Slow burn of anti-white racism

THREE talented men, respected by their peers. All three in the headlines recently.

David Unterhalter, Arrie Rautenbach and André de Ruyter. All three illustrate – in the judiciary, the private sector and the state sector – a troubling phenomenon, a country moving from racial redress to racial retribution.

Like so many grand designs that produce squalid outcomes, this disastrous state of affairs comes from good intentions. In the late 1990s, when the ANC government started to apply its “transformation” mechanisms, based on gradations of skin hue, those at the top of the old order – white men – suddenly found themselves at the bottom of the new order.

There was a reluctant but widespread acceptance among whites that racial inclusion was not only a moral imperative but a matter of the country’s survival.

In the private sector, the emphasis was on upskilling, mentoring and replacing white expertise, as closely as was possible in an accelerated process, with equivalent black expertise – in turn, further sliced and diced into the correct portions of gender and disability.

In the public sector, which lacks the financial-survival imperative of privately owned businesses, it was more brutal. In the civil service and state-owned entities, early retirement and fake redundancies wiped out, virtually overnight, entire institutional memories.

The results are clear to see in a state sector that is over-staffed, over-paid and catastrophically dysfunctional, as well as a parastatal sector that, virtually across the board, is bankrupt. But in spite of 28 years of accumulated evidence that a race-quota mindset in a skills-short economy has actually damaged the prospects for sustainable transformation and social justice, the ANC has repeatedly upped the ante.

The political discourse has drifted far from that of an ANC that in its founding document, the Freedom Charter, in 1955 averred that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”.

The plight of the three men referred to earlier illustrates this drift to the kind of crude racist reductionism that was previously the sole preserve of the ANC’s hated predecessor, the National Party.

André de Ruyter is one of fewer than a handful of white Afrikaners appointed by the ANC to be in charge of anything. In 2020, he was plucked by President Cyril Ramaphosa from the CEO position in a major manufacturing company to try to pull Eskom out of its death dive. He became Eskom’s 14th CEO in 20 years, of which 12 were black, one was white, and all were ditched because they were incompetent and/or implicated in corruption.

God knows why De Ruyter would accept such a poisoned chalice – he talks earnestly about duty – but from day one, he has been the target of a relentless campaign to oust him.

Part of it springs from his attempts to rid Eskom of corrupt ANC-deployed cadres. This inevitably gave rise to accusations that he was a racist Boer replacing skilled black executives and engineers with white pals.

Being exonerated by the Eskom board-appointed investigator, a prominent black advocate, of racism, irregular appointments, poor governance, and unlawful procurement practices, hasn’t ended the campaign. De Ruyter remains the target of racial abuse that would not be tolerated were it directed by whites against a black CEO.

Nor is it only a public sector problem. Last week it was the appointment of Arrie Rautenbach as CEO of financial services group Absa that got the race warriors angry. Rautenbach’s appointment ended a year-long leadership vacuum after the abrupt departure of Danie Mminele, Absa’s fourth CEO in three years and its first black one.

Responding to Rautenbach’s appointment, the Public Investment Corporation, which holds a 5.4% stake in Absa, demanded an urgent meeting with the board to express its “downright disappointment”.

The Black Management Forum said Rautenbach’s appointment was made to maintain “white male power” in the bank.

Finally, there is advocate David Unterhalter whose undisputed brilliance as a legal scholar appears destined to be perpetually thwarted by the burden of not only being white, but Jewish.

This week, for the third time, he failed to be recommended to the president as a possible appointment to the Constitutional Court.

During his previous appearances before the Judicial Services Commission, the bigotry and stereotyping were palpable.

These are individual examples but this is a common phenomenon.

Such unapologetic anti-white racism marches in locksteps with our economic decline.

If there is any lesson to be learnt from the past 28 years it is that race is a crude instrument.

We’re not only failing to untangle historical injustices, we’re inadvertently and irretrievably damaging the ties that bind peoples into a nation.