RW Johnson: From apartheid to race laws - Has South Africa come full circle?

Key topics:South Africa's post-apartheid racial laws hinder growth and deepen divisions.ANC policies push racial quotas, blocking skills retention and foreign investment.Education decline and skill loss threaten South Africa’s economic future..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson.At the end of the Second World War the governments of East and West Germany both turned their backs on the Nazi experience and tried to eliminate its traces. The Nazis had been in power for twelve years and had organised the whole of German society from top to bottom to fit their ideological mould, ruthlessly enforcing their will. Yet in both East and West Germany their model was wholly repudiated. There was no organic gradualism about the way German society changed after 1945 – even though that is the way most societies normally change.South Africa was very different. After a long struggle for non-racialism and democracy, apartheid was universally repudiated and its many crimes were publicly exposed. Yet many features of apartheid society continued naturally, although there was now no law enforcing them. The different racial groups continued to live mainly in areas dominated by their own kind and most marriages and relationships took place within, rather than between, the different racial communities. Whites remained far better off and better educated than blacks. Blacks travelled mainly by black taxis while whites drove their own cars or flew. The most upwardly mobile group was Indians, just as they had been throughout the apartheid period. Coloureds complained that under apartheid they hadn’t been white enough but now, under the ANC, they weren’t black enough. A small group of blacks – under five per cent of the African population – became much better off and some became really rich but there was little change for the other ninety five per cent.In other rapidly developing countries in Asia huge emphasis was placed on improvements in human capital, essentially by education. In South Africa the opposite was true: education was allowed to deteriorate and very little effort was made to improve human capital. Indeed, the ANC has been a major blight on the education system which regularly takes bottom place in many international comparisons. Remarkably, many African countries with far smaller education budgets than South Africa far out-perform South Africa in this respect. By 2025 many hundreds of South African schools no longer even taught Mathematics as a subject. The situation was particularly bad in black schools. So while other developing countries used education as the principal engine of modernisation and growth, South Africa effectively adopted a programme of “barbarisation”, as if deliberately aiming to drive the country backwards. Indeed, in the new South Africa illiteracy and innumeracy increased dramatically. This left Africans heavily handicapped in a modern industrial society and simply made upward social mobility impossible for most Africans. Yet at the same time the ANC, for political reasons, was determined to push black candidates into top jobs. The contradiction between these two objectives explains much about the colossal series of governmental and enterprise failures experienced under ANC rule.Initially the ANC declared itself in favour of non-racialism and that concept appears both in the Constitution and frequently in the ANC’s own slogans and propaganda. Indeed, in terms of the 1998 Equity Employment Act “employers may not discriminate on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy, marital status, family responsibility, ethnic or social origin, colour, age, disability, religious belief, political opinion, language or HIV status”. And yet that very Act introduced the notion that jobs should be distributed in line with racial demographics – so if whites were only 7% of the population they should only have 7% of the jobs. This would inevitably lead to discrimination on grounds of race. Yet at the same time there was much celebration of the “Rainbow Nation” – the idea being that all races were equally welcome in the New South Africa..Read more:.RW Johnson: Fleeing ANC chaos: Eastern Cape migrants and Afrikaners seek refuge. pt 1.Even by the time that the Equity Employment Act was passed affirmative action had become ubiquitous, with candidates of colour preferred for opportunities across the board. This was justified by arguing that this was not unlawful discrimination but was necessary in order to redress historical injustices. In effect this argument opened the door to a sweeping new form of racial discrimination. Very quickly this was made more explicit – for example in sporting codes – by saying that a certain number of team places must be given to sportsmen of colour, including a specific number of “black Africans”. At the same time the allocation of resources to the old “tribal colleges” – originally vilified by the ANC as apartheid creations - was justified by referring to them as “Historically Disadvantaged Institutions”. This is worth noting simply because such circumlocutions quickly became widespread. Everyone knew that in effect “historically disadvantaged” meant “black”. This rapidly mushroomed so that today the statute book includes no less than 142 Acts based upon racial classification, though often using circumlocutory ways of describing it. In some cases the language used is more blunt, as in the various “Black empowerment” laws – though such laws are actually misnomers since they empower only a tiny stratum of politically-connected Africans. In effect they are a form of legalised corruption. Moreover, the ANC continues to propose new race-based laws in a steady stream. The most obvious example is the proposed Equity Employment Amendment Act which mandates effective racial quotas for all levels of employment. Another case is the new set of rules for investment in gas and oil proposed by Gwede Mantashe, the minister of mineral and petroleum resources. This is worth mentioning because in effect the Black Empowerment and related obligations which any energy company would have to bear are so onerous as effectively to forbid investment into this sector. This extraordinary situation is now quite common in South Africa. BEE requirements are treated as sacrosanct and this explains why foreign investment for greenfield projects in South Africa has effectively ceased altogether. The most celebrated case is that of Elon Musk’s Starlink. The ANC is furious that Musk keeps insisting that he is prevented from investing in South Africa, although he was born here, because he is not black. But Musk is essentially correct. To invest here he would need, effectively, to give away 30% of his equity to black investors and - if Mantashe’s rules are taken as a model – to undertake all manner