Racism is Alive and Kicking in South Africa

So the Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ) is all upset because the Human Rights Commission (HRC) gave a public slap on the wrist for the ejection of a number of non-black journalists from a recent briefing with Jacob Zuma.

 

Shame.

 

What, I wonder, would have been the reaction of the FBJ had a media event organized by exclusively white journalists refused entry to black reporters?

 

I’ll tell you. The FBJ would have screamed blue bloody murder and gone on to rant and rave how racism was still alive and kicking in South Africa and how every white person in the country was an apartheid recidivist intent on reviving the old days and ways.

 

The FBJ wants its cake and to eat it, too.

 

This is a great pity.

 

The FBJ – black or not – represents part of the so-called profession of journalism here and abroad. By failing, both in intent and practice, to subscribe to the stated aims of impartiality and fairness in the industry the FBJ has not only made a laughing stock of itself and pretty well destroyed its credibility, but has also deepened the contempt held by any thinking person for the profession as a whole. The FBJ has merely increased the suspicion surrounding the motives and actions of journalism and has done its own interests a great disservice.

 

Like a prima donna the FBJ has thrown a tantrum over the HRC’s remarks – for that is all the HRC did.

 

The HRC did not issue an enforceable judgement, merely an opinion. The over-reaction of the FBJ is quite remarkable.

 

Of course, the HRC should have been much harsher on the FBJ and its comments were clearly designed to avoid offending black sentiment.

 

This really shows the inherent cowardice of the HRC and its true role in human rights in South Africa. As asked above, what would have been the response of the HRC had white journalists excluded black colleagues in a similar situation?

 

The HRC would have made some very loud and indignant denunciations of the white people involved; it would have issued legal writs against the individuals and their professional body and some people would have been facing stiff fines and/or jail time.

 

Such is the two-faced chameleon nature of official human rights and spiteful race relations in South Africa today.

 

It’s all a massive fraud financed and motivated by the ANC and the government. All the pretty words and laws on equality were carefully crafted, put on the statute books and then touted around the globe as an example to the democratic donor countries in Europe and America of what good guys the ANC were in dealing with their former mortal enemies, the whites.

 

The application is, however, very different.

 

If you are a white person in South Africa, just try getting a development loan from the Landbank, a licence for a firearm, a job, or tendering for government work without first giving away 51% of your business – for nothing – to a black partner. A similar environment exists for the Indian and Coloured communities – they are not quite black enough to be included in the division of the post-apartheid spoils.

 

Oh! Yes! Racism is, indeed, alive and kicking in South Africa – it’s just that the rest of the world chooses not to see it because it would be rather embarrassing to have to admit that it has been conned and duped into a false sense of reality.

 

There is nothing wrong in seeking to redress the ills of the past – and, God knows, there were ills aplenty. But why, if not for reasons of economic greed and political revenge, change the balance in a way that so alienates 15% or more of the population that the most able, skilled and economically active of them exercise their economic attractiveness to other markets by deserting their country of birth or adoption?

 

If this programme of alienation and ethnic cleansing continues then South Africa will descend into a chaos no different from that of Zimbabwe’s following the forced eviction of thousands of white farmers in 2000.

 

The loss of skilled white artisans and professionals in recent years has already contributed significantly to the steady deterioration of much of South Africa’s infrastructure. More and more foreign expertise is having to be imported to run our major corporations and banks at much greater cost than if we had not, out of sheer spite, deported our own competence and skills.

 

Disregard the handful of aberrant white individuals who dream of the imagined glories of their past. They are not significant.

 

The vast majority of white people, whether Afrikaans or not, have subscribed wholeheartedly (some, granted, with varying degrees of wariness) to the vision of the New South Africa. Allow them the opportunity, without undue handicap, to contribute to the effort of truly uplifting the bulk of South Africa’s population into educated political and economic maturity. Allow them to expose the deceit that Africa and Africans are unable to manage their own affairs.

 

The Forum of Black Journalists, together with the ANC, have, through bitter personal experience, seen that the exclusivity and alienation of the apartheid days – to say nothing of other examples elsewhere in history – can only fail because such thinking always carries within it the seeds of its own discontent and subsequent destruction.

 

It has got to be worth trying not to repeat the mistakes and pain of the past.

 

Spearpoint.