Another View: Moeletsi Mbeki and Johann Rossouw have tried to 'erase apartheid', says Matthew Blatchford

South Africa faces a serious political crisis: the government appears unable to lead effectively or pursue consistent policies with integrity; and its internal left-wing opposition, which spent 15 years complaining that it was being marginalised, turns out to have neither the taste nor the capacity for exercising power.

With the country facing grave threats (including the worst economic depression in 70 years), this lack of leadership is crippling. Because the corrupt leaders have established authoritarian control over the ANC, meeting dissent with repression, there seems to be no democratic way of resolving the problem.

So it is tempting to abandon faith in democracy - and particularly tempting for those who never supported democracy in the first place. Unfortunately, South Africa has a history of being undemocratic, rooted in the white supremacism which fostered colonialism and then apartheid. And this is what Moeletsi Mbeki and Johann Rossouw appeal to in their article "Many nationalisms still cripple SA".

Despite the title, the article is not about the crippling effects of nationalism. It is an attack on the ANC, not merely for bad leadership, but for the entire anti-apartheid struggle. Drawing heavily on the reactionary analysis of the likes of Hermann Giliomee and John Kane-Berman, Mbeki and Rossouw insist that 21st-century South African politics are all about racial nationalisms.

Undeniably, both colonialism and apartheid were driven by white racial nationalism. But the ANC was always driven by a desire to resist the oppressive consequences of white racism.

Conspicuously, anti-white political organisations, like the Pan Africanist Congress and the Azanian People's Organisation (Azapo), never gained a mass following.

This spurious racialisation of South African political history seems intended to erase the crimes of colonialism and apartheid - by pretending that racist tyranny and the struggle against racist tyranny were equivalent. Once the anti-apartheid struggle is discredited, Mbeki and Rossouw can claim, baselessly, that the chief force for the ending of apartheid was the white business community in South Africa.

Then Mbeki and Rossouw announce that blacks have misruled South Africa ever since taking over. Supposedly, the ANC has destroyed South Africa's social and physical infrastructure. The party, Mbeki and Rossouw hint, were only able to do this because they were allied with the English - echoing the Afrikaner ethnic psychoses of those such as Dan Roodt.

What has happened, in fact, is that South Africa's infrastructure, designed to serve the white minority, is inadequate to serve the majority, and there was neither the time nor the money to build a new one.

Mbeki and Rossouw can only get away with their lie by erasing apartheid, which refused to provide adequate infrastructure for the black population.

Why should they want to do this? This is where the abandonment of faith in democracy comes in, entwined here with a deep-seated racism. According to Mbeki and Rossouw, blacks are unruly and need to be controlled. Since black politicians are incompetent to control them, whites must do so.

They specifically mention the Democratic Alliance, the National Taxpayers' Union and the Solidarity trade union, which are all white-run organisations. Mbeki and Rossouw hope that the ANC's alliance will break up, the party will split and white political organisations will seize power. This, say Mbeki and Rossouw, will enable white business to run the country efficiently.

But this is not a solution to the crisis, which is one of poverty and unemployment, undeniably exacerbated by the corruption and inefficacy of the ANC. Appealing to all those devoted to fighting for white interests against black interests means the "saviours" endorsed by Mbeki and Rossouw are guaranteed to make the situation worse.

Likewise, the appeal to the business community is mistaken. Mbeki and Rossouw jeer at the social grants system, the largest and most effective system of wealth redistribution in Africa. This system has helped blacks in South Africa to avoid the national surge in inequality. In contrast, the white and coloured communities have both become vastly less equal since 1994. In these communities, such a surge cannot be driven by the government, but instead is owed to the ruling class and the business community, which is largely white. Since the white business community refuses to look after its own (and even Mbeki and Rossouw acknowledge a surge in white poverty) they cannot possibly be trusted to run the country. Most of the million workers fired in 2009 were dismissed by white bosses.

Precisely because the ruling business class is not nationalist, but is devoted to short-term private economic gain, it is not intellectually or morally equipped to serve the people of this country.

Mbeki and Rossouw poison the whole debate with their racist vitriol to no purpose at all.

One can understand Rossouw's agenda as an Afrikaner nationalist, but why is Mbeki lending his name to this racist, plutocratic claptrap? Remember that, while Mbeki's brother Thabo took part in the anti-apartheid struggle and became president as a result, Moeletsi sat on the sidelines, sniping ineffectually. Now he hopes to see the black South Africans who ignored him humbled by white supremacists, and thus see the triumphs of his great brother erased.

We need not blame him for his neurosis. But we must not listen to him. Mbeki and Rossouw are talking dangerous nonsense which will bring disaster to the nation.

• Blatchford is a lecturer in English at the University of Fort Hare