Johannesburg - This country has been playing identity politics since 1652 and it’s getting worse. There are many reasons and plenty of places we can point fingers, but one person who must laughing in his grave is Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid.
He evangelised a policy of “separate but equal” but, in truth, created a monstrous system of degrees of inequality and access to privilege based on skin colour, hair texture and even the colour of your nails. Whites were not just separate; they were special.
His legacy lives on today, with the fascists of Operation Dudula standing sentinel at the doors of hospitals, turning away anyone who speaks differently and has a darker hue than they expect of South Africans – even if they are South African!
This week, convict-turned-platteland mayor Gayton McKenzie went one further. He told TV news channel eNCA that he would turn off the oxygen of a non-South African in a hospital bed if a ‘South Africa’ needed it instead.
It’s the latest iteration in a crisis sparked by the utterances of Limpopo Health MEC Dr Phophi Ramathuba last week, when she was filmed remonstrating with a Zimbabwean receiving health care in a provincial hospital.
At a certain level, the MEC was right. Foreigners do flock to our country for the hope of a better life. It does place an inordinate strain upon the government resources – those that is which have not been plundered by greedy politicians. But we also have the numbers of illegal immigrants that we do because of the abject failure of the government to ensure that our borders are not porous and that our administrative procedures are fair, fast and accessible.
People walk over the borders – in many places there aren’t even fences. They get to the big centres and then buy papers from the officials who should be assisting them but demand bribes instead.
The answer for the government has not been to resolve the issue, but instead add fuel to the fire by revoking emergency permits to millions of Zimbabweans. Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has just made them all vulnerable to unscrupulous and venal officials at the stroke of a pen.
The worst predators though are the populist politicians themselves; faux revolutionaries who style themselves as the heirs of the Strugglistas, conveniently airbrushing the fact that if it wasn’t for the kindness and courage of the Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Batswana, Basotho, Zambians, Malawians, Angolans and Tanzanians, the liberation Struggle would have been limited to the coffeeshops of Europe and NGO-funded colloquiums far from the battlefield.
Our government is fast to feed the Cuban economy by paying for doctors we don’t need and engineers we can’t use, but it can’t extend a hand – or a hospital bed – to Africans whose forebears kept the flame of the fight alive.
Ubuntu means being because of others. We are because of Africa, but if you listen to McKenzie and his loathsome fellow travellers, South Africans are something better, something separate, something special compared to other Africans.
Verwoerd would be proud.