While colonialism spread through advances in shipbuilding and navigation, communication among local leaders, foreign traders and investors was difficult, and reliable cross-border dispute mechanisms hadn’t yet been invented. In response, privateers, that era’s breed of entrepreneurs who developed resource extraction operations in less-developed countries, encouraged their home countries’ governments to adopt colonial policies by asserting that there was a moral obligation for elites to benefit the populations of less-advanced countries.
“Diversity” and “inclusion,” constructive objectives that broadly benefit societies, are blended with “equity,” an intentionally vague term, to form DEI, a routinely manipulated expression used to exploit the poor for the benefit of the affluent. The colonial-era equivalent was the French term noblesse oblige, which was imported into English to describe the moral duty of those with privilege, wealth or power to act with generosity, responsibility and benevolence towards those less fortunate.
As the electoral value of its liberation credentials faded, the ANC became increasingly reliant on patronage. This was justified by referencing the injustices and ongoing inequalities caused by apartheid. Yet SA today is the world’s most unequal country. There are now many high-income blacks, which represents important progress, but this has been achieved largely through a patronage system that permanently marginalises a majority of young black adults. No country has higher youth unemployment.
Backlash
The US Democratic Party’s popularity is plumbing new lows amid a fierce backlash against DEI abuses. Many Americans now appreciate that the “long march through the institutions,” which gathered momentum during the student protests of the 1960s, achieved its core goal — most leading universities and media organisations have been captured by hardline leftists.
Americans with degrees in gender studies vote for Democrats to avoid being unemployed and then bankrupted by oversized student loans. Such graduates aren’t members of the dominant group, white males. Nor are straight white males hired to teach gender studies or to run DEI-inspired HR departments. The subterfuge employed is not new.
Colonising powers often placed the second-largest ethnic group in charge of a subjugated country, like Rwanda, as their hold on power then depended on the imperial nation’s military support. Today’s prevalent version of symbiotic power-sharing unites information curators and patronage-reliant politicians, with both groups hiding behind DEI-messaging to obscure their agendas.
The intellectuals who dominate universities and media organisations thirst for power as avidly as investors seek high returns. Yet those whose stock in trade is ideas routinely belittle those who build the companies that provide jobs and those who run the armies that keep predators at bay.
Just as the Tutsis did the dirty work of the distant imperialists, many of our intellectual elites have been pawns of the ANC as they blindly endorse DEI. Much confirming evidence engulfs us.
A new national dialogue
In recent decades, global poverty, unemployment and inequality have plunged while reaching new heights in SA. With the economy continuing to deteriorate, the ANC wants to launch a new national dialogue as the party has been so successful at
co-opting our information curators. An admirable response from civil society leaders would involve much rallying around a workable plan to swiftly reduce unemployment and poverty. Rather, the silence is deafening, while we have been blind to profound successes in many distant lands.
As a prelude to a new national dialogue, earlier this year President Cyril Ramaphosa said: “We need SA solutions for SA problems.” That this was meekly accepted by our diverse public commentators constitutes a searing indictment of our current national dialogue.
We are well past the point where we can solve our own problems. Our extreme underperformance traces directly to localisation policies designed to benefit the ANC’s broad patronage network. One-man operations can’t compete with assembly lines, and isolated nations can’t keep up in an intensely integrated global economy.
We must ditch the political exploitation of DEI delusions to embrace proven economic development principles and practices.
• Hagedorn (@shawnhagedorn) is an independent strategy adviser.
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