The road to hell, they say, is lined with empty filling stations. I don't know who "they" are, but I'll have to take their word for it, since I'm staying home this Christmas. Not for me the annual lemming run, with or without fuel shortages. As anyone who lives in Stress City knows, this is the best time to be in Jo'burg: the weather's great and the people are nicer - and scarcer.
Also, I can confidently inform the faceless "they" that back home the road to hell is still paved with good intentions. That's my conclusion after reflecting on the year past and the one ahead in the calm, familiar seclusion of home and garden. Here's a piece of domestic cogitation you might want to mull over during the next three weeks, while the FM is off the shelves for the customary holiday break.
It's about black economic empowerment - one of the key issues of SA's modern history, and if we're not careful one that could go on to become the biggest political curse since apartheid.
How so? Well, empowerment is supposed to deracialise business, and so help normalise society as a whole. This is crucial if we are to weed out the racial inequities that have hobbled the country for generations. But, instead of deracialising the country, the emerging bureaucracy of state control and empowerment codes threatens to erect a new racial edifice that would be as insidious and even more difficult to break down than apartheid.
Apartheid was always fighting an uphill battle, not only because it faced formidable opposition at home and abroad, but because it was a negative, divisive and ultimately unsustainable construct. Empowerment, by contrast, comes with the label of being positive, unifying and necessary for development. And so it should be. But what's missing from government's formula is transformation with growth.
The breakdown in municipal services is a classic example. Commentators warned this would happen when the ANC government began turfing out skilled white officials in the mid-1990s. It's not simply a case of there being insufficient skills. There are plenty who used to fill key posts but left or were fired because their colour didn't match the skin ceiling. Now they're selling hamburgers or consulting to their successors for twice their former pay. The ANC government was too proud to learn from the oppressors, as the Afrikaners did from their former British oppressors before they pulled out.
But there's another dimension to empowerment that must have Hendrik Verwoerd chuckling on his bed of seething coals: the more government tailors empowerment to satisfy its critics, the more it complicates the process. As Institute of Race Relations director John Kane-Berman points out in the institute's latest newsletter, Fast Facts, a new industry to monitor compliance with the empowerment codes is beginning to emerge.
The requirement that companies must undergo annual verification and earn certificates of compliance with the codes has, according to reports, already prompted inquiries from at least 125 people and companies interested in being accredited as rating agencies. Such agencies, as Kane-Berman says, would be assessing not only the race of company owners but, in order to prevent "fronting", would have to "detect the colour of money and assign a racial identity to shares".
The prospect of the private sector, including international accounting firms, helping to revive a process of race classification - for that is what it will be - is ironic, to say the least.
