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Can Liberalism Fix Race Relations in South Africa?
81 Plays1 year ago
We sat down with Martin van Staden, the Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation (FMF), a South Africa-based organization founded to promote and foster an open society, the rule of law, personal liberty, and economic and press freedom. We discussed recent viral clips from the far-left South African party calling to "kill all Boers (whites)", race relations in South Africa, how they relate back to the situation in the USA, and the conditions that can lead South Africa to prosperity.
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 3
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode three of the Project Liberal podcast, the official project for Project Liberal. I am your host, Joshua Echol, co-founder of Project Liberal, and I am joined as always by our co-host, co-founder, Jonathan Casey. Good morning, sir.
00:00:32
Speaker
Good morning. Thank you for joining us.
Topics Overview: Liberalism in Africa
00:00:34
Speaker
Today we're going to have an interesting conversation with somebody who is a huge advocate for liberalism in Africa and South Africa. And we're going to talk a bit about something that's going through the news in the United States right now. So as many people have heard, there have been many viral posts over the last two to three weeks.
00:00:53
Speaker
about this far left South African political party, the economic freedom fighters had a rally at the end of July. And as part of this rally, there was a call to kill the Boers or kill the whites in South Africa. At least that's the framing that you've seen on social media. This went viral, international outrage.
00:01:13
Speaker
a lot of conflict and conversation around that. And I wanted to bring on our guest to talk about the state of race relations in South Africa, to talk about the economic conditions and maybe a classical liberal or liberal path out of that.
Guest Introduction: Martin Vincent
00:01:28
Speaker
So we are joined today by Martin Vincent who is a jurist and author based in South Africa.
00:01:34
Speaker
He is currently the head of policy at the Free Market Foundation and the former deputy head of policy research at the Institute for Race Relations, which is the oldest continuously existing classical liberal think-take in the world. Martin, thank you for making time to talk to us today.
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a great honor to be here. Yeah, no, absolutely. We are very, very excited to have this conversation and we're a huge fan of your work. I know that we've seen your stuff on social media for a while and you've led the classical liberal movement, or at least you're a very vocal classical liberal on the other side of the ocean and we're very excited to have a conversation. So I'm going to let Jonathan kick us off with some of the questions and we'll get into the meat of the conversation.
Race Relations and the EFF in South Africa
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we all saw the viral video of them singing the song and there was, you know, a lot of right wing commentators were taking this and painting a massive white brush that all black people in South Africa believe this. This is what they're trying to do. They're trying to murder everyone who doesn't look like them.
00:02:29
Speaker
What's the general context that Americans are kind of missing? What are we not understanding? What do we not see? Because when we see that, we look, wow, they're really talking about killing people. So what, as a South African, when you watched as a white South African, when you watch that video, what are you thinking? What's the context that's going on in your mind?
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, so let me try and distill a lot of this. It's obviously a big story. But effectively, it's not a new song. So the chant isn't anything recent. There's been litigation about it, in fact, for decades now. And the Free Market Foundation and other organizations are in an appeals phase about the litigation around it. But effectively,
00:03:10
Speaker
It is said that this is a chant from the anti-apartheid days and the people who sing it who chant it say that it's not about killing white people per se, but it's about ending the apartheid system. And it's still sung today as a way to kind of celebrate the struggle against apartheid and in fact to energize struggle against continued capitalist exploitation and exploitation by whites, et cetera. But it's not a call to action.
00:03:40
Speaker
for violence. Now, obviously, I'm not too keen on that explanation. I think that it's self-serving because it always tends to be these militant, very violent, authoritarian communists. The guy who sang at Julius Palema describes himself as a Marxist-Leninist.
00:03:58
Speaker
and his party, the EFF, very much describes itself as militant. I think it was last year he said that people should be willing to shed blood and die for the revolution and so on, so this is not a peaceful kind of guy, but I think the missing kind of important context that
00:04:17
Speaker
It sometimes helps, but usually doesn't help when the West gets a hold of these things. There's no impending race war in South Africa. It's not like white South Africans have to
00:04:33
Speaker
hide their faces as they walk in the street and kind of scary away just so black people don't see them. My former employer, the Institute of Race Relations, has done annual surveys on this topic and I mean I live here. It's a very great place as far as race relations is concerned. Most sub-Africans of all races, including and especially black sub-Africans, believe other sub-Africans are
00:04:59
Speaker
We're in this together. We need each other for the future of the country to work and for everything to turn out great.
Political Landscape: ANC, EFF, and Elections
00:05:05
Speaker
So there is no real bad racial race relations on the ground amongst ordinary South Africans.
