DA leader Helen Zille’s denunciation of her party’s vote in favour of the Employment Equity Bill provides revealing insight into the party’s philosophy and strategy. To some, its flip-flop on employment equity reveals the reality of a party that finds it difficult to shed its racial baggage and enslavement by its racist past. It uses the rhetoric of racial inclusiveness and diversity to lull black voters into a false sense that they are welcome in the party. But when it comes to serious policy issues, Zille changes positions in order to pander to the conservative elements of her white constituency.
Zille claims the “empowerment results have been dismal: we have only managed to ‘over-empower a small, politically connected elite’”. She repeats the DA mantra that she supports “BEE that creates jobs, not billionaires” and asserts this “position has not changed and will not change”.
Her view of BEE (black economic empowerment) is condescending and bigoted. She does not envisage a system in which black people can use their talents and flourish to the extent of becoming billionaires. She decries BEE for having created black billionaires whom she refers to as “a small, politically connected elite”.
Predictably, she is silent about white billionaires who owe their status and wealth to historical privileges conferred under apartheid. In Zille’s worldview, which reflects an ingrained Verwoedian principle where blacks should only be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, she implies black people should only aspire to be employees and labourers who only sell their labour.
Racial bigotry
Whatever the shortcomings of BEE and employment equity might be, it is undeniable that for every black billionaire, many opportunities were created for hard-working citizens to move out of poverty and become millionaires, as attested to by the growth of the black middle class
As the recent Goldman Sachs report shows, “the middle class has doubled from 7 percent of the African population in 1993 to 14 percent in 2008, a rise of 3.1 million more Africans in the period to 5.4 million.
Over the same period, the white middle class decreased from 4.2 million people to 3 million. Therefore, in absolute terms, Africans now dominate the middle-class consumer segment, while white people who stayed [in South Africa] have on aggregate become wealthier.”
The DA ignores these facts. What the detractors of BEE such as Zille also ignore is the increased buying power BEE created. So Mr Ackerman’s Pick n Pay and Mr Basson’s Shoprite can sell more baked beans at Mitchells Plain’s Liberty Promenade Shopping Centre or Soweto’s Maponya Mall because citizens are earning a living wage and experiencing career advancement that was not possible 20 years ago under apartheid rule.
The difference between Zille’s party and the ANC is that the ANC attempts to transcend, however imperfectly, our nation’s history of racial bigotry, skewed income distribution patterns along racial lines and apartheid legacy of white entitlement, while the DA wishes to maintain the economic disparities. The DA uses the rhetoric of black billionaires as a smokescreen for its long-standing opposition to any laws or measures it sees as promoting racial transformation or threatening white privilege.
The mantra of those opposed to employment equity and genuine transformation is that it only creates billionaires from a small politically connected group. But they have no answer to the facts about the BEE’s contribution to the phenomenal growth of the black middle class and the increase in spending in which all business, including conservative white business on whose behalf Zille claims to talk, is benefiting.
It is hypocritical for Zille to preach about blacks as candidates for education and skills development when the collective experience of black professionals in the DA-governed Western Cape has been that of a racist province, and hostile to blacks. The Progressive Professionals Forum sympathises with blacks in the DA who thought it was sincere about transformation and upliftment. They must be feeling abused.
Employment equity and BEE has positively affected disadvantaged individuals and established white business. Why then would any fair, just and patriotic South African be opposed to it?
* Kashif Wicomb is the deputy president of the Progressive Professionals Forum.