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Picture: 123RF/pitinan
Picture: 123RF/pitinan

Trying to help the previously disadvantaged via racial set-asides and preferential procurement is akin to taking feel-good drugs. You will feel good for a while — until you crave your next fix. And no, it’s not a solution to life’s inequities.

The ANC is suffused with entitlement and (race preferential) ideology. It’s a fatal addiction. It has not worked. It can never work. Despite the race preferences that abound in the state sector, the departments of state and state-owned enterprises are deteriorating. Indeed, some are close to collapse.

If the ANC’s ideology was the right medicine the state, and  Eskom et al, would be thriving and a better day would be dawning. After all, it has had a quarter century to prove this ideology right. But it’s not right.

Why? Are preferential set-asides not essential redress? No, they are akin to giving a man a fish that feeds him for a day, when teaching him to fish would allow him to feed himself and his family for a lifetime.

How? Through tough love. By abandoning SA’s entitlement ethos and curtailing  freebies and other forms of preferment. By learning the hard way — the only way — from those who have gone before and have the experience.

The way for a soccer player to become world class is to compete with the best. No set-aside approach will win the World Cup. There is no difference between sport and business. Both are hard and uncompromisingly competitive. They can seem cruel. But there is no easy way.

Government is now attempting to negate a Constitutional Court ruling by enacting new “empowerment” — preferential procurement and set-aside — laws. But laws will not deliver the new dawn. The way to a better life is the hard way.

Willem Cronje 
Cape Town

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