I REFER to Rich Mkhondo’s article, ”Affirmative action must help fix centuries of prejudice” (Opinion & Analysis, Business Report, September 10). In his opening paragraph, Mkhondo refers to the main flaw in our societal make-up, being that of race. Using the example of affirmative action side-lining Renate Barnard for promotion as an understandable quandary of affirmative action and its ensuing brouhaha, Mkhondo laments, almost wryly, that opponents of affirmative action are saying “enough is enough”.
In response he says that tinkering with affirmative action, and by that I suspect he means abolishing it, will in fact perpetuate the miseries of those who were disadvantaged in the past. What Mkhondo fails to understand is that while affirmative action as applied today, favours black people, it has done little to establish a skilled, educated, well-run state. There can be no argument that in order to redress the imbalances of the past, the previously disadvantaged need an opportunity to compete. Affirmative action is necessary, but it needs to be appropriately applied.
As it is applied now, affirmative action will favour those who are not white. Blacks will assume positions previously held by whites and will earn well. Some, if not many, will even amass a fortune. But what is the reality? The reality is that people, like it or not, are pushed into positions based purely on skin colour, are unable to cope, leading to incompetence and poor management, and in order to remain in their appointed position, to surround themselves with yes-men who will pay lip service to hang on to their positions.
This is the current situation and it needs no further clarification. Mkhondo alludes to the fact that in order to assist blacks to develop their potential, an effective affirmative action policy is necessary. Effective, yes, meaning appropriate not inappropriate affirmative action as is extant now. Inappropriate affirmative action will favour the previously disadvantaged.
Appropriate affirmative action will still favour some, if not all, previously disadvantaged people, but will go so much further in enhancing the state, leading to an educated and skilled nation.
Renate Barnard, whichever way it is viewed, notwithstanding the circuitous spin, was the best person for the job on each of the three occasions she applied for promotion. She was let down, not by affirmative action, but by the application of inappropriate affirmative action. The time has come that appointments need to be made on merit, on competence, ignoring party affiliation, nepotism and cadre deployment. To move forward as a state, to remove the constraining shackles that keep us down, we need to follow the South Korean model, where if the president or cabinet-level officials are suspected of wrongdoing, they are subject to impeachment by the National Assembly.
At local government level, to gain a position in the civil service, aspiring applicants need to pass one or more examinations and promotion through the ranks is linked to performance review. This is unheard of in our system. In South Korea, appointments are based on merit, competence, ignoring party affiliation. In essence, the best person gets the job.
One cannot legislate the poor, unskilled and uneducated, the “have-nots”, into freedom and jobs by legislating the “haves” out of their jobs. A government cannot give to anybody anything that that government does not first take from someone else, and when half the people get the idea that they do not have to do an honest day’s work because the other half will take care of them, and similarly when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work hard because someone else will benefit from their work, that then spells the beginning of the end of a nation.
Stan Sandler
Claremont, Cape Town
Merit is the only valid criterion for selection
ON MY first day at school, in 1940, another five-year-old smacked my friend in the face, making him cry. I immediately went up to the offender and gave him a hefty slap in the kisser. The teacher saw me and was horrified. She asked me why I had smacked the boy; I told her that he had smacked my friend, so I thought that I was perfectly justified. The teacher told me that it was always wrong to smack someone for whatever reason, even if that person had smacked someone else. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, Ernest,” she enlightened me.
Your correspondent, Rich Mkhondo, doesn’t seem to agree with my teacher, as he feels it is perfectly right for Renate Barnard, of the SAPS, to be denied promotion because she is white, as blacks have also suffered a similar indignity and injustice in the past. (“Affirmative action must help fix centuries of prejudice”, Business Report, September 10).
This kind of Neanderthal thinking will only prevent us from lifting ourselves out of a dark past into an enlightened future, when anyone with any talent, experience, and the right qualifications are prevented from making a beneficial contribution to society in order to “rectify the wrongs of the past”.
Lest you think that, because I am white, I have benefited from apartheid, let me explain. I was born into a lower working-class family, one of 10 kids, in Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire, in 1935. We were still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. We lived on the smell of an oil rag and, when I was four,World War II broke out. Although we never had much to start with, food rationing and all the other shortages compelled us to keep chickens and rabbits in the backyard.
I left school when I was 14 and immediately signed on to an Arctic trawler, on which I had to toil 18 hours a day, seven days a week, often in appalling conditions, for the princely sum of 15 shillings a week, in order to help pay the rent and “put some grub on the table”.
So I know what it is to suffer the slings and arrows of being poor and poorly educated. However, I had good teachers who taught me to “waste not want not”, “put away for a rainy day”, “ a fool and his money are soon parted”, “always live within your means” and many more such homilies. And, today, I own a lovely house with a nice little nest egg in the bank.
In a letter to a Cape Town newspaper, a few years ago I volunteered to give half my wealth to a programme designed to uplift the downtrodden if the billionaires, Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale, the Guptas and the rest would do the same, as I really do feel for the poor, whom I encounter every day.
Not capitalising on white know-how, but promoting unsuitable non-whites instead, as blind affirmative action demands, is largely responsible for the parlous state of affairs in which this country now finds itself. Merit, merit and merit, is the time-tested formula for excellence. When will we learn to forgive the mistakes of the past and start again with a clean slate?
Ernie Gay
Milnerton
Social equality cannot be legislated into being
IT IS a reality that one cannot compel social equality into existence through legislation. Proponents of affirmative action like Rich Mkhondo (Business Report, September 10), nonetheless, persist in ignoring that reality.
Just as nature knows no equality, so inequality and diversity are human realities. In 1997, Thomas Espenshade of Princeton University analysed SAT scores – a widely used set of tests for tertiary admissions in the US – produced by prospective college students. He found that out of 1 600 points, the scores of Asian Americans were the highest, exceeding those of whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 270 and African Americans by 450 points.
Mkhondo blames what he calls inferior schooling for the lack of progress in black advancement. But that is hardly the fault of the past. None other than Mamphela Ramphele is on record as stating that the old Bantu education system was better than the present schooling administered by the ANC.
Mkhondo’s lament that blacks are the victims of 300 years of “planned illiteracy” is also tedious nonsense. The first tertiary institution in southern Africa, Victoria College, opened only in 1874, Natal University College in 1910. Until well into the 19th century, whatever education whites received was from missionaries, governesses or from their own parents. If Mkhondo’s thesis has any credibility he should explain why when the first whites arrived in Natal in 1824, they did not find any evidence of writing, paper, records, or even a wheel among the indigenous population.
Thomas Sowell, an African American of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, has consistently challenged the proponents of affirmative action. In his 2004 book, titled: Affirmative Action Around The World: An Empirical Study, he found that race preference programmes had not met expectations and had often produced the opposite of what was originally intended.
In 2007, US chief justice John Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” (The Economist, April 27, 2013). Quite so. Affirmative action is merely job reservation by another name.
DL DU BOIS
DURBAN