Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon At present in its committee stage is a draft Bill designed to hoist South Africa even higher on the international booby scale. Having been diagnosed, if this newest legislative psychosis is allowed to develop untreated, it could well become terminal and develop into an genuine pathological law. Under this law, South African sports administrators who fail to transform their teams into racial mixes which reflect the country’s demography will be guilty of a criminal offence. For which they could go to jail for up to two years.
In support of his draft Bill, the sports minister, Steve Tshwete, says that predominantly white teams are still the order of the day and black sports folk are impatient for change. The obligatory justification-cum-whinge was forwarded by a ministry spokesman who said the draft Bill was no more than an attempt to “correct the imbalances of the past”.
This is standard phraseology to remind us that South Africa is still playing in apartheid’s injury-time. When someone’s going to blow that long overdue final whistle is anyone’s guess. In the meantime among this government’s top priorities is the need to continue to convince its customers they will always be victims of one kind or another.
I don’t know what the correct term is for this kind of political methodology. Gloom Government? Dialectic Stooge-ism? Something killjoy and self-pitying, just like the Nats used to employ. In advancing this sempiternal “once were casualties” mandate, political management has to spend most of its time persuading its voters to believe that, prior to the current demagoguery, they ranked among the most prestigious doormats in the world. Why else these continual wailings? Why the cries of “brutal colonial repression” and “crimes against humanity” if not to align the electorate’s psychological matrix to an abundantly exploitable victim- state?
In England “affirmative action” is called “positive discrimination”, which term at least reveals the founding ethic of the business. Discrimination is the very keystone of affirmative action. It holds as of primary consideration those human configurations – race, gender, disability, both historical and physical – which are in place only by default.
Then there’s the novel top-dressing from the giggleheads who dreamed up the Employment Equity Bill. It’s called “potential”. What “potential” insists is that employers will be forced to give someone a job solely because he looks like he might one day be capable of doing the job better than someone presently capable of doing the job quite capably.
I’d love to watch the reactions of the Tshwetes and Mbowenis et al, strapped into their first-class seats as the Boeing taxis out for take-off. A cheerful voice announces from the flight deck: “Good morning, this is your captain, Flaps Gumede. I’ve just been grounded for negligent overstressing of undercarriages, so you’ll be pleased to hear that our co- pilot, Gladys Plaaitjies, will be doing the flying today. Gladdy hasn’t actually quite passed her student pilot’s licence yet, but apart from her total inability to navigate further than the female crew rest- rooms due to an inoperable divergent squint, she’s been showing a lot of potential.”
How about the empowerment-maddened Cabinet minister, lying on his gurney in the induction room, just before they wheel him into theatre for open- heart surgery: “Hullo. As soon as I can find some fairly clean gloves, I’ll be doing your surgery this morning”, says a gowned figure warmly. “I got this job because not only am I a resurrectional member of a previously disadvantaged and landless racial grouping but because apparently I show a latent talent for disembowelling ostriches.”
You could go on for ever with these little alarm-parables in the certain knowledge they won’t have the slightest effect on Mr Tshwete. He’s there for keeps and if firing 90% of the current South African cricket team and posting Ali Bacher off to Sonderwater maximum security is necessary to maintain demographic racial equality, you can be sure Steve will feel encouraged. So, one imagines, will the overseas cricket selectors.
What will not even be taken into consideration is how things might otherwise be managed. The installation of this new and embarrassing sports despotism will cost the usual mint in study groups, committees, consultants, overseas fact-finding missions, green papers, legal costs and all the rest of the extravagant burlesque which usually attends these processes. Wouldn’t this money be better spent on more playing fields, more training projects, more sports equipment?
Of course, Steve Tshwete and his buddies might have to forego some of their real and intellectual luxuries. As Mr Shakespeare once said: “Ay, there’s the rub.”