My Beauty Best Teacher

The ANC's knee-jerk response to any criticism, blaming white interests or parties, and an automatic defence of ministers, party leaders or judicial candidates because they are black, intensifies this polarisation. Of course there are lots of white racists in South Africa, and race clearly remains a fundamental factor in the distribution of resources and opportunity in the country. This does not mean that all criticism of the ANC is based on race, or that our defence against such racism must mimic the very racial categories we are trying to defeat. Certainly, black South Africans also deserve competent ministers, judges and civil servants. Even in the Western Cape province, where the ANC lost power to the opposition Democratic Alliance, the organisation is attempting to regain power by adopting the principles of ethnically-based mobilisation by focusing its efforts on the coloured community, which constitutes a majority of the population in this province. Non-racism has been overtaken by political expediency and the rush for power.

A non-racial South Africa cannot be built without a non-racial ANC, and the recent history of the organisation indicates that this dream is in danger of being washed away by a combination of populist Africanist rhetoric, ill-considered defence of whomever is black in government or the civil service - simply because they are black, and the adoption of racial mobilisation tactics. It remains to be seen whether an ANC that has lost its political moorings and its firm foundations of non-racism - and instead has become a battleground for factional and material interests - can reposition itself at the vanguard of the struggle for a non-racial society.

We are paying the price for half measures and a victim ­ideology that drives consumption instead of production...A black upper class is now in place which, despite its size, is significant and established, he says. There has been a badly needed – though at best partial – redistribution of wealth in favour of blacks, not least through the tax system and government expenditure, but also through initiatives such as Black Economic Empowerment, a want-to-be equitable wealth plan closely associated with his older brother Thabo Mbeki, who led the country from 1999 until he was abruptly ousted from office by his own party, the ANC, in 2008.

Such piecemeal efforts do not amount to transformative justice, however, "which in South Africa should be about raising the earning power of the worker. We have a capitalist system and therefore by definition, the productive assets are owned by small groups, for whom large groups work. If their earning power was enhanced, it would have a knock-on effect on so much else, not least our education and health systems. That would have been real transformative justice."

But it didn't happen that way. Instead, the wrong measures were put in place, in his view. "The ANC adopted the Washington Consensus and other policies that began to shrink rather than grow the economy. Today it's stagnated, if not regressing. Look at the manufacturing system, once the main employer. Now it's shrinking and that's critical because it employs the semi-skilled and unskilled who are the bulk of the South African labour force.

Conglomerates are a vehicle, not for creating development in SA but for exploiting natural resources without creating in-depth, inclusive social and economic development, which is what SA needs. That is what is wrong with protecting conglomerates.
The second problem with the formula of BEE is that it does not create entrepreneurs. You are taking political leaders and politically connected people and giving them assets which, in the first instance, they don’t know how to manage. So you are not adding value. You are faced with the threat of undermining value by taking assets from people who were managing them and giving them to people who cannot manage them. BEE thus creates a class of idle rich ANC politicos.
My quarrel with BEE is that what the conglomerates are doing is developing a new culture in SA — not a culture of entrepreneurship, but an entitlement culture, whereby black people who want to go into business think that they should acquire assets free, and that somebody is there to make them rich, rather than that they should build enterprises from the ground.
But we cannot build black companies if what black entrepreneurs look forward to is the distribution of already existing assets from the conglomerates in return for becoming lobbyists for the conglomerates.

if we want to develop SA instead of shuffling pre-existing wealth, we have to create new entrepreneurs, and we need to support existing entrepreneurs to diversify into new economic sectors.

Qaddafi's connections to the African National Congress, South Africa's long-dominant ruling party, go back decades, when he supported its struggle against apartheid. No less a figure than Nelson Mandela has been the Libyan dictator's most respectable booster. In 1990, fresh out of prison, Mandela paid one of his first visits to Libya, where he was the inaugural recipient of the oddly named "Al-Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights." In 1997, Mandela paid Qaddafi back in kind, awarding him South Africa's prestigious Order of Good Hope. "Those who feel we should have no relations with Qaddafi have no morals," Mandela declared. "Those who feel irritated by our friendship with President Qaddafi can go jump in the pool."
The roots of the ANC's comradeship with Qaddafi are not just ideological, but pecuniary as well. When Mandela's ex-wife Winnie was on trial for the assault and kidnapping of suspected South African government informants (one of whom was killed by her bodyguards), Qaddafi helped pay for her legal defense. The final report of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found Winnie "politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights." Qaddafi is also rumored to have given $2 million to Zuma to pay legal fees incurred during his 2006 rape trial.