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Yet another shot across the bow of sanity within the SA political system. With unerring accuracy, the obtuse SA government has shot itself in the foot yet again by signing into law the Employment Equity Amendment Bill which amends the Employment Equity Act of 1998, empowering the Minister of Employment and Labour to identify proposed national economic sectors and to thence employ “numerical targets” under said Act. When we thought the “transformation” lunacy had reached its zenith with the ANC and its path to economic demise, this latest shock has reverberated throughout South Africa. This particular government department has decided to add a set of racial and gender-based employment criteria to transformation and BEE (black economic empowerment)  “that are so appallingly labyrinthine in complexity, so absurdly and patently unworkable in practice, that they make the Gosplan of the old USSR look avowedly liberal.” (Natale Labia, Partner and Chief Economist of a global investment firm, in Daily Maverick (DM) 30.5.23).

The world is agog watching president Cyril Ramaphosa’s latest shenanigans in his efforts to gain a few more votes in next year’s elections. Have they all gone mad, others ask? “South Africa is astonishingly creative at fashioning its own political, social and economic demise”, declares Labia.

These proposed targets push companies to be more “demographically representative” especially in top and senior management positions. This maze of percentages applies to 18 industry sectors, including farming. Most South African farms are family enterprises, so placing a black gentleman in charge of a farm which has been in a family for two hundred years is pushing the envelope! The tangled and tortuous tables to which businesses are supposed to adhere will need the brainpower of an actuarial Albert Einstein to simplify, to say the least! This convoluted piece of warped thinking will have little chance of passing muster in South Africa’s Constitutional Court, but not to worry: the news of this folly will play well in the townships where getting something for nothing, especially a nice job with smart clothes, a good salary and a car, will be well received.

Business interest group Sakeliga says that the numbers are “irrational and incomprehensible”. It will lead to “utter bedlam”, says Labia. “From Phala Phala to Sofagate, via rolling blackouts and mysterious nocturnal interludes with the Lady R, South Africa has been outdoing itself on the self-harm stakes. And yet, it is becoming apparent that there may well be more harbingers of the cataclysm to come with this amended Act.”

THE WATER NONSENSE

To add insult to injury, the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) has proposed draft regulations for allocating water licences in the Government Gazette of 19 May. One of the requirements is that licences for agriculture and forestry should be granted to entities with between 25% and75% black ownership. There is now a double whammy for farming! “The government’s efforts to classify everything and everyone based on racial numbers has always been shortsighted. But to say that colour is more important than food is truly excessive”, declares Bennie van Zyl, CEO of TLUSA. “Commercial farmers provide food for approximately 70% of South Africa. If these regulations are implemented, it will mean that many farmers do not qualify for water licences. Without water there is no agriculture. Without agriculture, there is no food. It’s as simple as that!”

Apart from being yet another election stunt, the government punts the impossible dream of equality. Not equal work and effort and sacrifice, but equal wealth. Those who create must “redistribute” to those who have created nothing. These latter are gargantuan consumers, avaricious to the nth degree. Despite this, the ANC wants more. They and their followers have already shown us that whatever type of affirmative action has been implemented in South Africa over the past 30 years, it has only worked for a few at the top who have become obscenely rich (including president Ramaphosa). It hasn’t trickled down to the masses who are poorer than ever. Hence the usual pre-election caper to give more freebies to the unproductive in exchange for votes.

Despite the fact that 2.1 million South Africans experience constant hunger because they are unable to access enough food due to a food inflation rate of 11,3% (which has pushed up food prices exponentially), the government is making it impossible to even produce food, let alone distribute it. President Ramaphosa’s Zimbabwean-option legislation might impress the masses, but long term, it is national suicide. Investors (both foreign and local) will run for the hills.

MARXISM

Why does the Ramaphosa government take the path of national suicide?  He and his party still adhere to a socialist way of thinking. Many espouse quasi Marxism but they have of course never lived under communism. However they love central control. They are afraid of being shown up by others who can do the job a hundred times better than they can. Their colossal failures they declare as “challenges” and they will continue along this path until they are stopped.  These two legislative processes of race over food security, and more grabbing of what others produce via more affirmative action, are a double whammy for farmers.

Andre de Ruyter comments on this ANC mindset in his book  “Truth to Power”: “Because of their myopic views, I find that debating with Marxists is like debating with members of the Flat Earth Society. You cannot win. They believe in their ideology like evangelists believe in the Second Coming. Despite all evidence to the contrary they strive for greater state control and greater state regulation”.

