Weekend Post

Max Du Preez pic Fredlin Adriaan

Pale Native

By Max du Preez

Julius Malema was quite correct when he stated after his disciplinary hearing that he had seen to it that he would be remembered in the history books.

Cynics would say he would be remembered because he was a dangerous, divisive demagogue and rich playboy – Robert Mugabe also made sure history would remember him, they would add.

That may be so, but I believe we might one day look back and say we owe Malema some gratitude because he forcefully put what he calls economic liberation of the unliberated majority on top of the national agenda.

His motives might have been suspect, but he has seen to it that dealing with poverty and inequality has become our first priority.

I am convinced that with Malema not dominating this debate (or is that wishful thinking?) we will find it easier to make progress with the project of establishing a new economic order in South Africa.

It will demand significant sacrifices from the business sector and the middle classes, but they would have been very reluctant to come to the table if there was a perception that they’re doing it because they’re threatened by a thug like Malema.

The director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Stephen Friedman, related a fascinating experience recently.

He was part of a research exercise shortly after 1994 where they tested the attitudes of mainly white middle-class people to a proposal that they pay more for water because they had benefited from apartheid and so they should subsidise black households.

The interviewees reacted with abuse, says Friedman, with many accusing black people of wanting to sponge off minorities.

In a later survey, the same people were asked whether they would be prepared to pay more for water so poorer people would be able to afford to use more water.

This time everyone agreed that it was a good idea. Friedman concludes: “So, if proposals for a fairer distribution of our resources are framed in terms of racial guilt, they are fiercely resisted.

“When they appeal to values most of us claim to share, such as justice and fairness, not only are they taken seriously, people who reject the racial argument may even accept them… Racial minorities who refused to pay more to atone for apartheid did not resist when they were asked to conserve a scarce resource or to reduce poverty.”

Human beings generally don’t respond well to pleas based on their sense of guilt, regardless how valid that guilt is.

I think this also applies to the emotive issue of land reform, another pressing issue and one that will be hard to proceed with if the present owners of agricultural land refuse to be a part of it.

If one declares, as Malema has, that all whites are criminals because they stole black people’s land and that land should now be taken away without compensation, landowners will dig in their heels and fight.

If one goes to the same people with a plan to help more aspirant agriculturalists to be settled on land, I have no doubt that most farmers would enthusiastically co-operate.

Now some people reading this would say, why should we molly-coddle these people who were beneficiaries of an evil system?

My response is: well, do you want to score a few political points or do you want to create a fundamentally new social order in as short a time as possible?

What is more important, venting your anger or getting results, punishing whites or helping the poor? I’m not saying that we should hold our tongues on burning issues or start sugar-coating the truth. But black anger for the sake of black anger is not very productive – black anger will remain forever if we don’t remove its roots.

I spent two years researching the life and times of Nelson Mandela for a book with a new take on the man, recently published internationally as the Rough Guide to Nelson Mandela. I was struck by his extraordinary talent for strategy and tactics and his gift of counter-intuitive leadership, some of which we witnessed after his release from prison in 1990.

When Prisoner 466/64, the undisputed leader of most South Africans, sat at a table in a prison uniform to meet the head of the apartheid regime’s feared National Intelligence Service, Niel Barnard, in 1987 he did not make a show of his bitterness, anger and frustration.

Instead he seduced Barnard and his political masters into accepting that a new order was urgently necessary and that they had to start negotiating with him and his constituency. If he had grandstanded his anger and cursed and insulted, history would have taken a very different course.

As a rugby coach would say: let’s keep our eye on the ball, not the man. What’s on the scoreboard is what counts.