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South Africa: Reality Check
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
EDITORIAL
4 July 2008
Posted to the web 4 July 2008
Johannesburg
REMEMBER the days when Chinese people were classified "coloured" but Japanese people were "honorary whites"? When the pencil test was used to determine race group?
It was all completely surreal then. And it's just as surreal now to hear the responses by black business people to the high court judgment that SA's 10000 citizens of Chinese origin were disadvantaged under apartheid and should be entitled to participate in black empowerment deals such as the one at Standard Bank.
What's even worse is that there's a perceptible undercurrent of racism towards SA's Chinese people in some of the utterances. This doesn't sit well from any source, but especially from people who have themselves been victims of discrimination.
It's hard to see how the court could have come to any other decision in the case brought by Standard Bank employee Vernon Whyte, and the community in question is anyway so small that the implications are immaterial. Which makes the aggressive reaction of the National African Federated Chambers of Commerce and Industry and 12 other black professional organisations all the more remarkable. They say Chinese South Africans never suffered under apartheid and protest that the judgment will undermine the basis of SA's economic transformation efforts.
But coming from these well-heeled black bankers, lawyers, managers and business people, this sounds suspiciously like no more than an attempt to defend the spoils of empowerment against any incursions by outsiders who are less black. The pickings are rich: no one wants to share them too broadly.
What this does is highlight, not for the first time, the absurdity to which some of SA's black economic empowerment landscape has descended. We have black billionaires who count as disadvantaged and have access to sweet deals, while more marginal people, dark and light skinned, lack that access.
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Something is not right here, and it's time we were brave enough to take another look.
I know many black South Africans who certainly did not suffer in any way financialy during apartheid but are now gleefully taking advantage of BEE,the exact Chinese position it seems,have your cake and eat it and eat it and eat it,until the governing party realises the harm beeing done to the economy and then only retroactively puts a sell by date on it.Nobody is saying that apartheid was not wrong but to right one wrong with another wrong certainly does not make it right.
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