is what Zuma should have said in his state-of-the-nation address had he been interested in growing the economy, restoring confidence and building national unity. Instead, it was likely that Zuma’s invocation of a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’ based on the fiction of white monopoly capital was retarding rather than advancing change, argued Business Day editor, Tim Cohen.23
This is because what Zuma described suggested that the government should deepen its existing approach to transformation, whereas the opposite is required – the government needs to change its existing approach to running the economy and drop its narrow obsession with the ownership aspect of transformation.
‘Zuma … could have said the economy is naturally evolving to reflect its true, multiracial nature. This is indeed a day to celebrate,’ wrote Cohen. ‘Instead, he reaches for his inner Donald Trump, citing statistics in an intellectually dishonest way to support an ideology of “us” and “them” …’24
The analogy is apt, as the resurgence of identity politics and intellectually dishonest race-baiting in South Africa paralleled what was happening in other parts of the world, especially in the US under its loathsome white-nationalist president, Donald Trump.
Trump was dangerously reshaping the national agenda around a sense of ‘us’ that includes only ‘real’ Americans, according to Harvard development economist Ricardo Hausmann. ‘[Trump’s] identity politics is a defence of a certain dominant ethnicity,’ Hausmann said on a visit to South Africa. ‘That this will be done at some economic cost is the same danger faced by South Africa.’25
Former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela also registered her concern over the rise of identity politics in South Africa, saying it made her ‘afraid’ for the country. Speaking to Al Jazeera at Harvard Law School in Boston, Madonsela said that by fuelling ethnic divides, politicians in South Africa encouraged people to direct the fight at white people instead of at overcoming inequality. This allowed them to divert attention away from how they were looting the state and destroying the economy.26
This was certainly the experience of Helen Zille, who found herself in the centre of a furious race row for Tweeting after a visit to Singapore in March 2017 that the legacy of colonialism wasn’t entirely negative. ‘For those claiming the legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport, infrastructure, piped water etc,’ she wrote.
The whole point of Zille’s trip to Singapore was to try to understand why some former colonies had become inclusive, spectacularly successful societies while others were divided, dismal failures. The last thing she had expected was to learn by example when her Tweet ignited a storm of invective.
In trying to make sense of it all, Zille opined in a Sunday Times essay27 that a tectonic shift had occurred in South African politics while white society hadn’t been paying attention. The Mandela era, with its inclusivity, had come to an end and emerging from South Africa’s universities, she argued, was a new set of ideas rooted in the writings of Afro-Caribbean revolutionary and philosopher Frantz Fanon, and codified in critical race theory that regarded ‘whiteness’ and ‘whites’ as the key obstacle to the progress of black people.
‘The virus of anti-whiteness (rooted in the negative legacy of colonialism) has spread rapidly through South Africa’s born-free generation, especially the young, educated elite,’ she said. ‘It’s an attractive philosophy, partly because it romanticises revolution and partly because it turns whites into an easy target, a scapegoat to avoid facing the real issues that prevent progress and economic inclusion in South Africa.’
In the process, the buzzword ‘transformation’ had been replaced by ‘decolonisation’, said Zille. Since all whites were by definition colonisers, this allowed for the condemnation of a whole category of people based on their race.28
Zille’s characterisation of the born-free generation as infected with a virus of virulent anti-white racism was a harsh and sweeping conclusion, since many of these young people had marched peacefully, united across race and class barriers, to demand Zuma’s resignation after his sacking of Gordhan. Some of them probably even voted for the DA.
But she was right about one thing – Bell Pottinger had not plucked the phrase ‘white monopoly capital’ from thin air. In Zille’s words, they had ‘tapped into a pumping vein of vitriolic race invective currently flowing through South Africa’s body politic’. The country ignored this tendency at its peril, she warned. ‘There is a genuine risk that it will reverse the progress of our decades-long struggle for a non-racial, inclusive democracy.’
SA on brink of making a ‘historic mistake’
Sometimes it takes an outsider with no political affiliation or racial baggage to see things clearly and say it like it is. In the same month that Zille was taking intense flak for her idiotic suggestion that colonialism had an upside, Hausmann, a former Venezuelan minister of planning, visited South Africa. He knew the country very well, having chaired Trevor Manuel’s International Growth Advisory Panel in 2008.
Hausmann took in the seething mass of misanthropy that confronted him and, being a first-class economist, distilled the country’s problems into a series of pithy observations. He was alarmed at the populist turn that South African politics had taken, based on ‘the fundamental lie’ of white monopoly capital. Scapegoating the white population and the firms that existed (no matter who owned them) was a dangerous and extremely counterproductive move, he said.
While there was no doubt that South Africa needed economic transformation because there were too many unemployed people and too many people living in poverty, Hausmann felt that the white monopoly capital narrative, which proposed radical economic transformation as its solution, was ‘a recipe for failure’.29
It meant that South Africa continued to take ‘somewhat aggressively’ from the firms that existed, instead of focusing on encouraging new firms that would create new jobs for the 9 million unemployed.
‘I can understand the political moment in which these decisions are made, but that doesn’t make them right,’ he said. ‘These are historic mistakes. Countries can take wrong turns and get into dead-end streets and that is my fear for South Africa.’30
The real inequality that South Africa suffered from was between those with jobs and those without, Hausmann explained. The problem, in his view, was that millions of people were unproductive or unemployed. This meant that South Africa had to focus on entrepreneurship and creating new enterprises, many of them, rather than tinkering with ownership and trying to transform the few enterprises it already had.
‘It’s not about changing the asset ownership for a few rich blacks in the country, it’s about empowering the millions,’ he said. In short, South Africa’s problem is that there is ‘too much of an obsession with making the top of society black and not enough focus on making the bottom of society better’.31
It is common cause that the way South Africa has designed and administered BEE, with its narrow focus on transferring firm ownership at the top rather than creating jobs at the bottom, has largely benefited a small, black elite. In some cases this has amounted to little more than replacing white capitalists with black ones. The government has belatedly acknowledged the need to get black people involved in starting their own businesses but its much-vaunted Black Industrialist Programme supported just 27 entrepreneurs. And the programme had cost the state about R1,5 billion, or roughly R55 million per entrepreneur.32
Commenting on the term ‘white monopoly capital’, Madonsela pointed out that if capital was the problem, then it was the problem – regardless of whether it was black or white capital. ‘I think that white monopoly capital is a narrative brought in to place blame on something for people’s suffering,’ she concluded, ‘and everyone who disagrees is an agent.’33
It was quite possible for South Africa to create a system that allowed for equal distribution ‘without damning white people’, she argued. Education, for example, was a great equaliser, she said, but South Africa had neglected to invest in education in favour of BEE.
The chess master sacrifices his bishop