Funny that. I've been reading reports of the SA Institute of Race Relations for forever. I don't remember one from the apartheid era that "Affirmative action is killing babies". And, let's face facts: apartheid was a long and structured affirmative action programme - it was called job reservation then.
There can be little doubt that apartheid and its affirmative action appointees killed babies, but I feel that line to be cheap and lacking in intellectual rigour. A bit like writing a piece headlined "Out of touch white CEO's responsible for crippling platinum strike" - sexy and sure to get a read, but cheap and destructive.
To stand up the argument that "Apartheid affirmative action killed babies", you would have to argue that the bureaucrats who devised and oversaw racial budgets for health and which therefore had the effect of killing babies because malnutrition was much higher for black babies than others. You'd have to show disease patterns and burdens as well as reveal the inter-generational outcomes of Bantu Education - again tracing them to their affirmative action appointees, all of whom were white and male or their homeland proxies.
The requirements of complexity and rigour probably explain why the anti-apartheid turned anti-affirmative action crusader think-tank, the SA Institute of Race Relations never once put out a statement saying "Affirmative action killed babies" throughout its illustrious history of fighting apartheid.
Why then did it put out a statement saying "Affirmative action is killing babies" last week? Why did it do so without mentioning the babies who died: Lehlogonolo (the nine month old son of Kehapilwe Sehau), Onalenna (the one year old son of Maserame Mogorogi) and Kabo (the five month old daughter of Keabetswe Wageng)? Or without sending a research team to Bloemhof, the municipality in the North West where the three little ones died after drinking water infected with ecoli?
The unusual absence of rigour and research didn't matter. The headline went viral, resonating with a powerful strand in society that is virulently against affirmative action now, but was pretty acquiescent with it before. The preventable deaths of babies should make us outraged. But to turn their deaths into political fodder for an emotive campaign against affirmative action is to spit on their graves. I checked with the Institute last week - they had not sent a team out to the municipality to study their thesis before launching the campaign; neither had they been in touch with the families of the babies who were killed.
Neither, as far as I can see, did their statement include a study of whether white skilled applicants had been refused posts in favour of black unskilled applicants at the municipality. In other words, it was a neo-conservative thumb-suck.
Like a proper Sunday editor, I love celebrity coverage of Kimye, Bonang and Minenhle, but at City Press we also make it our business to get out further than Mzansi shining. We report and study local government because it is at the coalface of so much. And, so we've developed a pretty good understanding of what happens to water. As the governing ANC found out on the election campaign trail, water is at the forefront of poor communities travails. In fact, Bloemhof was in violent protest about water before the election.
If you trace the story and its narrative arc, you'll find that there is a deadly cocktail being served. Its ingredients include cadre deployment (where politicians who do not make it onto party lists become municipal managers and officials); neglect and corruption (there are numerous municipalities where water tanker owners work in cahoots with municipal officials to prevent the laying of drinking water and sewage pipes). If you ask the mums of the babies, they lay responsibility at the doors of hospital managers where queues kept the ill from being treated and at the municipality.
There is no link, except an ideological one and a possibly racist one, between the Bloemhof babies who died and affirmative action. Ideologically, the SAIRR has always been part of the army mustered against the successful implementation of employment equity. And, racially? Basically the Institute is saying that black incumbents are institutionally and indelibly inferior.
Some of my best friends and I are affirmative action appointees. We also happen to be walking examples, among hundreds of thousands of us, of why such an ideological and racial position is untrue and unwise. It is from the Institute's vast troves of research treasures, and specifically from its dynamic young CEO Frans Cronje, that I have learnt about the impact of a growing black middle class on South Africa; about how black people presented with an opportunity have taken it and run. We children of freedom have kept a recession from the door with voracious appetites for property, pension funds, cars, household goods, you name it.
So, what happened? I think Cronje is being pulled back to the right from the progressive placing he had sought for his Institute - it is a great pity. Progressive liberalism can sit quite comfortably with policies geared to enhance the empowerment of black people. What is more deeply worrying is how viral that awful headline went. Not for the first time do retrogressive debates like this one call upon those of us who benefited from affirmative action to speak up for it. And to speak up for babies who die unnecessarily.
Ferial Haffajee is editor of City Press.
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