Declares Labia: “Without drifting into hyperbole, in their current state, the regulations (the EE laws mentioned above) represent an unprecedented act of economic suicide. South Africa is astonishingly creative at fashioning its own political, social and economic demise. While it can (and will) be argued that the objectives are laudable insofar as they pertain to redistribution and correcting THE INEQUALITIES OF THE PAST, it is hard to know where to begin on the problem”.

This economic grab is justified by the false narrative of “previously disadvantaged” (pd) citizens now claiming rights because they have ostensibly been outside the normal economy, through no fault of their own. This pd narrative has stood the ANC In good stead, before coming to power and during their control over the past thirty years. It is used to condone taking from the productive by affirmative action and the latest buzz word, transformation.  The term “previously disadvantaged” is used by virtually every local SA writer and overseas journalists. It has become a given. It is not however a given at all! Unsurprisingly,  the American journal Newsweek ran a story entitled “Is South Africa limiting water for white people?” (2.6.23) where the water licence sham is said to have been “part of president Ramaphosa’s push to redress SOUTH AFRICA’S HISTORICAL RACIAL INJUSTICES”.

INEQUALITIES OF THE PAST -  A FALSE NARRATIVE

Here we pause to examine the assumption that there were “inequalities of the past” that need correcting. Virtually everyone repeats the same mantra, that blacks were marginalised, discriminated against and weren’t allowed to partake in the SA economy. What is overlooked is the empirical fact that they had no economy of their own to begin with. Historically they were people  not that far removed from the Stone Age. When Europeans arrived in Cape Town 1652 there was no development whatsoever. Indeed in the 19th century they had not moved further from that original status.

Dozens of people from Europe travelled to South Africa either on official business for European governments (especially the British) or from academic institutions, to see this new country and report what they saw. The recording of visitors to South Africa during those years is the written history of those years.

The British government sent Dr. Andrew Smith, a doctor and botanist, to South Africa in 1821 where his first assignment was as a medical assistant to the British 72nd regiment, stationed at Grahamstown on the Eastern Frontier. In 1824, Major Henry Somerset commander of the Cape Corps, posted Smith to Fort Wilshire as medical officer “with specific instructions to make friends with the African people and to observe their customs and their attitudes”. (See “Andrew Smith’s Journal and his expedition into the interior of South Africa: 1834 – 1836.). He subsequently travelled extensively throughout South Africa. He found local people living a subsistence existence not far removed from the Stone Age, with no accoutrements pertaining to any form of evolution along the lines of anything resembling developments in other parts of the world, including Europe at the time.

Writers and observers from Europe had no political agenda. They simply wrote about what they saw and experienced. It is only through living with whites and others in South Africa that blacks have moved into the 21st century, but little they have comes from their own. The language they speak, the cars they drive, the education in their schools, their houses, their businesses, their day to day living in modern day South Africa is from others who settled in South Africa. Thus why the guilt complex which is the raison d’etre for affirmative action? What did whites steal from blacks which blacks legally owned? What did blacks develop on their own?

How did whites “disadvantage” blacks? On the contrary, whites advantaged those that they found in a primitive state. Virtually everything that blacks have today came from the European settlers. So what is the rationale for affirmative action, for transformation? What was taken from blacks who had lived a subsistence existence for thousands of years and had developed nothing towards improving their living standards? What civilization was destroyed by whites? What land was owned that was taken by whites? Even without proof of land ownership, whites either paid for land or exchanged  land. How were blacks disadvantaged with employment when they never created jobs,  nor built one factory, nor developed writing, nor built one road, a school, a railway line?

Affirmative action, Employment Equity legislation and transformation is nothing more than a grab at something you couldn’t create yourself. So why is it allowed to proliferate? Controlling a country for thirty years and still needing to take from another group reveals the historic generic reasons why piggy backing on another culture has always been needed. What do white farmers, for example, owe the ANC? Why are their farms targeted? Why are they harassed as a group, one asks? Is it because they show up the ANC for the incompetents they are. Can the ANC provide food for 60 million people? Already more than 4,300 productive farms handed over to the ANC under the so-called  land reform policy have been either destroyed, or are in the possession of the ANC government and produce nothing. No title deeds were given to the proposed recipients under this policy.

A court action to challenge the rationale to support affirmative action and employment equity could prove embarrassing to the government. Can the complainants prove the need for redress? Redress for what? Everything in modern-day South Africa that they possess comes from someone else.

The irony is that what they have taken, what they were given in the name of transformation, they have destroyed. They have transformed South Africa into a tragedy.