Reply by Solidarity's Chief Executive Dirk Hermann to the open letter from journalist Jan de Lange: 

Dear Jan

How can South Africa escape the tyranny of representivity?

My late uncle, Kosie, didn't belong to a medical fund and desperately ill, he landed up in a state hospital. I visited him there and it was a most disturbing experience. The smell of urine and soiled bedding will stay with me forever. My dad managed to organise that uncle Kosie be transferred to a private hospital. The family paid for it. Requiring a great deal of effort I had to negotiate the transfer with the hospital. Hospital management was fully transformed.

I helped when uncle Kosie was trollied from the ward while the desperate eyes of the other patients in the ward, two white and around 35 black patients, pleaded: just take me with. Half-nauseous, I walked away from the affirmative action paradox - a transformed hospital with mostly black patients desperately wanting to escape the transformation.

I think we must be more frank about affirmative action. Affirmative action makes people sick; it destroys municipal service delivery; it turns lights off; it drives our best police members away and, as Frans Cronjé, CEO of the Institute for Race Relations says, it allows babies to die. That's my problem, Jan. I see those things, but too many people remain silent. I want to cry it out, not only on behalf of the small group of whites whose right to dignity and equality is undermined but also on behalf of the masses of black South Africans who have to pay the price for the ideology of representivity.

The problem is that affirmative action degenerated into an ideology that does not take reality into consideration. All has just become a matter of figures. In the Western Cape, coloured South Africans must be transformed from constituting more than half of the province to constituting less than a tenth. When Renate Barnard is considered for a position, the SAPS doesn't take service delivery into consideration, only race. Jennila Naidoo is told that at certain officer levels the ideal figure for Indian females is zero.

The SAPS's race figures look "better" but the police's service to ordinary South Africans is deteriorating. People are being sacrificed for the sake of a so-called great national idea. An idea that is not a reality anywhere else in the world - a society that looks exactly the same everywhere. The great idea involves major programmes of social engineering to redesign the South African society, and if your race is over-represented in a region, then you need to relocate.

Jan, that's not affirmative action, but a short-sighted race ideology.

South Africa's skills supply is one of the underlying factors. The fact is that the distribution of skills and training doesn't reflect the national demography. A degree is the minimum qualification for senior job levels in the public service, but only 49% of those with degrees in South Africa are black. Black South Africans already fill 73% of the posts at those job levels, a percentage that far exceeds the skills supply. This pressures service delivery. This is not a black/white issue at all; the question is rather whether skills and experience match the post. This doesn't even include that to have an effective civil service institutional memory; regional realities; individual skills and passion and so forth, also need to be taken into consideration.

The assumption of the tyranny of representivity is that if South Africa's workforce is representative of the national demography at all places and at all levels then we are an equal society. It's not that simple. If tonight the broad unemployment rate of white people is equated with the average in South Africa, only 553 000 posts would open up for black South Africans. The broad unemployment rate among this group would drop by a mere three percentage points, from 39,9% to 36,9%.

The answer must lie at a different level and that is on the input side of affirmative action, namely training and development. Much more ought to be written about this.

Jan, I often address audiences and often the majority of the audience is black. Quite rightly, the question is how we convey our messages to reach beyond each other's built-in filters. I don't have a quick fix for it, but political correctness, which as a matter of fact amounts to dishonesty, is not the answer.

The issue of the symbolic recognition of suffering of the past is one that is internationally discussed. Ward Connerly, back American activist against affirmative action, asks why black Americans support affirmative action even when they don't benefit from it. His answer is that the system is in recognition of the suffering of the past. He addresses the problem, not by maintaining the system, but by liberating African Americans through a series of referendums that ban affirmative action in some states. I subscribe to the Connerly school of thought that believes the past shouldn't be used to nurture reliance on the system and that the victim/offender relationship must be broken for it is lethal to a mature political debate.

Dirk

Dirk Hermann is Chief Executive of Solidarity.

This letter first appeared in Rapport newspaper.

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