BusinessTech reports Well-known South African company hit by “terrorist attacks”. The well-known company is the long-haul bus operator Intercape. The “terrorist attacks”, as described by Intercape’s CEO Johan Ferreira, are perpetrated by taxi bosses who direct thugs to vandalise buses and intimidate drivers and passengers, while the police stand by and watch. Our courts have ruled that the police and the Department of Transport are in contempt of court for their inaction, saying “It is unthinkable that the government would expose their citizens to terrorism and do nothing about it.”1

This is your typical “frog-boiling” story (in which government slowly squeezes money out of well-off whites): hardly an existential crisis but vaguely unsettling as the heat rises another notch. When Zuma was president we had the comfort of “knowing” things would get better when the “business-friendly” Ramaphosa took over. Today we have no such comfort. In fact, the Intercape CEO blames President Ramaphosa for doing nothing about the problem because he supports the taxi industry.

In other water-boiling bad news, the investment strategist Magnus Heystek (How the ANC destroyed the SA economy – and your wealth – in 15 years) lays out in gory detail the carnage caused by ANC misrule.

According to Heystek the SA economy has underperformed 43% compared to emerging markets since 2010, and that barring countries at war or undergoing civil unrest (e.g. Libya and Syria) “nothing comes close to economic destruction so relentlessly pursued by a government in power than the ANC under Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.” If – like me – you stupidly own property outside the Western Cape, you will know that against the US dollar it is worth far less than what you paid for it. (Heystek notes that the US residential property market rose 148% in the past decade, while South Africa’s dropped 30%-40% in USD terms over that time.)

There are some who believe that the ANC has deliberately set about destroying the economy to undermine opponents and make the masses depend on them for grants. This is unlikely. The reason the ANC continues to destroy our economy is because they equate black pride with black economic empowerment (BEE). Black pride is an ideology to dignify black people as a nation within nations, worthy of the privileges and perquisites of the world’s more successful races. In South Africa, BEE is the policy that is meant to deliver on this ideology yet has the opposite effect.

A recent report by the Free Market Foundation and the Solidarity Research Institute (Cost of BEE quantified – 4m lost jobs; trillions in GDP. Will Ramaphosa now remove his blinkers?) estimates that BEE burdens the private sector with R145-R290 billion annually in compliance costs, with R5 trillion lost to GDP thus far. The report argues that a freer South African economy not constrained by BEE regulation would have grown at about 3% more per year since 2007, which would have led to a workforce of 21 million today, as opposed to only 17 million.

Meanwhile, President Ramaphosa (who is meant to be part of ANC’s pro-business faction) is doubling down on BEE, saying “It’s not only about correcting past wrongs, it is also about establishing a new wave of emerging businesses that can create work and opportunity.”

As Dr Morné Malan of the Free Market Foundation puts it, “The ANC has so tightly linked its identity to BEE that it can’t imagine itself without it.” But the good news is that “the country is waking up. Disillusionment is growing, and that’s why we’re seeing such nervous energy from the top.” Happily, some voices from within the black intelligentsia are starting to speak out against BEE. According to William Gumede (a professor of political economy at Wits University), “BEE has led to increased poverty, unemployment, and inequality in South Africa. Over R1 trillion has moved between less than 100 (politically connected) people since 1994. The same people have been empowered over and over again for decades.”2

According to Dr Frans Cronje, head of the Social Research Foundation, the ANC would quite easily get back to 60% of the vote if only they attracted more fixed investment, which would be achieved by dropping BEE.[4] Why would the ANC cling to this failed policy when without it they would enjoy renewed electoral support and thus the ability to steal for many years to come; plus the status of governing a winning black democracy delivering wealth and prestige to their core constituency, the aspirant black middle class?

The answer comes from America. South Africa is mostly an ideological satellite of America. (Some argue that we’re an ideological satellite of the Soviet Union, an absurd notion that discounts the fact that the Soviet Union does not exist anymore and that there were no blacks in that part of the world anyway.)

Black Americans and their struggle for recognition is the abiding inspiration for black politics in this country. The reason South Africa took a wrong turn in 1994, by discounting the obvious inability of the ANC to properly govern the country, is because by then many of us had become addled by a peculiarly American way of thinking about politics.

That peculiarity started in the 1960s with the civil rights movement. In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020), the conservative thinker Christopher Caldwell argues that the “core of the revolutionary time of the 1960s was race”. It is in the shadow of this revolution that South Africa’s current battles about BEE are playing out.

At the heart of the American Culture War is their constitution: is it what the Founding Fathers wrote in 1788 or is it the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted”? This “license” as Caldwell puts it gave progressives the opportunity to move beyond the context of racial segregation laws in the US and achieve “liberation after liberation.”

The liberation of BEE after the everyone-equal-before-the-law liberation of 1994 is precisely what the major black parties in South Africa are devoted to. Our black government – with broad backing from the black elite – does not see itself as the political embodiment of the South African constitution, it sees itself as the political embodiment of black empowerment, by means fair, foul or even terroristic, as the example of Intercape shows.

Given this approach the principles of the original constitution – be it property rights or the protection of the private sphere against undue government interference – are made secondary to the revolutionary aims of racial equity and the reversal of historic white privilege.

Such radical thinking started in America and eventually culminated in Maga backlash. Liberal elites continue to downplay the failure of BEE because they remain broadly aligned to the goals of the civil rights movement. Thus, it is the job of western conservatives to oppose racial equity warriors, not by being embarrassed at the successes of our race and of our civilisation, but by confidently proclaiming them. Ours is by far the fairest, most inclusive of civilisations, with the main blot against it being Hitler’s Germany where Jews – not blacks – were the primary victims and where those most loudly championing western civilisation (e.g. Churchill) were its fiercest enemies.

We have a special role. A special place. Our purpose is not to dominate blacks or to frustrate their advancement. On the contrary. For the dwindling few whites in South Africa, our role is to include and encourage blacks to join a tradition of Judeo-Christian civilisation that values excellence for its own sake and that bows to truth and justice. (As Plato put it: what this age needs is increased reverence in the rule of right and goodness and a quickened faith in its ultimate victory over folly, superstition and vice.)

Our black leaders have a choice. They can continue to see themselves as victims of a white world – an insane conceit given that they’re running the country – or they can defer to the superior culture that is the western tradition and partake of its enormous advantages. Instead of boiling the frogs they should use us to put South Africa onto a winning path.