Afrikanerbond must get used to affirmative action

A particular section of the Afrikaner community and some members of other white groupings appear to be suffering from chronic paranoia of everything related to transformation. While they recognise the indubitable truth that apartheid established gross imbalances in our society, they consider themselves under threat of measures intended to correct such imbalances. Their views do not in fact represent those of the rest of the white community, whether Afrikaner, English, Italian, Portuguese or otherwise; as there appear to be a considerable number of white South Africans who are committed and support the government’s efforts to redress these gross imbalances that still persist today.

Jan Bosman, managing director of the Afrikanerbond, said, “Race, at all cost, has now become the basis and criteria of employment … although this Act originally aimed to eliminate unfair discrimination in employment and to redress the imbalances of the past and create equality in employment, it is discriminatory in its current application.”

I do espouse Jan Bosman’s views that the Employment Equity Act, with all its good intentions, has been abused in many ways by people who use it as a weapon to exclude white males from employment. The reasons for doing so may be born of the spiteful need to subject white males to the same unjust discrimination the majority of black people found themselves having to contend with under apartheid; or it may be an innocent misinterpretation of the legislation which results in application that misrepresents its original intention.

We should not promote and condone in any manner the blatant discrimination of white males under the false pretext of advancing transformation. I have said before that transformation is non-negotiable if we are sincere in our commitment to bring society back to normality.

Jan Bosman has before proposed the government phase-out affirmative action. He has recently repeated his plea to the ANC Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe for the ANC government to consider introducing a sunset clause for affirmative action. What Bosman is proposing is not a solution to the problem. He is in fact proposing murder of a patient as a cure for a disease. The Afrikanerbond and other white formations should be engaging government on practical measures to be considered in order to address the problem of application of this legislation.

It is this problem that has created an idiotic perception that affirmative action means ‘whites need not apply’; that white males have been reduced to second-class citizens of this country. It is a problem when there exist some idiots who firmly believe in this nonsense as the gospel truth and they recoil into the same victim mentality they chiefly accuse black people of.

Pieter Groenewald of the Freedom Front Plus in 2005 in an interview with Anthony C LoBaido of the WorldNetDaily said:

“At the moment, many whites are the “useful idiots” of the ANC and even more amongst white business. They believe they can influence the ANC from inside. The fact is they will never succeed and are only used by the ANC to create the impression that the ANC is not hostile toward Afrikaners.

On the question of what will happen now, the answer is the ANC will increase the pressure on the whites. Racial discrimination against whites will increase. A good example is affirmative action. All over the world affirmative action is used to protect minority groups, but in South Africa it is used to protect a majority group.

The whites are in the process of losing everything they built in SA. The ANC government is no different from that of Mugabe of Zimbabwe when it comes to whites. Mugabe took the white-owned farms; the ANC uses the words “land reform”. Just yesterday they started the process to expropriate the first white farm in SA. Mugabe nationalised the businesses in Zimbabwe; the ANC use the words “Black Economic Empowerment”, or BEE. I call BEE “Black Elite Enrichment”. Mugabe openly says that whites are not welcome in Zimbabwe; the ANC uses affirmative action to force whites to seek jobs overseas.”

Groenewald sought to entrench the absurd belief and irrational fear that the future of white people in this country is facing irreversible jeopardy. It is this type of fear-mongering among a particular section of the disgruntled white community that is hampering progress towards nation building.

In the 14 years of liberation of our country we cannot, without hesitation, claim that the Employment Equity Act has indeed resulted in a diverse workforce broadly representative of our people. The corporate world is still overwhelmed by the Irish Coffee phenomenon. The debate about the sunset clause is premature. What we need is a perfect brew, black and white perfectly blended together in every structure of the corporate world; until that aspiration is realised we should delude ourselves that any other measure would be appropriate.

“Perhaps if we take an approach in an objective and scientific way, we can then have a way of phasing it out rather than to say let’s do away with it. You may find that we do away with it prematurely and settle with a problem.” – ANC deputy president (and president in waiting), Kgalema Motlanthe.