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.