00:05:14
Speaker
the political elite is obviously a little bit detached from that. So the ANC, the governing party since 1994 and the EFF specifically and particularly, they get a lot of mileage out of acting like there's still this kind of race conflict in South Africa and they
00:05:32
Speaker
It's low-hanging fruit, especially we have an election next year like you. So we're in that cycle now where politicians are trying to grab easy things to kind of be on media and so on. And race is one of them. White South Africans still tend to be wealthier than Black South Africans, very low levels of unemployment amongst White South Africans and so forth. And a lot of politicians think, well, we need to kind of exploit this fact and create the impression that
00:06:01
Speaker
Whites are oppressing blacks, South Africans, and therefore we need to kind of generate this hysteria and so on. Just about the song itself, so the word bur, kill the bur is the bur is, that is either a reference
Implications of ANC and EFF Coalition
00:06:17
Speaker
to white Africaners or it's a reference to farmers. So the word, it has a double meaning. Whites in South Africa tended to be agriculturalist farmers centuries ago and kind of the identity became entwined.
00:06:30
Speaker
But I think when that song is sung, it definitely refers not to the occupation of farmers, but certainly to kind of white Afrikaans speaking, tending to be South Africans. Although, yeah, when the word farmer is said in South Africa, especially by these politicians, they also tend to simply mean a white farmer, even though we do have obviously many, many black farmers now.
00:06:58
Speaker
So yeah, that's kind of a quick run through of the context. But just to say the important thing is there's no white genocide here. Please, if you see that, a lot of Americans are getting into that. It's not true. There is no white genocide in South Africa. I wouldn't be sitting here in an office building having a conversation about liberalism with you guys. If there was a white genocide, I'll be in some refugee camp somewhere, or I'll be hiding in a bunker or something.
00:07:24
Speaker
It's not happening. I'm sure, and I think there has been enough evidence that there have been racially motivated killings in South Africa, black South Africans against white South Africans. That does happen, but it's not an endemic kind of organized systemic program by the government or by some syndicate to wipe out white South Africans from the face of the earth. None of that is happening.
00:07:49
Speaker
And all the big organizations in South Africa that are kind of seen as white, they would also tell you there's no white genocide, but there is a kind of a threat to rural South Africans, including many, many white South Africans. And that's kind of where the pushback against the chanting of this song comes from. It's to say that, listen, we already have people vulnerable in rural areas. South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
00:08:18
Speaker
So we already have this problem of violent crime and chants like this just serve to create more political cover for violent crime. So that's kind of where to push back against songs like this is coming from.
00:08:34
Speaker
Okay, I had a quick question. So you touched on the fact that you guys are going to have an election next year, just like the United States. And there are a lot of people projecting that the ruling party is going to lose a lot of power. Now, I don't know anything about South African politics. So I'm curious, do you see the EFF as potentially gaining more seats and moving South Africa farther left? Do you what do you think the projections of the political dynamic in South Africa standard right now?
ANC Governance and Economic Challenges
00:08:59
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, so the ANC has been losing support since the early 2000s, it kind of reached a climax with a huge percentage of support around the country and it's been steadily declining. And now with our previous municipal elections 2021.
00:09:14
Speaker
the ANC received less than half of the votes cast. It still controls most of the country, but that was kind of what triggered people to start thinking, okay, well, this national election is going to be the first one where the ANC gets less than 50% of the vote. That's likely. The kind of debate now is about how much less than 50% they're going to get. So if they get just under 50%, they would go into a coalition with
00:09:44
Speaker
one of the very small parties, the non-notable political parties of which we have many in South Africa, and things will probably kind of just continue as it is.
00:09:53
Speaker
The concern is if the ANC gets like 40% of the vote, or maybe 35% of the vote, then it will basically have no choice but to go into a coalition with the EFF. And that is where a lot of the concern comes in. The EFF is hanging around 13%, maybe on a good day it might get 15%, but we don't think that it's
00:10:16
Speaker
It's not a mass party. It's very dogmatic about its Marcus Leninism. So it's going to hang around those kind of percentages, hopefully closer to 10% ish. So the concern is the ANC might be forced to go into a coalition of the EFF next year if they do very badly. So it's kind of a bitter pill. We want the ANC to do badly in the election because they've been totally mis-governing this country for decades. But you don't want them to do that badly, that they are forced into that type of coalition.
00:10:45
Speaker
Makes sense. So for the sake of our audience, ANC is the African National Congress. And the ANC was once what led by Nelson Mandela at one point. That's led the South Africa out of apartheid. I am curious, how would you characterize ANC's politics?
00:11:01
Speaker
Today. Corrupt. Very, very corrupt. So it's almost that kind of self-American thing you dream up about, like the left-wing government tends to just be looting and so on. That's definitely what we have. The great ANC of Mandela was very, very short-lived. Arguably, Mandela was just an exceptional individual amongst the ANC, but
00:11:28
Speaker
So if you look back to the 1940s, the ANC then already went into an alliance with communists, very understandable in the context that the communists were the only or the Soviet Union, etc, were the only ones willing to support the ANC, the United States and so on weren't prepared to support the ANC when it was slightly more liberal back in those days. But since then, it's been very left wing, very, very socialist. In the 90s, it was kind of hit by that post Soviet realization that
00:11:58
Speaker
Well, our big ally in the East is now gone. So we kind of need to be pragmatic. And then we saw some, call it pragmatic, left wing kind of free market economics from the ANC there for a short spell. So kind of Clinton maybe ish. That was also quite short lived by 2017, when Jacob Zuma became the president.
