White arrogance undermines black opposition

Nostalgia for National Party rule is not only wrong-headed, it endangers SA's future

LAST month, I wrote a column in these pages arguing against the idea that the fate of black people was to break the things whites had built.

I did not suggest that the ANC wasn't rife with corruption or governing atrociously. I, in fact, argued that one of the burning tasks of the day was to develop an arsenal of rhetorical weapons to aim at the ANC, and that these weapons ought to be sharp enough to hurt.

What I did say was this: telling the ANC that they are black people destroying white accomplishments is not one of those sharp weapons. One reason is that it is simply a myth, for whites often governed this country poorly.

In 10 years of writing a newspaper column, I have not received as large and vitriolic a response.

White people wrote in varying degrees of agitation. Some thought I was simply mad; others that, in the spirit of some nauseating code of political correctness, I was twisting an obvious truth into its opposite.

Once-good streets are now pot-holed. An electricity grid that used to give abundantly suffers blackouts. Garbage goes uncollected on pavements that were once clean. For those who wrote these incredulous letters, the fact that black incompetence is destroying a legacy of white efficiency is obvious.

They are nonetheless wrong and their error has serious consequences.

Older white readers should cast their minds back to the 1970s and '80s. To have suggested then that the government was building something lasting would have elicited scorn.

The civil service was regarded as demented and useless, staffed by a bunch of affirmative action appointments who did not know their arses from their elbows. Government ministers were considered dour men who wore funny black hats and practised a backward religion.

Few whites protested too loudly, though, for the one thing the National Party did well during the first quarter-century of its rule was to make 12% or so of the population progressively richer.

This hardly required competence; it was lucky enough to govern during the most abundant epoch in human history; hundreds of millions of people across the planet were joining the middle class.

Was the apartheid bureaucracy capable of servicing the entire population? I doubt it. I suspect that, like the current black bureaucracy, it would have faded before the task and instead used state institutions simply to line its pockets.

Apartheid's leaders were just marking time. They had no idea how to create, let alone manage, an equitable country, and so they tried hard not to think about the future.

There is a wider African story to be told. At the end of World War Two, Europe's colonial powers were convinced that they would rule Africa for generations to come. They wrote a host of plans to develop African cities into modern metropolises.

By the late 1950s, their plans had all failed and they were preparing to leave. While they had been okay at governing Africa when the majority of its population lived in rural huts, they were flummoxed once Africans started urbanising in great numbers. As John Iliffe, one of the most respected students of African history, has written, "[The colonial powers] all found it easier to transfer Africa's growing problems to African successors."

The truth is that nobody, black or white, has governed modern Africa with much success. The burning question is whether anybody can.

After a brief period of hope in the 1990s, when it seemed that South Africa might finally get the rulers it wished for, we are poised to become yet another African disappointment. Nobody can be sure whether we can still avoid that fate. But among the signs of hope are recent stirrings of agitation among black professionals. There seems to be growing distaste in the black middle class for the style in which this country is being governed. Whether this distaste will find political expression is one of the key questions of our time.

And that is where angry white newspaper readers come into the picture. If, at bottom, white South Africa's view is that black people's fate is to ruin white accomplishments, we are indeed in trouble. For, in the face of this entrenched sense of white superiority, the nascent black opposition may well stumble in the starting blocks. It may retreat back into the ANC, albeit in bad faith, if only to take cover from the stench of white arrogance.

It would be a terrible irony if black people ruined South Africa in response to white racism. But stranger things have happened in this world.