctor, Mac Maharaj, confesses to S'thembiso Msomi in an interview that in cases like Cooperative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka – who is accused of using R160 000 in public funds to fly family members around the country – Zuma will not fire him because “we don't like to drop a person. And that is a good quality.” In other words, when it comes to the ANC, every cadre is untouchable.

- Business Unity SA executive member Sandile Zungu uses similar logic to justify having chief government spokesman Jimmy Manyi as head of the Black Management Forum. Chris Barron asked him if black business was likely to speak “without fear or favour” against nationalisation when “one of its most influential leaders is the government's chief spokesman”. Zungu said there was “a school of thought which says it enhances that because of access and reach”. Asked if it doesn't “compromise its independence”, he said: “Independence is not enhanced by dissociation, necessarily.” So he's saying it is possible to be critical of government while being its chief spokesman. What dangerous nonsense.

This is a section of an interview which Chris Barron conducted for his So Many Questions column in the Sunday Times of July 24, 2011. He was speaking to the director general of Basic Education, Bobby Soobrayan in the light of the Sadtu conference I referred to, and to two reports which spoke of Sadtu's baleful influence on education. As usual, Barron was brilliant in pinning his subject down. I often wonder how he does these interviews. It is in person or over the phone. What they constitute, however, is an object lesson in how to speak truth to power. Now if only we could see our politicians - including Malema - put under similar pressure on national TV, preferably by someone as informed and fearless as Chris Barron seems to be.

Prof Jonathan Jansen on education

I submitted this piece in response to an article in the Sunday Times of July 10. Needless to say, it wasn't published. Instead, the paper led the July 17 letters page with another response to the same article written by someone who regurgitated the very turgid rubbish which got education in this country into the sorry state it is to begin with. Anyway, for what it's worth, here is my response to Prof Jansen's article:

Professor Jonathan Jansen hits the nail on the head with his analysis of what is wrong with education in SA (Fixing a class-based calamity, July 10). However, what he did not mention was the imposition of outcomes-based education soon after the ANC came to power.

In their arrogant rush to remove all structures in place before 1994, the ANC decided to impose a curriculum that many warned would fail. And so it has.

Jansen notes that it is the former Model C schools which “continue to provide the camouflage of an apparently functional education system”, and the reason they do is not entirely financial. What most of them did was apply OBE very reluctantly, at all times ensuring that tried and tested methods – what Jansen calls “routines and rituals” – were retained. Clearly, with Sadtu undermining all attempts at achieving excellence, these rituals have not been allowed to take hold in township schools.

The ANC has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that it needs the expertise and experience of the white people of this country, and as long as it continues to do so it will reap the bitter rewards of such short-sightedness. Meanwhile, the ANC elite send their children to those very schools which still apply the successful methodologies of the apartheid era. How tragically ironic, since it means that the people who vote them into power again and again – the impoverished township masses – will continue to bear the brunt of this new form of class-based apartheid.

Meanwhile, the ANC goes on appointing under-skilled, inexperienced cadres to key positions in local, provincial and national government as part of its race-based affirmative action programme. And so the vicious cycle of failure built on failure will continue.