Should black Africans copy Afrikaner affirmative action?

1 August 2023

Black Africans should copy the successful Afrikaner affirmative action of the apartheid government. This was the suggestion of Reuel Khoza, a businessman, speaking to the Black Management Forum last week. His theme was summed up in a Sunday Times headline of his speech: “BEE ‘should copy Afrikaners’ “.

There has been much comment since. It is true that Afrikaner affirmative action was far more successful in promoting Afrikaners than ANC affirmative action has been in promoting black Africans. There are important reasons for this. 

There are profound differences between Afrikaner promotion (with job reservation) and African affirmative action (with BEE, cadre deployment, employment equity, transformation and all the other racial preferment). The Afrikaner government wanted to advance all Afrikaner people, including the working classes and the poor – indeed they paid special attention to promoting this under-class. The ANC only wants to advance an upper-class black elite; it cares nothing for the plight of the black working-class masses. 

The Afrikaners, whose great enemy was the British Empire, wanted to promote the Afrikaans language and Afrikaans culture. They set up Afrikaans schools and universities. Afrikaner leaders sent their own children to the same Afrikaans schools as the Afrikaans working classes. ANC Africans seem quite happy with British colonialism despite making angry but feeble gestures against it. Crucially, they prefer the colonial language of English to their own languages. They have not promoted African languages or African culture (apart from a few name changes). They have set up no new schools or universities teaching in African languages.

Black leaders send their children to posh schools with mainly white teachers, while they send working class children to terrible state schools with mainly black teachers. The Afrikaner government disliked capitalism and liked state control, but didn’t interfere politically with state enterprises such as Eskom, Transnet, passenger rail and local government. The ANC government hates capitalism and does interfere with all state enterprises, which is why they have been ruined.

It was revealing that Khoza thought the measure of successful Afrikaner preferment was the number of billionaires it had produced. Actually, this was incidental. Far more important was that it lifted so many working-class whites out of poverty. I notice that all the Afrikaner billionaires cited have made their money through business, illegally in the case of Markus Jooste, legally for the rest of them. I notice that one of the Afrikaner billionaires is Michiel le Roux, who co-founded Capitec Bank with Jannie Mouton and Riaan Stassen in 2001 – long after apartheid had ended.

The biggest beneficiaries of Capitec have been the poor, and especially the black poor, whom previous banks refused to bank. I wonder why black businessmen did not set up a bank for the poor. The most famous black billionaire today is Cyril Ramaphosa, who did make his fortune from apartheid, when rich white businessmen, embarrassed by apartheid and seeking to end it peacefully, bought him out with lucrative BEE partnerships.

Apartheid began when a National Party (NP or Nat) government was elected in 1948. It made formal, by law, the de facto discrimination against the black majority that previous white governments had enforced for centuries. Apartheid was nothing other than a justification for continued white minority rule. But the Afrikaner nationalists wanted something else too; they wanted Afrikaans domination over English-speaking whites.

Many of them still smouldered with hatred and resentment against the arrogant British Imperialists who had seized their lands by force and killed thousands of their women and children in Boer War Concentration Camps. They promoted their own language and culture. But they also wanted to develop the South African economy, and did so with considerable success.

If in 1948 a fully democratic, liberal, capitalist government had come to power promoting free enterprise and the free market, South Africa would now be incomparably better off than it is. Unfortunately, we got apartheid instead. But we did get a considerable amount of dynamic growth under apartheid, leading to a large, successful infrastructure and advanced industrialisation.

The Nats disliked capitalism but left the private mines, industries and banks alone to make profits, as long as they obeyed the apartheid laws (all of which were detrimental to profit-making). Job reservation laws shut blacks out of most of the economy, so hurting the blacks and the capitalists but helping poor, unskilled white workers, who would not have been able to compete against black labour. (This was one of the reasons why the white working-classes were always the most enthusiastic supporters of apartheid.) Our economy did not advance as quickly as it would have done in a free market, but it did advance, and the poor whites were lifted out of poverty – helped by good free education for all whites, rich and poor.

The Nats did not run their great state-owned enterprises with optimum efficiency. There was far too much bureaucracy and protection against the private sector. But they succeeded in providing services. South African Railways ran pretty well over the vast expanses of our huge and varied country, and was a useful source of employment for unskilled Afrikaners. 

My childhood experiences on passenger trains in the 1950s and 1960s were excellent: they were safe, clean, cheap and punctual. The Nats did prefer Afrikaners over English-speakers in the public service, but they didn’t push it too hard in some of the state-owned industries, notably Eskom, which is the brilliant example of apartheid success.

As I have said repeatedly, electricity generation is one of the few areas where a well-run state company will always do better than a private one. This is because running a power station does not require much ingenuity but it does require a lot of capital, which the state can always raise more cheaply than the private sector. Eskom, a state electricity company, makes my point perfectly. It was founded in 1923, but by the time the Nats came to power it was still only providing small amounts of electricity for the country.

