Someone once said that you can tell a lot about a country by the quality of the letters pages in that country's newspapers. Hopefully the same doesn't apply to web pages because, with some notable exceptions, last week's comments following the Black Business Council column were lamentable. We on-line columnists get quite excited when our scribblings stir up enough discussion to provoke responses.
However, my 130 comments last week is hardly going to stand me in good stead when I next meet my fellow Politicsweb columnist Jeremy Gordin for a nice kosher English breakfast and our usual moan about the state of modern journalism. Not wishing to unduly hurt my feelings he will probably mumble something about quality versus quantity into his sunny side up fried egg.
Following the publication of the column I was courteously invited to discuss the topic on SAfm by their morning presenter Siki Mgabadeli. The Black Business Council declined the invitation to participate in the discussion leaving the impression with many listeners that they had something to hide. However, in fairness to them they did phone into the programme and manage to salvage a little bit of credibility.
The calls to the radio station were as depressing in some ways as the comments following the column; many of them hysterical and displaying a deep lack of knowledge when it came to basic economics. A recurring theme from black callers was that the whites still owned too much of the wealth of the country and should go back to where they came from and leave the country's economy in the capable hands of the black majority.
Quite how this would work from a compensation point of view I'm not sure but since organisations like the ANCYL enjoy promoting the myth that all the land was "stolen" by whites in the first place the argument is largely academic. The Black Business Council might do well by promoting a basic course in economic understanding for their new members including a module called "Basic Common Sense 101" which would point out to the lunatic fringe that if you remove a large portion of the tax payers because you don't like their skin tone then you won't have any money to spend.
Three major points emerged from what I will generously call our on air discussion. The first was that there is this amorphous word "transformation" which is trotted out with monotonous regularity in these discussions. Nobody seems quite sure how it is to be implemented but they do know that we must have it whether it's in sport or in business.