RW Johnson: Fleeing ANC chaos: Eastern Cape migrants and Afrikaners seek refuge. pt 1

Key topicsEastern Cape migrants seek better services and jobs in Western CapeANC policies restrict white employment, fueling emigration and loss of talentComparison of South African racial laws with historical German Jewish persecution.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.There has been much heat generated recently over the question of refugees. When Helen Zille referred to Eastern Cape residents who fled their province in large numbers due to the appalling mis-governance of the ANC provincial government, she caused a storm by referring to them as refugees. Yet the fact is that if you live in the Western Cape you meet such people all the time. They are desperately keen to have state hospitals that actually work, decent schools for their children and a better chance of a job, all of which the Western Cape provides. They still all go back frequently to see their families in the Eastern Cape and without doubt they would have stayed there if such facilities had been on offer there. But when you question them they all love Cape Town: they enjoy the fact that the city works, that the traffic lights work, that there are no potholes and no litter. When ANC politicians come here they always claim that Cape Town is racist, that the DA council ignores the poor and so on, but I have never once heard such complaints from the migrants from the Eastern Cape. In effect they all have expectations of what a decent urban society should look like – expectations formed under apartheid. They are bitterly unhappy that the Eastern Cape no longer provides that, and happy that the Western Cape does. They sound very much as if they have found a refuge.Now there is even more heat over the US offering a home to white Afrikaner “refugees”. Indeed, angry government spokesmen insist that for America to use such a term is an attempt to undermine South Africa’s sovereignty – and there are furious efforts to somehow prove that Solidarity and Afriforum are to blame, although these organisations want Afrikaners to stay in South Africa and fight for their rights.The point is that throughout the Struggle the ANC depicted themselves as victims struggling self-righteously against oppression, and that has long become crucial to their whole sense of identity. It is accordingly most jarring and upsetting to hear of whites seeing themselves as victims – refugees fleeing from black oppression. ANC spokesmen are outraged to hear such words which threaten not only their own sense of moral self-righteousness but even their sense of identity.Yet stop and consider. Over a million whites have left South Africa since 1994, many of them abandoning comfortable lives here and despite many of them loving South Africa. In the early years after 1994 most were leaving not because things had gone bad but because they greatly feared that they would. They feared anti-white racism, they worried that corruption would go through the roof, that crime would get a whole lot worse, that job opportunities for whites would be constrained and that African government would be marked by the same incompetence, corruption and mismanagement that they had seen elsewhere in Africa. Were they wrong ?Let us look for the sake of reference at a classic refugee experience, that of German Jews. Immediately on coming to power Hitler declared a boycott of Jewish businesses. He also excluded non-Aryans (Jews, Romani and Blacks) from the legal profession, the civil service and from all teaching jobs in secondary schools and universities. Many Jewish-owned stores had to close almost immediately. Moreover Jews were also forbidden to work in any of the government-regulated professions – not only education but medicine, dentistry and so on. As a result many Jews became unemployed or were forced into menial jobs in order to survive. In addition, of course, Jews were stripped of their citizenship and forbidden to marry or have relationships with Aryans – but it is notable that the Nazis were sensitive to the fact that many of the Nuremberg Laws (ordaining these forms of discrimination) would be offensive to much international opinion. Accordingly, no prosecutions under the Nuremberg Laws were allowed to take place until the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin were safely out of the way.Under the Nuremberg Laws there were complicated definitions of who was part-Jewish as a result of inter-marriage. Those of “mixed-race” (Mischlinge) were also subject to a variety of heavy discriminations. All told there some 750,000 Mischlinge in 1935..Read more:.White refugees welcomed, Afghan allies abandoned in Trump’s America - Patricia Lopez.The key objective of these laws was, quite openly, to simply get rid of the Jews from Germany. Emigration was far from easy but nonetheless, by 1939 some 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews had emigrated, as had many of the Mischlinge. Those who remained were then wiped out in the Holocaust from 1941 on. By 1945 there were only 200,000 Mischlinge left in Germany.As we know, there were many other bestial, cruel and horrible forms of anti-semitic behaviour and discrimination in Nazi Germany, but the laws on employment were the most fundamental since they made it virtually impossible for most Jews to carry on living and working in Germany. The German Jewish population was a talented and creative group, over-represented in the liberal professions, education, business, the arts and science, so it was particularly vulnerable to the Nazi prohibitions. The countries who received Jewish refugees from Germany were lucky, for many of the refugees and their descendants have been high achievers in many fields. From Germany’s own point of view, the persecution of the Jews was a huge exercise in self-harm. To take only one example, the German war effort was highly dependent on the great skills of German scientists but had Jewish scientists remained in Germany, German science would have been even more formidable. Thus the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, was set up as a result of an appeal to President Roosevelt by four leading scientists – Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Roosevelt’s adviser, Alexander Sachs. Einstein and Szilard were both Jewish refugees and Sachs was also Jewish. Fermi, the only non-Jew of the four, was married to a Jewish wife and had accordingly been forced into exile from Italy when Mussolini copied some of the Nuremberg Laws.When the Manhattan Project was set up it was divided into eight work groups. Five of the eight were headed by Jewish scientists and the Project’s overall leader, Robert Oppenheimer, was also Jewish. The