of other onerous responsibilities: provide free housing for staff, be responsible for the welfare of various local communities, agree to highly intrusive forms of affirmative action appointments within Starlink etc. If Musk was a black South African he would face none of these hurdles.Thus, despite the original vow of non-racialism, ANC ideology has evolved into a highly racialised formula which has become stricter and tighter with every passing year. And the government is so determined on this course that it insists on these racial laws even when they have the effect of deterring much-needed foreign investment. Such laws now govern every aspect of South African life. The result is nothing less than the re-invention of a softer version (so far) of apartheid and just as the Jews were driven out of Germany by their exclusion from employment, the same has been happening with South African whites and other minorities for some time.This is despite the abolition of the old Population Registration Act, so there is no legal definition of race. But the authorities are determined to get round that and are using exactly the same four racial categories employed by that Act. Thus the new rules on racial employment in universities say that a university must specify whether each member of faculty is white, Coloured, black or Indian – thus overcoming the fact that many faculty members will just classify themselves as “Africans”, resisting further classification. This determination to force everyone into a racial pigeon-hole mirrors the Calvinist determination of the old National Party to do exactly the same thing..Read more:.No genocide, just grievance: The myth behind Trump’s Afrikaner 'refugees' - Roger Southall.Moreover, the ANC is pushing hard for a National Health Insurance Act although it is quite clear that its passage would result in wholesale deterioration of health facilities and medical standards and the mass emigration of highly qualified professionals. This would strip the country of most of its doctors, managers and businessmen. The fact that this legislation is being pushed so strongly despite the staggering blow it would deal to the national economy is further evidence of the ANC’s effective wish for racial exclusion at all costs.What makes this completely absurd is that South Africa’s main trump card in 1994 was its possession of a large professional, business and managerial class whose skills had helped to build South Africa’s economy, the most developed in Africa. If South Africa was to grow so as to be able to offer a decent life to all its people, instead of just for a small minority, nothing was more important than that it should retain those skills. There was absolutely no need for African nationalists to see this mainly white group as a threat. Demography alone would guarantee an ever-increasing African political dominance provided that the new ANC government at least maintained a steady rate of economic growth. Moreover, with all the apartheid-era sanctions and boycotts now discarded and with South Africa enjoying enormous international good will, there was every reason to expect an acceleration in economic growth. All that was required was for the government to adopt a laissez-faire attitude politically and economically and concentrate on maintaining law and order and on improving education so as to up-skill the young black generation as quickly as possible. Rapid economic growth would quickly lift all boats, creating more jobs and improving living standards.There was another, vital reason to do this. The South Africa whose government the ANC was inheriting was not like other African countries. It had the infrastructure of a modern industrial state – not just the physical infrastructure of modern cities, highways, airports, railways and ports but a sophisticated financial, commercial and industrial infrastructure, the strongest military in Africa, by far the best higher education sector in Africa, Africa’s leading airline and so on. This infrastructure had been planned, brought to fruition and maintained largely by the skills of the white population. If this superior endowment was to be preserved it was essential to retain those skills – and to build and strengthen the skills of the black population so that they could take over these tasks. Instead the ANC chose the one way certain to derail all such hopes, re-adopting many features of apartheid, squeezing out the whites as far as possible and adopting a whole raft of legislation whose effect was to restrict and stunt economic growth. The results have been a great loss of key skills and a steadily falling GDP per capita. As a result the whole country has been going steadily backwards. Already the military has been reduced to almost nothing, the leading airline has gone bust, the railways and ports have lost most of their original capacity and now have worst-in-the-world status, the universities have declined and perhaps most dramatically of all, the cities and towns are in a state of extreme delapidation. The scale of the disaster is so great that it has in itself become a potent factor in driving the further loss of skills. What is happening is historically very unusual. It is seldom that one sees a government deliberately driving a country backwards. All else apart, such a process is clearly suicidal – ultimately the electorate is bound to throw out a government that does this. The critical point is that while there is enormous potential talent in the black population, it is not being educated or trained in sufficient numbers to replace the whites who are being squeezed out. In effect the ANC has a manic ideological commitment to “transformation”, whose logic would be to reduce the whites to the same tiny minority status they have in Zimbabwe. And as the Zimbabwean example makes only too clear, the result of that is an institutional and economic collapse. To take only the case of agriculture, white farmers still provide some 90% of the food on which South Africans rely, so without them the country would rapidly face starvation and chaos. The chief victims would be the black population. And by then the government would have run out of scapegoats….So, are the Afrikaners leaving South Africa for America refugees ? What’s in a name, one might ask ? In their own eyes they are refugees and apparently in those of some Americans too. But that is hardly the most interesting question posed by their flight. The real question is why, 35 years after De Klerk announced the end of apartheid, is the ANC trying so hard to re-invent and use racial classification for almost every walk of life ? When will we finally get to the point where all South Africans are treated equally and on merit, regardless of race ?

RW Johnson: From apartheid to race laws - Has South Africa come full circle?

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