Phillip Dexter has a tough job. As "communications coordinator" of the ANC in the Western Cape he has to help convince coloured folk, the majority of the province's voters, to be happy with their low rank in the party's racial hierarchy.
Perhaps he thinks that writing to Politicsweb (‘Race and identity in the WCape', 21 May 2013) in his personal capacity absolves him of responsibility for his party's double think - ritualistically advocating something called "non-racialism", while presiding over racialised government policy.
It is does not. Dexter can hardly reprimand his former comrade Peter Marais, or anyone else for that matter, for serving racial nationalist interests, because it is his party's politics which perpetuates these very interests.
Racial identities are not mere "historical, social constructs". They are created by statute. It is not the Bruin Bemagtigingsbeweging but ANC laws which recreated the white, black, coloured and Indian tick boxes of apartheid's Population Registration Act.
Marais' movement would hardly have reason to exist if affirmative action laws weren't based on demographic representivity, the ANC policy of limiting people's job prospects to their race groups' percentage of the national population (also known as "race quotas").
As the current fallout over national demographics versus provincial demographics in the Department of Correctional Services has shown, the ANC even refuses to adjust its rigid race quota policy to the regional variances of the Western Cape.
As a racial nationalist movement the ANC was always going to find it difficult to serve more than one racial constituency after apartheid, and nowhere is this more apparent than the Western Cape.
The sad implication of all of this, as accurately and crudely explained by former government spokesman Jimmy Manyi, is that coloured people in the province have to move to other provinces if they want to enjoy job prospects commensurate with their race group's numbers.
Thus, shorn of its bullshit intellectualism, the essence of Dexter's argument is that it is unacceptable and even unconstitutional to "unleash the demons of narrow nationalism" unless of course you're the ANC.
He will of course struggle to make this argument to Western Cape voters, but one hopes that South Africans in other provinces discern the damage being done to our institutions, from prisons to the Judicial Service Commission, by the ANC's racial nationalism.
Yours faithfully,
Cilliers Brink
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