DA’s BEE stance unsound
We are delighted that the DA has entered into a correspondence with us (“DA’s Alternative is Credible“, February 15) regarding its position on race and empowerment.
Following its federal council meeting earlier this month, the DA said “we believe race is a proxy for disadvantage and an accurate reflection of who is still excluded from opportunity.” Now it says that “while race is a proxy for disadvantage it is not the only proxy”.
“Only” is a very important word. Must we now understand that the DA is open to other proxies, and if so, what are these and why were they not adopted, or even debated, by the federal council?
One gets the distinct sense that an escape hatch has been opened in order to facilitate a flipflop. In any event, a “proxy” means something that can accurately be substituted for another. Race cannot always and accurately be substituted for disadvantage. There are, for example, now more black households in SA’s top monthly expenditure categories than there are white households, though the proportion of black households that are prosperous is very much lower than is the case for whites. The phrase the DA therefore wants is that “race is a general indicator of disadvantage”. But that, of course, would not justify a policy of racebased empowerment.
Adopting unemployment or the lack of a proper education as a proxy would avoid this deficiency. However, if those socioeconomic measures were adopted, why would the party need a proxy at all, as there would then be no reason not to base policy on actual established socioeconomic disadvantage?
The DA goes on to say its model of race-based empowerment is different from that of the ANC because it is a “bottom-up” as opposed to a “topdown” approach. On reading this, a colleague remarked that saying “you stack books on a bookshelf more heavily on the bottom does not mean you aren’t dealing with a bookshelf”.
In any event it is not true that the ANC’s racial policies are all “top-down.” Every small-scale business owner is forced to jump through racial hoops and it is therefore perhaps at the bottom of the economy that the ANC’s racial engineering policies do their greatest harm.
Frans Cronje CEO, Institute of Race Relations