Viewing everything through a racial lens is shortsighted
I was somewhat surprised to read in Peter Bruce’s column (“Is Mboweni in mood to stand against insanity?” The Herald June 24) that he came upon a tweet from the minister of finance expressing disgust that Bruce keeps using the word “ludicrous” when referring to the ANC in his articles, and pointing out that Bruce is a white person criticising a mainly black party.
Recently, a regular writer to the letters page of The Herald was chastised by a reader for apparently repeatedly criticising blacks because he always finds fault with the government and municipality.
Never has this author made reference to blacks, but the perception is that if you criticise the ANC or municipality, you are criticising blacks and if you are white you are racist.
Must whites sit back and quietly put up with a government that is not performing? It equates to saying that freedom of expression should not be accorded to whites and the reason, probably, will be that they created apartheid and benefited from it and so do not deserve the privilege of freedom of speech.
Helen Zille is running the gauntlet at present for tweeting that there are more racist laws now than under apartheid. I am not a Zille supporter and believe she enjoys being the centre of attention and makes controversial comments for that purpose.
But though her reference to racist laws is semantically incorrect, there are definitely a number of race-based laws.
The policies of many of the political parties are racebased, as we have seen in Port Elizabeth where certain political parties ganged up to oust the white mayor simply because they did not want a white person in that position. Race was the sole criterion making him unacceptable — merit and competence played no part.
This brings me to the constitution and its bill of rights.
The constitution has been criticised by certain members of the ANC on occasion, and by Julius Malema of the EFF, as protecting white privilege and monopoly capitalists, which is absurd.
It is another example of the obsession with race.
The drafters of the constitution have been praised for a job well done because our constitution is regarded internationally as one of the best in the world.
What the founders obviously did was to foresee the future and built in protection for minority groups because they learnt from apartheid that if you do not protect all groups, discrimination would rear its ugly head at some point.
The constitution’s main purpose is promotion and protection of democratic rights, which includes many freedoms such as freedom of association, of movement and freedom to vote and trade in a free market.
Then there are rights to life, justice, education and certain amenities such as running water and health care.
The government does not have a good record of protecting and promoting many of the rights contained in the constitution. Just consider poor policing in a country filled with violent crime, corruption, as well as the provision of poor education.
The impression one gains from the utterances of many in politics is that they would love to see democratic rights in SA limited, as happened during the hard lockdown.
Many would love to see greater state control of everything, but that would be a disaster.
As we saw during the lockdown, those making centralised decisions regarding what may and may not be traded and done, did so on a whim and did not base their decisions on science.
Many of the lockdown decisions were ludicrous and the minister of finance (Tito Mboweni) actually disagreed with some. He must have found them ridiculous, especially the banning of the sale of tobacco products.
We all need to lighten up and stop operating with a race-based mindset.
Prof Norman Kemp,
Port Elizabeth