South Africans have rested on their rainbow-nation laurels for far too long, allowing the country to be blown off course as our deeply wounded society has become increasingly skewed, unequal and divided, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has said.
In an opinion article written exclusively for Independent Newspapers on Friday, Tutu lamented the state of the country, the decline in its social mores and particularly the failure of wealthier citizens to help their poorer brothers and sisters.
And in a repeat of his earlier, widely reported call for a so-called “white tax”, the archbishop again suggested that the (predominantly white) rich should not wait for the government to act. Instead, whites should take the initiative and establish a central fund for those who got rich during apartheid “to pay one-off reparations”.
“What a magnificent gesture it would be, now, in the context of a global financial recession and widening wealth gap at home, were relatively wealthy South Africans to contribute to a central fund aiming to contribute to the national effort to uplift the poor,” he wrote.
Tutu said whites had failed to acknowledge – or respond – to the magnanimity expressed by black citizens’ willingness in the 1990s to forgive, to reconcile and to heal. He went on to remind whites that South Africa emerged from its troubled past without land grabs and, apart from BEE policies and a land restitution process, there was no legislated, physical redistribution of wealth. “We sat back and thought all was forgiven and was on track,” he wrote.
But Tutu conceded that, “given the perceived levels of corruption in government”, some people may baulk at the idea of contributing to a fund administered by the state. Instead, such a fund could be run “privately” or by “captains of industry”, and contributions could be either voluntary or statutory. Company contributions could even count towards their BBBEE (broad-based black economic empowerment) scorecards, he suggested.
And responding to the criticism that his call for a tax on white wealth had generated over the past days, Tutu pointed out that despite an increase in the number of wealthy black business people, the vast majority of blacks remained poor. “The old ‘haves’ continue to have, and they’ve been joined by some new ‘haves’. But most of our people remain ‘have-not’. And, most of them are black,” he wrote.
Tutu appears despondent about the state of the nation. “In the old days… no matter how poor we were, we kept our communities tidy. Today, there is litter all over the place. Why? Why do we drive so selfishly and recklessly? Why is it necessary to exacerbate property crimes by torturing and killing the victims? Why do we brutalise our women to the extent we do? Why, when our unions go on strike, do they trash the streets and traumatise the people?” he asked. - Political Bureau