South Africa must move away from its ”stubborn” obsession with race and focus on the socio-economic backgrounds of people to transform the country, political analyst Frederik van Zyl Slabbert said on Wednesday.
”If you make yourself hostage to a racist past you could budget on a racist future,” Van Zyl Slabbert said.
He was speaking at the launch of a report on the revival of racial classification in post-apartheid South Africa, which warns that several new laws and actions taken by government are, in essence, creating a new system of racial classification.
”Unless government reconsiders its racial consciousness, the political transition of 1994 will be reduced to a mere transition from one racially driven dispensation to yet another racially driven dispensation, under pretext of democracy,” said Kallie Kriel, author of the report and chief executive of AfriForum. AfriForum is a civil society discussion forum, which was started by trade union Solidarity.
He argues that trying to tackle inequality solely on the basis of race would not benefit the majority, and creates new second-class citizens.
”As long as measures are applied that are based solely on race, a small elite group of well-trained black people will benefit repeatedly, at the expense of the needy of all races who are not in a position to grasp the new opportunities,” Kriel said.
Like Van Zyl Slabbert he suggested that socio-economic status should be sues to address inequality.
”Given the great poverty in the black community, it is self-evident that most of the beneficiaries of such an approach would be black,” he said.
Van Zyl Slabbert said he was concerned that laws such as the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act are open for corruption.
”Like in the past where you could pay R500 to get yourself declared a ‘coloured’ or a R1 000 to be declared ‘white’, these laws … work on point systems and would lead to corruption, helping no one,” he said.
He said the new laws are also based on South Africa’s racial classification system of the past.
”What prevents a white person from having himself declared African? There are no racial classification systems defining what an African, coloured and so on means, so what do we base our decisions on? We base it on our past classification laws where you look at a person and decide he is a certain race,” he said.
Van Zyl Slabbert said transformation can only be achieved if there is a move away from race as the driving factor.
He urged civil society to engage government on the issue.
”Don’t just lay down and say you can do nothing. You can,” he said. — Sapa