Let’s pick on Pik

Anyone remember Pik Botha? He’s the guy who was driven to drink as Apartheid’s long-serving foreign minister, because while he got a glimpse of reality while hobnobbing in foreign capitals with Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the rest of white-ruled South Africa was growing ever more backwards and isolated. He was a good guy. PW Botha ordered him placed under surveillance and military intelligence didn’t trust him, so he must have been okay.

Like a ghost from the past, he recently resurfaced.

In an interview in the most recent issue of The Weekender, he claims that when negotiating the handover of power to democratic rule, the white National Party would never have agreed to the African National Congress’s current affirmative action policies. He doesn’t think that “injustices of the past should be compensated by creating new injustices”.

I happen to agree that affirmative action is an injustice, but concede that redress is both fair and politically necessary to achieve long-term reconciliation. I agree current affirmative action policy is too rigid, too bureaucratic, and not particularly constructive, though it has succeeded in building a prospering and growing black middle class. I agree that too much affirmative action has benefited an already-rich black elite, and that this poses grave risks of corruption, cronyism and conflicts of interest. I agree that affirmative action should be a temporary, exceptional measure, and should come with a strict sunset clause, such as that it should not advantage anyone “born free”, nor disadvantage anyone young enough to have been eligible to vote for the first time in the 1994 elections. (I voted in the 1989 general election, so I’m not arguing my personal interest here.) See? I agree with Pik.

Moreover, I’m of the opinion that the majority of the new government’s effort should have gone to education. That is the only way in which sustainable transformation (look ma, I just wrote “sustainable transformation”!) can be achieved. Education is also the best way to mitigate the negative effects of affirmative action policies. I’m of the opinion that the ANC government has largely failed in its education policy, because it wasted years toying with discredited central planning schemes such as outcomes-based education (PDF worth reading). It curbed instead of encouraging private schools, and spent money that could have gone towards upgrading facilities and paying teachers what they’re worth (say, ten times current pay) on a wide range of nationalist and socialist boondoggles.

What beats me is why Pik Botha is going around making such points in the way he did. He spoke at a largely white Afrikaans union gathering. He spoke in terms of minorities, which is unnecessarily divisive when the real issue is far bigger. His approach will likely be dismissed as nothing more than a former Apartheid minister’s whining. He’s just confirming his political irrelevance.

Besides, he’s got far more useful things to explain. Such as how we ended up with closed-list proportional representation at national and provincial level, so nobody gets a say about exactly which individuals run their country. Was the NP too overjoyed with a concession that might give it at least a few seats in Parliament to haggle about the details? Did it not think people might come to regret not being able to vote for (and vote out) representatives they know and trust? Did it not occur to the NP that the first-past-the-post system which it dreaded isn’t the only way in which this more accountable representation could be achieved? (Good primer here.) For all its inexperience and lack of power, the ANC sure put one over the NP on the electoral system.

Thanks, Pik for helping to establish a government that isn’t directly accountable to citizens, constituencies and regions. Thanks for helping to centralise power in the ruling party. Oh wait. He can’t talk for the NP. He’s an ANC member now…