The Africa Review in Five highlights African current affairs from a Christian perspective. Listen and subscribe through Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Today is Friday, July 14th, A.D. 2023. This is The Africa Review in Five, written by Paul Schlehlein and presented by Yamikani Katunga
The Rotten Fruit from Affirmative Action
This month marks the 20th anniversary that the Maputo Protocol was adopted, a women-specific document urging affirmative action on behalf of females in Africa.
This document lists a number of women’s rights, including the right not to be discriminated against, which according to this document, means that “states are required to integrate a gender perspective in their policy decisions.”
Here we see again the evils of affirmative action at play, this time not in relation to race but to gender. This is not about equal opportunity. It is about forcing equality.
In a recent episode, we explained the assumptions behind affirmative action. Some people suppose that if there is a lopsided distribution of income and good jobs, it must mean there are discriminatory schemes against the less fortunate. The only way to balance out these issues, as the argument goes, is to offer counteracted preferential policies on their behalf.
However, we learned last time that affirmative action is both unbiblical and bad policy because it is inherently racist, it encourages a victim mindset and it is inconsistent. On the last point, for example, no affirmative action policies were used for the Orlando Pirates soccer squad, even though the entire team is black. Why? Merit. The best players made the team.
There are many more reasons to abandon affirmative action.
Affirmative action creates racial tensions. It hinders reconciliation. For example, men that lose out simply for being a man may become embittered towards women. Employees and students will wonder, “Am I succeeding because of merit or is it due to affirmative action principles?” This will only increase the discord between fellow workers.
Next, affirmative action is dangerous. When government forces quotas for occupations like doctors and airline pilots, and the hiring is not based strictly on merit but instead on race and gender, the lives of the patients and passengers are put at risk.
Moreover, affirmative action increases government power. Free societies have small governments. Governments that oversee the smallest hiring methods of their people must grow bigger and bigger and thus remove more freedom from their citizens.
Affirmative action encourages corruption. Nowhere is this seen more clearly in South Africa than in Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE, which demands equity ownership and board positions. For decades BEE has been the source of rank abuse, wasting tax-payer money and enriching only a tiny elite. South Africa demands that many companies comply with their BEE scorecards—the more diverse, the more black, and the more female, the better the score. For example, if your senior manager is black and female, you get two points. Black and male earns just one point. White and male earn them nothing. Isn’t this the very same crime of apartheid, but in reverse?
This problem is not unique to South Africa. Some years ago the country of Malaysia was concerned that the Chinese and Indians in the country had too much wealth, even though the Malays were the majority of the population. So they installed affirmative action policies. It backfired. Stealing freedom always backfires eventually. Affirmative Action policies only enriched Malaysia’s cultural elite, encouraged many skilled workers to flee, and enflamed intercultural discord.
Affirmative action also hurts the economy. It damages small businesses because of the high costs of paperwork. It encourages early retirement and drives skilled labor away toward other countries, commonly known as “the Brain Drain”. According to Stats SA, there are over 600,000 South Africans living abroad. Affirmative action also discourages international companies from investing in the country.
Furthermore, affirmative action opens the door to bigger problems. If preferential treatment must go towards blacks and women, then it is but a small step to demand that employers and universities give special treatment to, say, homosexuals and Muslims. Aren’t they a victimized group as well?
Tenth, affirmative action devalues real accomplishment. The thinking goes: “Why should I try my best when so-and-so will get hired ahead of me anyway?” Or, “Reaching this position took so much work, but now so-and-so was just handed the same post with little effort. I might as well coast.” This creates what Thomas Sowell calls the “soft bigotry of low expectations”
Eleventh, affirmative action creates unemployment and school dropouts. When a skilled B student is artificially forced into an A school, he won’t be able to keep up and he’ll often quit. Tintswalo should have been an elementary school teacher. Affirmative action convinced her to be a medical doctor. Now she’s neither.
Finally, affirmative action is vague. Who exactly are the “sons of the soil” that should be given such preferential treatment? Are these special racial groups really indigenous to their country? Often they are not. For example, I live among the Tsonga people in South Africa. But they did not originate in this country. They sprang from Central and East Africa, then moved to Mozambique, and eventually a portion of them rested in north-eastern South Africa. Why should an accident of geography demand that Tsonga South Africans have such an immense advantage over Chinese South Africans? These questions are rarely asked.
One solution to affirmative action is humility. Romans 12:3 urges us not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought. Governments must stop thinking in terms of what “they” can do for “them”, but instead give individuals the freedom to hire, enroll, and pursue whomever they want, so long as it is based on merit and character.
And that’s it for The Africa Review in Five on this Friday, July 14th in the year of our Lord 2023. Subscribe to the Missionary Minds podcast on Spotify or Apple podcasts. I’m Yamikani Katunga. Be not weary in well-doing.