By 1956, Eskom’s total capacity was 2,764 MW – less than that of one big coal station today. Faced with a growing economy and rapid industrialisation, the Nats realised they would need an awful lot more electricity. So they embarked on the world’s most aggressive programme of building big, standardised coal stations. Suppliers around the world beat a path to Eskom’s door, offering low prices. A series of huge six-pack coal stations (using six identical units) were built on the coal fields in the northeast of South Africa. Procurement was open and honest, without bribes or anything like BEE. The stations were built mainly on budget and schedule, and mainly ran very well.

They were financed on cheap debt, through Eskom bonds, and quickly paid off. Apart from the restrictions against black labour, Eskom was free to employ whom it wanted, and it always chose the best skills. Many of the most prominent Eskom executives, men like Ian McRae and Alex Ham, were English-speaking. The Apartheid government left Eskom alone. It wanted Eskom to provide reliable electricity and cover its costs from sales. Nothing else. No political interference, no bonuses for racial quotas, no social engineering.

The coal mines were run by private English-speaking companies such as Anglo-American, and fed good coal to the power stations on conveyer belts. Eskom produced the cheapest electricity in the world, very reliably, and was always in good financial health, never needing bailouts from the government.

When the ANC took over Eskom in 1994, it had quite different intentions. Making electricity seemed of secondary importance. Individual ANC politicians saw Eskom as a looting opportunity. The policymakers saw it as vehicle for racial engineering, BEE, employment equity and cadre deployment. Skilled, qualified, experienced white engineers and managers were kicked out and replaced with inexperienced cadres – meaning black chums and cronies loyal to the ANC. 

Crazy financial ideas were adopted (although I have to say that some of these crazy ideas began with white financial managers in the 1990s). Maintenance was neglected. Coal procurement was shifted away from the big mining majors (white monopoly capital) and towards small, inefficient, BEE mines scattered all over Mpumalanga.

They produced very expensive, very bad coal, which was delivered by road over long distances on road trucks, wrecking the environment, damaging the power stations and plunging Eskom deeper and deeper into debt. New stations were not built when they were needed, in the 1990’s, and when they were finally built, with Medupi and Kusile, they were built with bad design, bad contracting, bad workmanship and massive corruption. So Eskom failed, with increasing black-outs and colossal debt, which it can’t repay. All the ANC had to do with Eskom was to leave it alone. This it could not do.

The apartheid era initially saw strong economic growth – over 6% in some of Verwoerd’s years – and world-leading industrial projects such as Sasol in Secunda. Eventually, though, the madness of the apartheid laws began to strangle the economy. The acute shortage of labour and the rising costs of the apartheid bureaucracy wore businesses down. By 1988 the economy was struggling. However, when the ANC took over in 1994, South Africa still had fairly decent roads, railways and harbours, and quite good water and sanitation, and excellent electricity supply.

The ANC wrecked them all. For the ANC, unlike the previous NP, economic success was never a driving intention. The central tenet of the ANC/SACP/COSATU is the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), which is based on Marxism and black African nationalism. It seeks total state control under a permanent ruling party, and black preferment. 

What happens to the economy is incidental. If it succeeds, good; if it fails, too bad; but it does not matter too much one way or the other. This is utterly unlike the NP before it, which saw economic success as paramount. Perhaps the ANC thought that the South African economic machine would just keep rolling along no matter how much the ANC looted it. 

ANC contempt for the black working classes is in dramatic contrast with the NP’s obsessive concern for the white working classes. To some extent this is a matter of history. Black South Africans come from a traditional, hierarchical class system, where the aristocracy and ruling classes are revered and the lower classes reviled. The Afrikaners descended originally from Flemish peasants and became a nation born in liberty. 

They fled from Dutch and then British control, and became a nation of equals in their Great Trek and their subsequent republics. They became perhaps the most classless people in history. When they came to power, they regarded their poorest as their own. Of course, they also wanted their votes, and certainly got them. The ANC elite does not regard the black poor as their own, and has neglected them horribly, and might at last be punished by them at election time. This is causing some panic, but not enough to reverse the NDR.

Apartheid helped the Afrikaner nation to a considerable extent, but it also did them great psychological harm. It crippled them as individuals. They had been a nation of free individuals, mocking authority. Now they became a nation of petty bureaucrats, imposing authority, inflicting stupid, hateful laws. They stopped thinking for themselves. Many of them just became passive employees of the state, unfit for any other enterprise.

When apartheid ended, it liberated black people to a considerable extent, but it liberated the Afrikaners more. They became free-thinking individuals again. Unable to gain employment in the state, or kicked out of employment in the state, they turned to their own resources to make a living. They discovered they were very resourceful. They became dynamic. Afrikaans businesses sprung up after 1994. 

Most of the Afrikaans billionaires we hear about made their money after apartheid. If apartheid had continued, many of the thriving Afrikaans businessmen of today would still be low-paid bureaucrats in the public service. I believe that BEE, affirmative action, employment equity and dependence on the state is now shackling the natural enterprise of ordinary black people. They are becoming helpless economic cripples. If all these wretched policies were scrapped, I believe that they too would show the dynamism and ingenuity that we have seen in Afrikaners after apartheid.

The ANC could learn from the very different experiences of Afrikaans affirmative action under the NP and African affirmative action under the ANC. If it wants to learn – which it probably doesn’t.

This article first appeared on the Daily Friend. The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.

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