Dr Ramphele is a Dangerous Black! There is no Black person more dangerous than a Black liberal. This is the kind of Black person who is not looking to put an end to the diabolical system of White supremacy, but one trying to improve their position in it. One such dangerous black person is Dr Mamphela Ramphele. Personally, I am not shocked about the DA/AgangSA merger that was announced yesterday morning; it was overdue. I had a problem with AgangSA from its very conception because contrary to the assertion that it was presenting an alternative to the DA, AgangSA was nothing more than a Black-led version of it. What irks me is how Blacks like Dr Ramphele have become instrumental in delivering Black natives to the abattoir of White supremacy. Many people on social networks are angry with the DA/AgangSA merger, claiming that Dr Ramphele has “sold out” on the philosophy of Black Consciousness that she became famous for championing in the 1970s alongside Steve Biko, the founder of the BC movement. I find such people rather sensationalist, for they are suggesting that until this merger, Dr Ramphele was some revolutionary BC activist; a ridiculous insinuation that couldn’t be any further from the truth. The reality of the situation is that Dr Ramphele shed off her BC skin a long time ago. We are talking here about a Dr Ramphele who failed to transform the University of Cape Town during the time she served as its Vice-Chancellor. It is this same Dr Ramphele who worked as a Managing Director of one of the World Bank, a Bretton Woods institute that has crippled the economy of many African countries through its dead aid and structural adjustment programmes. When AgangSA was established a few months ago, I studied its economic policy very closely (agangsa.org.za/pages/economy-policy). I wanted to ascertain whether AgangSA was just another black skin white mask organisation, or if it truly held promise for the working class majority of this country. It became clear to me that AgangSA had no conception whatsoever about what the real problem with the South African economy is. The organisation failed dismally to give a thorough analysis of class contradictions that are still characterised by White monopoly capital, raising instead luke-warm arguments about “cartels” that “stifle innovation” in our economy. There was nothing about fundamental issues such as land and mineral wealth. How does one even begin to raise issues about the extractive economy of our country without paying special focus on the mining sector in particular? The mining sector is a critical sector in the SA economy. Not only does it contribute an estimated 6% to the annual GDP, but according to statistics, the country produces 10% of the worlds gold, and has 40% of the worlds known resources. It is estimated that 36 000 tons of undeveloped resources – about one-third of the worlds unmined gold – still remains. This means that mining has the potential to be the cornerstone of the economy, with a potential of significantly eradicating problems of unemployment and underdevelopment. The growth in global population has a proportional relationship to consumption and therefore, a demand of raw materials that are needed for the production of many goods. Therefore, a political party that fails to address this critical issue in its economic policy has already failed to understand that as part of dealing with the land question, a question that is very fundamental to our struggle, the question of the mineral wealth of this country, and the transformation of key sectors of the economy thereof, is vital. Dr Ramphele’s silence on these important issues is no accident. She served in the board of Anglo-American Corporation, a British multinational mining company. This company was founded in Johannesburg in 1917, during the height of imperial devastation in our country, and is the single largest extractor of South African mineral resources, with a net income estimated at $614 million (more than R6 billion). As a board member of Anglo-American Corporation, Dr Ramphele made a significant amount of money and her shareholdings in Anglo American, Gold Fields, Sibanye Gold and PTI Select Managers Funds is R1.4 million combined. AgangSA’s labour market policy was also as reactionary as its economic policy, making assertions about how worker economic literacy had to be improved so that workers would not make “unrealistic wage demands”. This implies that the toiling workers in factory floors and those working underground in mines need to be taught to not demand that which is due to them. AgangSA, with the contemptuous attitude typical of liberals, views exploited workers, not employers making millions of rands in profits, as a problem to the development of our country. Considering that the majority of these workers are black people with poor families to feed and children to educate at highly expensive learning institutions, the implications of this implied “solution” by AgangSA was troubling. Why then would anyone in their right mind think that Dr Ramphele has just undergone a Damascus conversion this morning when she merged AgangSA with the DA and accepted to run as DA presidential candidate for this year’s elections? Dr Ramphele simply affirmed what many of us already knew long ago: that she is a Black liberal who is not fighting to annihilate the system of white supremacy, but to better position black people in it. She is one of the beneficiaries of a BEE policy that has done nothing more than create a Black comprador bourgeois elite that has filtered through the Berlin Wall of White monopoly capital while millions of ordinary blacks remain on the receiving end of structural inequalities and abject poverty. Though she didn’t have great support with AgangSA, Dr Ramphele has delivered the few thousand Black members and followers to a White supremacist DA whose neo-liberal agenda has never been secret. It is a tragic day for occupied Azania that we now use Black faces to champion and consolidate a white supremacist agenda. It reminds me of the words of Steve Biko who, on page 52 of I WRITE WHAT I LIKE argues: ...The fact that we are NOT White does not necessarily mean we are all Black. Non-Whites do exist and will continue to exist for a long time. If ones aspiration is Whiteness but his pigmentation makes attainment of this impossible, then that person is a non-White...Black people - real Black people - are those who can manage to hold their heads high in defiance rather than willingly surrender their souls to the White man... By: Malaika Wa Azania
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:43:10 +0000
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