Beware the new Racism
Advocate Thuli Madonsela, the retired Public Defender, recently tweeted as follows: “I’ve always believed that the invention of the White Monopoly Capital campaign was a clever racist diversion from the state capture question.”
Of impeccable integrity and sound judgment, she was and is listened to by honest and decent South Africans. When she describes a campaign as a racist invention then most of us are inclined to believe her and to think badly of those who so assiduously spread the lie.
We know where it originated: Bell Pottinger, the UK public relations firm employed by the Guptas and by one of President Zuma’s sons used the racist lie against their own client, Johan Rupert and it was enthusiastically welcomed and spread by people like Mzwanele (Jimmy) Manye, paid to be a Zuma propagandist. Bell Pottinger then employed a small army of fake twitterers to spread the lie further and to attack politicians, several in the ANC, perceived to be opponents of the Zuma faction of the ANC, as being soft on White Monopoly Capital (WMC).
Bell Pottinger has now withdrawn from acting for the Guptas and in a remarkable display of self-pity ascribed their action to the social media attacks on them. They had become the story and could therefore no longer with credibility represent the Guptas’ Oakbay company. No matter, though, the racist invention has now become common currency and many of the idiots and economic illiterates that litter the ANC benches in parliament and the cabinet have fallen in love with the term “White Monopoly Capital.”
Why it is so attractive is that the word “white” is used as a pejorative. White = Bad. This is the new currency of a political party that prided itself for decades after it admitted Whites, Coloureds and Asians into its ranks that it was non-racial. The ANC professes to love the Freedom Charter, many of the provisions of which found their way into the Constitution in the stirring words: “We, the people of South Africa, believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”