subscribe Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
Subscribe now
Picture: 123RF/HXDBZXY
Picture: 123RF/HXDBZXY

Even had “empowerment”, in the form of BEE and cadre deployment, achieved its noble aims — to rectify racial imbalances resulting from centuries of discrimination — the horrific cost is now arriving.

The ANC has enabled warring factions to delay phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project for 10 years. Deciding whose turn it is to eat, that is, to be empowered, takes precedence over safeguarding future water supply.

Anthony Turton, the water expert, warns that the water tanker mafia is expanding out of KwaZulu-Natal. These criminals even sabotage water distribution plants. They thrive off the skewed and stagnant infrastructure resulting from ANC empowerment policies.

Are these creeping parasites then the end result of the ANC’s playing racial games, under the umbrella of “empowerment”? Are they the result of the decades-back ejection of pale skills in a desire to create a demographic paradise, with skilled ethnic minorities restricted by neo-apartheid quotas?

We have suffered collapsing municipalities, already collapsed passenger rail, crooked and wasteful procurement tenders and now — collapsing water.

All manner of mafias have intruded into the vacuums created by the race engineering of the ANC. They say nature abhors a vacuum. But mafias move in. BEE is leading us into a mafia state.

The Competition Commission has blocked a major Vodacom fibre network deal, in the interest of “competition”. Cannot the ANC see that empowerment itself has ravaged competition throughout the economy? And left a mafia-filled vacuum?

Let’s face the reality that any state can only create an environment for economic activity — not its ethnic complexion.

Willem Cronje
Cape Town 

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.

subscribe Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
Subscribe now

Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.

Speech Bubbles

Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.