Jan Taljaard: Pretoria
SELDOM shy of a good idea, the die-hard leader of the Boerestaat Party, Robert van Tonder, has established the right-wing’s own reconstruction and development programme.
It is unlikely that minister Jay Naidoo will ever be part of this RDP, even though the somewhat idiosyncratic Van Tonder is a businessman of no small repute.
In the formally titled “Boerevolk RDP”, Van Tonder wants to use money from investors to identify and develop entrepreneurs amongst the right-wing.
The Boerevolk RDP is, nevertheless, just a part of what Van Tonder calls “the freedom struggle of the Boer nation”.
Says Van Tonder: “We lost our country because we had become economically subservient. The Boer does not even own 20 percent of the economy. We have become a nation of state slaves of which two-thirds work for either the state, the provincial authorities or municipalities, the police or education.”
He says the struggle for freedom via the ballot box is doomed to failure even if “right-wingers and left-wingers and whites and coloureds and Indians stand together.”
“Since 1910, so-called Afrikaner parties have won 17 elections but, at the end of the day, the Boer nation has no land that it can call its own. The ballot box is at last something of the past and thank the Lord for that.”
According to Van Tonder, a previous attempt to attain economic independence during the 1940s failed because it was hijacked by what he calls the “Cape Dutch”. “It all ended up being controlled by a few big concerns in the Cape such as Nasionale Media, Sanlam, Rembrandt and FVB General Mining. All these businesses are hostile to the Boer nation and therefore a new Boer RDP must be started from scratch.”
A brochure of the Boerevolk RDP exhorts readers not to keep their money in a savings account but to invest it in the RDP. Units are sold at R1 000 each and the money is repaid after two years with10 percent interest.
The funds will be used to identify entrepreneurs among the “Boer nation” and to provide them with financial aid, the brochure promises.