You whites! It's all your fault

26 October 2011 - 01:58
By Peter Delmar

You white people! What is it with you people?

The other day the white baases who control the JSE told the world that black people owned 17% of companies listed on the exchange. This was a lie.

Before that the Chamber of Mines claimed black ownership of this country's mines had already met the targets our democratic government had set for 2014. This was another white lie - by which I mean that it was a big black lie put out by white people, sometimes getting black people to lie for them.

I know these things were lies because The Clever Young Leader has said so. Just this Sunday, he had a big piece - a huge piece - in the Sunday Times in which he said these numbers were lies. This is what he said: "Believing that South African society is gullible, JSE authorities spread misleading information in the hope of mitigating frustration and anger at their refusal to transform."

You white people will probably expect the Wise Young One to explain why he says these numbers are lies, but that is not the role of a leader. No, the role of a revolutionary leader is to paint the broad brushstrokes of the revolutionary treasure map, but while doing so to "hide nothing from the masses of our people", to "tell no lies. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures". (Here the Shining Light of Liberation and Enlightenment was quoting that great African thinker Amilcar Cabral. Who was he? I can hear you white people asking. Of course your neo-colonial counter-revolutionary Eurocentric thinking doesn't allow you to know he was the great revolutionary leader of that West African powerhouse and tranquil house of democracy, Guinea-Bissau.)

White people can expect to live 30 years longer than black people. Again to quote The Enlightened One, this is "due to poverty and starvation because we have not changed the economic ownership pattern that is informed by apartheid".

Don't you honkies get it? We have poverty, joblessness, poor education and HIV/Aids all because of you white people. It's been 17 years and still our democratic leadership is scared of you people because "white people present a picture of indispensability in the economy".

Pat Davies walks away from Sasol with a R24-million-plus-plus handout. Why? Because he is white and therefore presumed to be indispensable - even after he hits the road. All over the economy, white fat cats are continuing to milk the economy for all it's worth.

Eighty percent of our productive land is controlled by less than 5% of the white population. We have a democratic government that has bought six million hectares of land and given almost all of it voetstoets to emerging farmers. Fully 10% of these farms are now prosperous agricultural land. More than two-thirds of the land the state has doled out has never been sold to other people. Clearly, the way forward is to take the rest from you white people and redistribute it as Cde Robert Mugabe has so gloriously and successfully done in Zimbabwe. To quote, for the last time from Sunday's Epistle to the Insouciants: "The only way to fight these horrible manifestations of an unequal, racialised and uncaring capitalist system is to mobilise its victims to confront it."

So, this week the young and the dispossessed will march on those spreaders of white untruths, the JSE and the Chamber of Mines, and, overturning one dustbin at a time, confront you white people and the black Uncle Toms we elected through our hard-fought franchise.

We might not have the numbers or even the tools with which to dispute your lies about the JSE and mine ownership. We might not have a clue about economics or job creation and we don't have time to engage, consider and contribute to things like New Growth Paths and the government's sectoral green and white papers on economic transformation and job creation. We are, however, crystal clear on one thing: it's all your fault and we're going to fight you until there isn't any economy left to fight over.

  •  I wrote the above in high dudgeon on Sunday after the country's biggest newspaper published a facile 1 300-word piece of the most incendiary, most utterly offensive drivel written in the name of South Africa's most dangerous, most misinformed demagogue since Hendrik Verwoerd. It's now Tuesday morning and I remain outraged and disappointed.