If someone came to you regularly to ask you to do one or other thing on their behalf, would you think they were your equal?
A flood washed over Knysna not too long ago, and social media became awash with South Africans lamenting that the whites that were organising charity drives to send food parcels and clothing to the region were racist because they hadn’t done the same for flood victims in Alexandra.
Some decade before a group of white business leaders camped out at FNB to raise funds for some charity, a similar outcry followed. In this instance black South Africans complained that the organisers were of an inappropriate race.
There have been a lot of similar stories in which people who do nothing complain that those who do, don’t do enough, don’t do it for everyone or don’t do it for the right reasons, for example, that it is a publicity stunt.
Invariably, the moaners are black and the doers are white.
Why?
I know you answered my opening question in the negative so I will ask it again but this time more pointedly.
If you were white and blacks looked up to you to do this or that for them, would you think they were your equal?
It is very possible that dispossession created a culture of inadequacy, helplessness and a feeling among the dispossessed that the dispossessor had a duty to help them. But a proud people cannot stop there, a proud people have to go past that to ask “how do we break that?”
I know my progenitors were disenfranchised by apartheid and that they passed that disenfranchisement to me and that I will pass it on to my progeny.
But that story shouldn’t end there for proud people if they accept they have value and agency. We have to blame apartheid, and justly so but we also need to recognise that it cannot give us back what it took.
We must live up to the credo that we are equal citizens of the world so we must start living as such first by showing that we are capable of finding solutions within instead of looking to whites for our salvation.
Just like you have a right to help whoever you wish, whites too have a right to donate to whomever they want.
You love your car more than you love me, right so why is it strange when a white person does what you do?
If we show whites that we are incapable, we need them to save us, it would be stupid of them to believe otherwise.
I have observed how the DA has taken advantage of our need for a white saviour. It tells blacks that the ANC is bad because “connected individuals” get BEE deals.
Why does the connectedness of the person the previously advantaged choose to make a BEE deal with make the ANC bad? You swallowed the first fallacy without question and not the second, why?
There’s nothing in the BEE legislation that prevents the previously advantaged from choosing you to make a BEE deal with yet they don’t.
So, why has the DA not demonised the givers of the BEE deals for choosing the same people – that’s who’s to blame, right?
In 2008, Vodacom started a legal battle to avoid paying Nkosana Makate for the “please call me” service from which it made possibly millions.
Ten years later, the company concluded a BEE deal with YeboYethu worth more than R1-billion, not Makate, whom it offered R47-million, why?
Did the company choose a “connected” person over Makate? You bet it did. Is that the fault of the BEE Act and/or the ANC?
The BEE Act does not decree that redress be achieved only through that law so if the owners of capital believe it’s the act that stops them, they could do something else to achieve transformation, for eg pay Makate more than. So the problem can’t be the BEE Act.
Yet we cannot bring ourselves to blaming the owners of capital for the failure of BEE because we would rather parrot the DA.
If we place whites superior to ourselves, why should we blame them if they start believing they indeed are?
- KaBizokwakhe is a columnist at large with too much time on his hands to think silly things
