Stinging attack

COLUMNIST Eusebius McKaiser should have known that his insightful and frank take on the DA’s BEE policy would ruffle feathers of the fiercest defenders of the ill-accumulated wealth made possible by apartheid’s racially skewed economic policies. So it was little surprise that the DA’s Wilmot James and Dr Roger Sinclair wasted no time in penning letters waging personal attacks on McKaiser, rather than deal with the genuine issues he raised.

McKaiser correctly notes that James Selfe’s disturbing remarks – made hardly 24 hours after his party’s leaders unveiled a billboard declaring support for BBBEE – that his party would drop BBBEE in favour of “Diversity Economic Empowerment” is a clear indication that the DA is in reality antiBBBEE policy. It only pretended to support for it to appeal to black voters ahead of next year’s election.

A closer look at the DA’s version of the BEE shows it believes a descendent of Ernest Oppenheimer deserves an equal chance of empowerment as a child of an African peasant who inherited hundreds years of generational poverty.

Its “open opportunity society” policy blatantly ignores the current glaring economic inequality brought about by centuries of racial inequality, violent dispossession and economic exclusion. It says that both blacks and whites must be empowered equally through BBBEE, even though wealth ownership is still ridiculously concentrated in the hands of the minority.

BBBEE is, by design, intended to redress the economic injustices of the past that impoverished the majority of black South Africans. The DA says do away with “black” from policy and replace it with “Black Diversity Empowerment” so as also to benefit even the richest whites who, as statistics have repeatedly illustrated, are still centuries ahead of the black majority economically.

This is a shameless defence of the status quo deliberately aimed at deepening white wealth accumulation, where the poor black majority become even poorer and the rich white minority become even richer.

These are the issues that came out of Selfe’s own lips during an interview with McKaiser, which both James and Dr Sinclair fail to respond to in their letters. James’s letter missed a valuable opportunity to distance his party from Selfe’s anti-BBBEE sentiments and his threat to reverse the policy should the DA come into power.

This leaves everyone with an inescapable conclusion that the DA’s expensive billboard exercise merely to indicate its “support” for the policy is an empty ploy to woo the black vote. Moloto Mothapo