Helen Zille is either incurably disingenuous or oblivious to facts, writes Tebogo Khaas.
Dear Black People,
I have never been to Singapore nor have I read that country’s former dictator Lee Kuan Yew’s international bestseller, From Third World to First - The Singapore Story. The DA’s uthixo wase Western Cape, Helen Zille, has done both. This Far East sovereign city-state, with a population almost the size of the Western Cape, deserves its “poster child of economic development” crown. South Africa should draw lessons from Singapore to realise ideals of economic prosperity.
Upon her return from Singapore, Zille was apparently tormented by bad service and inefficiencies at the VIP lounge in OR Tambo airport, which included her temporary loss of entitlements such as TV remote-control, hot coffee and fresh milk.
Enraged by this apparent lack of first-class service delivery, it seems that jetlag and colonial hangover took control of not only Zille’s faculties but her Syrian-refugee-invented iPhone too!
Zille unleashed a torrent of bigoted tweets in which she lamented blacks’ lack of gratitude to her forebears who brought us (sic) the judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water and technology. Zille is either incurably disingenuous or oblivious to facts.
Let me explain. Africa is not only the cradle of humankind but has been at the forefront of developing knowledge systems and progress long before being colonised.
In his seminal treatise, I write what I like, Steve Biko writes about the intellectual arrogance of whites who seek to arrogate “civilisation” exclusively to themselves.
Let me state that some of the oldest legal systems in the world began in Africa. Tradition, social equality and impartiality were the key doctrines of millennia-old African jurisprudence and remains embedded in customary law.
Maybe Zille needs reminding that it was only after the demise of apartheid that a democratic order and fully independent judiciary were established in this country. As for the development of engineering and technology, it can also be traced to Africa during the Ancient era.
According to Wikipedia, a key development in that era was the advent of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus developed by Egyptians around 3000 BC as an instruction manual for students in arithmetic and geometry. This development was to become the bedrock of scientific and engineering disciplines upon which modern technological advancements are premised. Although the earliest civil engineer known by name is Egyptian Imhotep, who lived around 2600 BC, it was not until the Middle era that an Artuki named Al-Jazari developed machines to pump water for kings of the Turkish Artuqid dynasty.
Let me acknowledge that individuals of different hues and origins have contributed in different measure to the development of knowledge systems and progress.
Whereas SA and Singapore were indeed once British colonies, the similarities between the two nations start and end there. For starters, SA has abundant mineral wealth while Singapore doesn’t. Zille’s forebears not only plundered SA’s mineral resources but also implemented economic systems that sought to ensure SA’s perpetual subservience to European interests.
I am not surprised that Zille would invoke Singapore’s meritocracy, given her well-known drivel on affirmative action and employment equity in SA.
The apartheid system placed restrictions on the type and level of education blacks could attain. It is a practice in local academia that considerable university research output is purveyed or hived off to overseas jurisdictions by white academics for private commercialisation despite research funding from SA’s tax coffers.
Little wonder SA ranks so poorly in terms of new intellectual property registrations measured against comparable investments and economies.
In an opinion piece redolent with condescension, Zille wrote: “Unable to sleep, I recalled a passage from Lee Kuan Yew’s book where he describes how he lay awake at night, contemplating the challenges of the dirt-poor country he was required to lead: its mass unemployment, lack of education, almost non-existent sanitation, a dearth of natural resources (not even sufficient water), squalid shack settlements prone to major fires, opium addiction”
I thought Zille was relating challenges encountered in the province she leads except that those challenges almost exclusively afflict poor black people. Zille missed an opportunity to inspire South Africans with an unsullied account of Singapore’s economic prosperity and what SA could learn from it.
In more prosaic terms, Zille must halt her attempts to expunge Africa’s chronicled pre-eminence in the development of knowledge systems and progress from history books. I surmise, in her world, the only way to respond to black peoples’ acquiescence and goodwill is by sporadically spouting her incurable colonial hangover and arrogance.
For peace sake Zille, please shut up!
Thixo!
* Khaas is executive chairman of Corporate SA, a strategic advisory consultancy based in Johannesburg.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.