It is neither in the DA’s nor South Africa’s best interests for the party to embrace the backsliding liberalism which Eusebius McKaiser espouses, says Cilliers Brink.
Liberals have sustained their moral firepower against both apartheid and the abuses of the ANC in government by insisting that the individual and not the tribe is the touchstone of society.
Although tribes are important and individuals should be free to join whichever tribes they like, rights and opportunities should never be pegged to tribal membership.
If the DA were to become the party that McKaiser wants it to become it would not only be indistinguishable from the ANC, as Tony Leon has rightly said, it would solidify the ANC’s hegemony.
As self-anointed upper chief and proxy of the largest tribe, the ANC needs to do little more than perpetuate the battle of the tribes to ensure its political predominance.
The converse is also true: if most South Africans stopped believing that competing tribal interests were the most important political differentiator, the ANC, like the National Party, would go out of business.
Laws like the Employment Equity Act, with its racial quotas, are the ANC’s means of ensuring that this never happens – competing tribal interests instead of individual circumstances and experiences are placed at the forefront of public policy.
While self-styled intellectuals like McKaiser may have been duped into believing that racial quotas can achieve “substantive equity”, the truth is that racial quotas serve their own ends.
Laws that treat individuals as “representative” of their appointed racial tribes, namely either African, white, coloured and Indian, do not achieve equality.
How is “substantive equality”, for example, achieved by appointing more Africans than coloureds in the Correctional Services jobs in the Western Cape in accordance with national demographics?
The jobs aren’t actually increased and neither is poverty eradicated. Some members of one tribe are just moved up the tribal hierarchy at the expense of members of another tribe. The intent is even more banal in the private sector.
Affirmative action and black economic empowerment have done little to broaden economic participation exactly because they are not about equality but “representivity”. And representivity allows a political elite to enjoy opportunity vicariously on behalf of the other tribe members.
South Africa needs the DA to stick to its principles and reinvigorate the belief that we can achieve individual freedom outside of apartheid’s frame of reference.
In fact, our only chance of growing the economy and competing against the world instead of ourselves is to become the open society liberals have always envisioned.
Just because most voters are black does not mean that the DA has to concede to tribal politics to grow beyond its “traditional” base. In fact the DA will never out-tribe the ANC.
Moreover, there is a growing number of black voters who see tribal politics for what it is: an elaborate front for the dominance and enrichment of a parasitic elite.
The real intellectual challenge for the leaders of the DA is to come up with policies that create opportunities for the poor by non-racial means.
It’s a tough job and initially won’t be as popular as the ANC’s tribal politics, but given that we’ve already tried the ANC approach there really isn’t any other option. Liberals must stay liberal if they want to be of any use to South Africans.
Cilliers Brink
DA Councillor, Tshwane Metro
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
The Star