Country in trouble when politicians focus on their own financial advancement, power

IN RESPONSE to the article by Wahbie Long, I deem Dr Long’s article as very important and well balanced. To bring up the essence: “What has morphed into a national conversation about white privilege, black pain, institutional racism and the decolonisation of the knowledge-making enterprise.”

I also want to quote Julian Barnes’ characters in one of his novels, “History is the lies of the victors”, “and also the self-delusions of the defeated. And, “The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously”.

I, however, firstly object to the remark: “In one corner the racist taunts of white South Africans.” No Dr Long, I am white and I find those remarks by people with low emotional maturity and lacking humaneness, rambling on over social media, extremely appalling.

I am comfortable with your position of non-racial anti-capitalism when you add that it is not profit-making in business that you object to, but the greed that goes with money-making at all costs with no overriding humane morals, to the extreme benefit of some, and to the detriment of a vast majority of people.

We have history on record. All of it up to this point in time. And it tells us of people of all colours and creeds, when getting into power to reign to the advantage of the “in-group”, with at most a very secondary leniency towards the “others”. We humans tend to become solipsistic fat cats when in power.

White apartheid has been replaced by a black majority in politics. On the one side, there is still frustration in some quarters about privileges that had to be given up. But many others are also just ordinary people struggling to get jobs and to have a decent life.

The younger people in that group also feel that many of them had nothing to do with that past period of time, perhaps only benefiting in a better education, but they are not racists; having black friends or working with them in offices. On the other side, we have a super-rich black echelon hoarding some of the strategic offload of white capitalists.

Our country, though, is in trouble. We have corrupt politicians focusing on their own financial advancement and presenting myopic views in defending their well-off positions.

We have politicians manoeuvring to get people loyal to themselves into positions of power, with a lot of those appointees not having the skills.

Either we become maturing grownups and accept all kinds of people as South Africans contributing to make this country a better place, or we all will start to run as has-beens in an Africa where many countries are getting beyond mere race and classist considerations Wim van der Walt