”For many black South Africans very little has changed: the same people still own the big houses, they still hold down the best jobs, they still drive the fancy cars that speed — unseeing — past the black informal settlements that line our first-world highways,” says FW de Klerk, the country’s last apartheid-era president.
And, he adds, ”They [white people] still own more than 80% of the country’s farmland.”
Although whites make up just 13,6% of South Africa’s population, they also dominate trade and commerce.
Addressing reporters in Johannesburg earlier this week, De Klerk — who has been credited with helping to dismantle apartheid — said the creation of a non-racial society was something that continued to elude South Africa, even ten years after the demise of white minority rule.
”Black, white, coloured (mixed-race) and Indian South Africans hold diametrically opposed views on the issue,” he noted.
”Minorities often perceive transformation as a new form of racial discrimination. Blacks emotionally reject any such notion and regard the process only as a long-overdue rectification of the deep injustices of the past.”
De Klerk regretted that too often, there was little frank debate on these issues.
Many whites publicly express politically correct, but qualified, support for transformation — while they privately advise their children to obtain international qualifications and to emigrate,” he said.
”Many blacks — on the other hand — see transformation more as a passport to personal wealth and advancement than as a process that will genuinely address the underlying inequalities in our society,” De Klerk added.
Under South Africa’s decades-long system of official segregation, blacks were discriminated against in virtually every area of public and private life. De Klerk stunned the international community in 1990, when he unbanned the African National Congress (ANC), which had led the fight against apartheid — and freed Nelson Mandela from prison.
According to Wole Olaleye, a researcher at the Johannesburg-based Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, ”the nature of South African politics has changed”.
”De Klerk represents a lot of things including reconciliation. He is also concerned about his constituency, especially the Afrikaners.”
Olalele added, ”I also think that De Klerk is expressing genuine concern about affirmative action. It is healthy to bring out such issues so that tomorrow if something happens one would not be blamed.”
De Klerk, who ruled South Africa between 1989 and 1994, said he did not disagree with the concept of ”black economic empowerment” (BEE), which has been introduced to reverse the inequalities created by apartheid.
”I support the programme. What I oppose is the way how it is being implemented,” he said. ”The black empowerment legislation has caused growing concern among minorities and raised fears of reverse discrimination.”
Key pieces of empowerment legislation include the Mining Charter, which is aimed at having 26% of mines black-owned within the next decade.
The Financial Services Charter has set 2010 as the deadline for having blacks control 25% of this sector.
Other laws are expected to follow soon. This worries De Klerk, who wonders whether a situation will arise where ”the editorial staff of an Afrikaans newspaper like Beeld [will] ultimately comprise 75% non-Afrikaans-speaking black South Africans”.
Shoni Makhari of EmpowerDEX — an agency in Johannesburg that specialises in empowerment issues — said that he did not regard black empowerment as racism in reverse. ”Rather it is a programme to redress the inequality created by Apartheid,” he said.
As regards other aspects of the economy, however, De Klerk believes the ANC has done a good job. ”I rate their economic performance as ‘A’,” he said.
The former president referred specifically the export of luxury cars, more than 100 000 of which left the country for the first time in 2001: ”It was one of the high points of the new South Africa, because it illustrated the country’s ability to increase its manufactured exports and to compete successfully in the globalised economy.
”Car production now accounts for almost seven percent of gross domestic product and for annual exports of R40-billion ($6,1-billion) — more than our earnings from gold.”
South Africa’s economy has expanded for 20 consecutive quarters — the longest period of continuous growth for over 50 years, said Finance Minister Trevor Manuel when he presented his budget to Parliament last month.
But De Klerk said the loss of half a million and a million jobs in the formal and agricultural sectors of the economy was one of the greatest failures and disappointments of the first decade of freedom in South Africa.
”Unemployment lies at the root of the poverty that continues to afflict almost half our population,” he noted. About a third of South Africans — 5,3-million people — are unemployed, according to official statistics. Most of these people are black, and live in poverty.
De Klerk said South Africans needed to transform their society to address this deprivation, and appeared confident that this was possible: ”We South Africans have shown that we have the ability to reach historic agreements on the challenges that confront us. We did so between 1990 and 1994 on the critical question of constitutional transformation. Now, ten years after the creation of the new South Africa we need to do so again.”
Chris Landsberg of the Johannesburg-based Centre for Policy Studies believes that the twin issues of transformation and affirmative action will raise the political temperature in the run up to general elections that are scheduled to be held on April 14.
”I think the 2004 campaign has been polarised by the race issue… [It] is becoming a major problem in the campaign this time around,” he said on Thursday. – Sapa-IPS