Project – a war-winning programme if ever there was one – would have been literally impossible without Jewish scientists.How does this compare to South Africa ? Obviously, it would be quite wrong to liken the lot of Afrikaners or South African whites in general with that of German Jews and a grievous insult to the latter, who were the targets of so much wickedness. The real comparison is with apartheid. As with the Jews, black South Africans were denied citizenship and couldn’t vote, and just as with the Jews, there were elaborate laws forbidding racial intermarriage and even punishment for inter-racial sexual intercourse. Blacks were, like the Jews, subject to job reservation and forbidden access to many of the more skilled jobs and professions. They were also forced to carry passes – their version of the yellow star – and blacks were forced to live in townships, squatter camps and in the homelands – their own version of the ghettoes the Jews had been forced into. No South African whites have been forced to undergo any of these things.But there are points of comparison, nonetheless. If you talk to the residents of Orania you cannot but be struck by how many of them fled there after dreadful incidents of violent crime in which their houses were invaded. Apparently the same is true of many of the Afrikaners who are now in the US. They are definitely seeking refuge. Similarly, the South African authorities are highly sensitive to the fact that their own race-based legislation has begun to attract international criticism, just as the Nazis worked hard to hide their own racial oppression from the eyes of the Olympic audience.More important, the ANC has done a great deal to restrict employment opportunities for whites – and now Coloureds and Indians too. Soon after 1994 the civil service and most of the public sector became almost a no-go area for most whites unless they were ANC or SACP members, able to benefit from cadre deployment. This was rapidly followed by similar restrictions in the private sector. Time and again I heard of the almost impossible situation facing the sometimes extremely able children of white friends. Some of the cleverest were told flatly by universities and private businesses that no more whites were being hired.And, as we know, the ANC continues to act in order to restrict job opportunities for the minority races even further – the Equity Employment legislation being the latest instalment. What is dreadful about such legislation is that it insists that the most important criterion for employment is race, not merit. The fact that new rules have been issued requiring the racial classification of all property owners and requiring universities to enumerate all their staff by race shows only too clearly that a lot more race-based legislation is in store.Inevitably, the result has been the emigration of many of the best and brightest. When one speaks to white students they often say that their whole graduation class is about to emigrate as the only way to gain appropriate employment. I think of one outstanding and highly qualified young man I know. After enormous effort the only job he could find was managing a bicycle shop in Jo’burg. Today he works in California in a highly paid job, managing a dozen businesses around America for a private equity firm – for he is an outstanding business manager. Equally, I remember an extremely able young woman, a graduate student at UCT, who applied for an academic post, only to see a person of colour of far lesser ability appointed ahead of her. Her immediate reaction was “I’m out of here”. Today she has a fellowship in Cambridge..Read more:.Smiling refugees, grim realities: The politics behind Afrikaner asylum in the US - Ivo Vegter.And of course, we hear all the time about other outstandingly successful ex-South Africans in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. There is no doubt at all that driving such people away has been – and is - a huge act of self-harm by the South African government. True, none of these exiles seem to be involved in any new Manhattan Project but, as we know, one of them is building rocket ships to take the first humans to Mars…..Has the ANC been consciously trying to drive whites out ? It’s difficult to say. Mandela began by pleading with whites to stay but quickly reverted to “Good riddance to them” when they didn’t listen. And one often hears the “Good riddance” reaction from other African nationalists. But it’s more complicated than that. African nationalists invariably assume that the only reason why whites retain many leading positions is white racism. They simply disregard the fact that many of those whites have worked and studied hard, secured important qualifications and earned their spurs in years of concentrated effort. In other words, they simply ignore merit – and even insist that a stress on merit is itself somehow racist. They never seem to consider that companies and other institutions are all in a race for survival and simply cannot afford not to choose the best people for top jobs.Instead, the same people insist that there is no shortage of Africans who are just as good as any whites. When Mbeki presided over the Africanisation of the civil service he insisted that the notion of any skills shortage among Africans was “an urban legend”. But in that case Mbeki and those like him need to explain why the civil service then collapsed into incompetence and impotence, and that despite a huge increase in the number of civil servants. And why the same happened throughout the public sector. After all, SAA and the Post Office have collapsed and only large state subsidies keep the other SOEs alive. All of these disasters are examples of national self-harm. They didn’t need to happen. Of course, simply employing white managers is no guarantee of success, but disregarding employment on merit is a sure fire loser. And, incidentally, despite thirty years of ANC governance, the polls show that voters of all races overwhelmingly agree that jobs should only be awarded on merit.What comes out of this comparison is, once again, the centrality of exclusion from labour market opportunities as a dominant factor in both Germany and South Africa and the fact that such race-based legislation is hugely self-harming. Interestingly, the German Communists denounced the Nuremberg Laws as racist whereas the South African Communists strongly support the legislation aimed at the racial exclusion of certain groups from the labour market. Marx himself would have regarded racial classification and exclusion as an abomination.

RW Johnson: Fleeing ANC chaos: Eastern Cape migrants and Afrikaners seek refuge. pt 1

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