Sometimes politicians make life easy for journalists. When they put their feet in their mouths one just needs to report it and readers can see them for what they are.
Take Thabo Mbeki and Panyaza Lesufi. The former president responded to my article (“ANC not yet close to understanding the damage Robert Mugabe did to SA”, September 11) by saying he had never met a Zimbabwean who wanted to get rid of Robert Mugabe. Soon radio shows were flooded with Zimbabwean callers who vociferously contradicted him, and he was named Mampara of the Week by the Sunday Times.
Gauteng education MEC Lesufi, for his account, tied himself in knots over his rejection of a college giving lectures in Afrikaans. He declared it an insult to the constitution, without bothering to read what it was really all about, and was duly reined in, including by the many non-Afrikaans speakers who also want education in their mother tongues.
Mbeki and Lesufi fail to understand that politicians and bureaucrats are not in charge in a constitutional democracy, and nor can they rewrite history. Mbeki will go down in history as Mugabe’s accessory in crime and as an Aids denialist whose policies resulted in at least 300,000 unnecessary deaths, no matter what he says.
In fact, his defence of Mugabe at a Durban memorial service laid a tombstone to another of his dubious legacies, one yet to be properly elucidated. He proudly recounted how his administration followed Mugabe’s example and let white government officials stay on for a while before firing them.
We are now plucking the fruit of what will probably be called the Great Purge by future historians. Every year during the auditor-general’s reporting we listen to the same sorry story of municipalities barely functioning, whole provinces put under administration and central government departments paralysed by corruption. Not to speak of calamities such as Eskom and Transnet.
Mbeki was referring to the “sunset clause” that emerged from the pre-1994 negotiations, and to be fair the National Party (NP) is as much to blame for it as the ANC; the impression was that it worried about guaranteed pensions more than anything else. It was indeed the case that the NP turned out not to have much of a plan or a vision for the future SA.
This allowed ANC negotiators to run circles around them, which was probably a source for the scornful opinions of the white politicians that arose in the democratic camp. The other sources were the hubris from having been the darlings of the anti-apartheid world and now on the verge of power, and frankly, a crude racism that painted the administration as populated with Afrikaner supremacists unable to be rehabilitated.
In his fascinating memoirs, Niel Barnard, the top facilitator of the negotiations, wrote how ANC delegates made fun of Afrikaans accents (later the rest of the country would complain for years about ANC accents). This racism and the absence of the top ANC negotiators from SA for decades made it hard for them to recognise the sea change occurring in Afrikanerdom.
One who, according to Barnard, did foresee potential disaster was Trevor Manuel, who tried to caution that “the political changes in the country should be seen as a normal development and should not act as a disruptive intervention” in officialdom. But the view of Mac Maharaj prevailed, as cited by Barnard: “The ANC is aware of a reservoir of capable people who could serve as capable future public servants.”
We now know that this “reservoir” was pure bluff. Only the homelands could have supplied trained officials with any possible experience, and these were hotbeds of corruption for crooks of all colours and creeds, possibly even worse that that of the Zuma era.
The central and provincial governments, however, were stocked with highly qualified people who had quietly been undergoing their own Damascene experiences. Their Calvinist guilt complexes spurring them on to make good for apartheid and their protestant work ethic made them the ideal public servant for fixing the disasters of the NP government.
One weakness of the negotiations was that proper attention was only paid to the public service from 1993, giving birth to the half-baked sunset clause. Still, there were complex plans for white officials to take on a mentoring role, but the ANC had by then decided on cadre deployment, and as Barnard noted: “Of this [mentoring] came very little. After the election several departmental heads were unceremoniously replaced and others were treated like doormats. This laid the foundation for the return of apartheid in the form of affirmative action.”
In the next 10 years I watched and heard of relatives, friends and acquaintances leaving the country in a predominantly white exodus, but in latter years this included quite a few black people too. Older people, highly skilled engineers, scientists and numerous teachers took lucrative packages and then sat at home, deeply frustrated at being unable to do the job they loved.
Sure, some of those who left did not want to work under a black government, but the vast majority of Afrikaans speakers were, and still are, keen to chisel out a common future, even if they would never vote ANC. A former Rand Daily Mail political editor, Patrick Laurence, an anti-apartheid stalwart, wrote several articles to this effect, to name just one writer.
It is estimated that close to a million people have taken part in the white exodus alone. One of the casualties was the work done by the many linguists employed by the apartheid government. Of course, their work was tainted by the divide-and-rule strategy behind the homelands, but most of these academics devoted their lives to indigenous languages out of a love for their subject. Their work was drastically downscaled by the Anglocentric ANC.
One result is our drastically underperforming educational system, which many experts ascribe to teaching that is not focused on the mother tongue. That there seems to be little understanding in the ANC of the intricacies and complexities of mother-tongue education is abundantly clear from the ravings of Lesufi against Afrikaans.
From Mbeki’s boast about manipulating white public servants to Lesufi’s demonstrations of impotence and unsuitability for the job, there is a straight line of hubris and triumphalism that is doing great damage to the country.
• Pienaar is a journalist and author.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.