00:12:19
Speaker
things took a very hard leftward turn and then things became significantly more corrupt where people are the high ranking politicians are just brazenly and openly stealing taxpayers money and and really mismanaging state-owned enterprises.
00:12:36
Speaker
and so on. So the ANC now, if I had to give you a clear ideological answer, I would say kind of central left kind of, it's dominant wing, very, very left wing, it's more ideological wing, but ultimately the people who have power and access to funds simply corrupt. So they'll go kind of the path of least resistance to kind of ensure that the gravy train of corruption keeps on flowing.
00:13:06
Speaker
So South Africa, you know, had decades of apartheid and in the early 90s came out of that.
Post-Apartheid Mistakes and Economic Policies
00:13:13
Speaker
What are some of the major mistakes? What are some of the, you know, black South African, I think have a high employment rate of unemployment rate of over 30%. And there's still massive amounts of poverty. And as you said, violent crime. What are some of the mistakes coming out of apartheid that were made that really have an impact, lasting impact to today? What are some of those
00:13:34
Speaker
What are some of those key things that you say, if we had just done a few things differently, you know, the outcomes would have been far different.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, so the first thing that I feel dirty for having to say, but yes, it's a good thing that apartheid was ended. Unfortunately, a lot of people kind of libertarians in the West are like, oh, white South Africans made a huge mistake. And it's like, well, ending tyranny is never a mistake, but the way you go about that is important and certainly mistakes were made.
00:14:05
Speaker
So the national party, which was responsible for apartheid, by the mid-80s had certainly become far less of an ideological kind of racist, fascist organization. It became very middle-of-the-road, pragmatic, trying to get a settlement for the country that was broadly acceptable to everyone.
00:14:26
Speaker
They became federalists, a good thing. The broadly classical liberal movement in South Africa up to that point was always a federal movement, a federalist movement rather, and the National Party kind of joined into that. The ANC was never federalist and they were very against any type of federalism in South Africa.
00:14:46
Speaker
and very much against the kind of principle that when apartheid ends, there must be a radical decentralization of authority and of power, and that there must be very strict constitutional checks and balances and so on. The ANC was always against that. It kind of nominally supported a Bill of Rights, which is great, we have that, but it would not accept anything that kind of put the central government in a straitjacket as far as economic policy was concerned.
00:15:16
Speaker
So the National Party and the other anti-apartheid parties kind of pushed during the end of apartheid for a significantly decentralized political system in South Africa and the ANC didn't want that and so we kind of met in the middle and there is unfortunately the
00:15:34
Speaker
the big mistake and that is that we didn't decentralize nearly enough. So we settled on a very, South Africa is a federal state, the constitution is a federal one, but it's one where the central government has a very high degree of authority and the lower levels of government have less, significantly less.
00:15:54
Speaker
less authority. So that's unfortunate, and that's part of the kind of the reason why any mistake that is made by the central government today is reverberated throughout the country. So the national police minister's total inability to deal with criminal matters, that's kind of the whole country's problem, whereas in a strong federal system,
00:16:14
Speaker
certain states and provinces and municipalities even could do things that would solve that problem. We don't have that luxury. We do have municipal police forces and so on, but the maneuvering room that they have to kind of pursue their own policy is very limited. So that's kind of a big issue. The other thing is that we didn't.
00:16:36
Speaker
we didn't kind of experiment with free markets for nearly long enough. So apartheid was, for the bulk of its existence, a very state-centric kind of, it was anti-socialist, but only anti-Marxist socialism, but very much socialist in a more general sense of government planning, government sets the agenda for the economy for the time being, that was very present.
00:17:01
Speaker
And then again, in the 80s, when the national party became a little bit more moderate, it started privatizing things during the Reagan, Thatcher era, kind of the global privatization drive. That all happened here as well. There was widespread deregulation and so on.
00:17:19
Speaker
And the ANC continued this for a very brief window into the 1990s, maybe even into the early 2000s. And during that time, we saw the healthy levels of economic growth. So I think about 5% thereabouts, maybe a bit higher, maybe a bit lower on some years. And that was really kind of the period of optimism in South Africa. Everyone was high on this idea we're ending apartheid. We're now back as a fully fledged member of the international community. Things are looking up.
00:17:48
Speaker
And then, yeah, it kind of, we started during the time of the kind of the financial crisis, 2008, but we started a little bit earlier, this kind of anti-capitalism sentiment became embedded here as well and state control of
00:18:08
Speaker
of everything double down and one of our biggest crises today is electricity. We have rolling blackouts called load shedding here where sometimes we don't have electricity for up to 6, 12 maybe even 12 hours of the day because we have a one public utility that is responsible for electricity and this public utility was set to be privatized by the end of the 1990s but then
00:18:36
Speaker
it simply didn't happen because there wasn't real political will for that to happen. So these are kind of the economic policy mistakes. We didn't push the free market insights, the free market potential nearly far enough to kind of drive down South Africa's unemployment and push up our economic growth in a significant way. So yeah, the
00:18:58
Speaker
On the one hand, our constitution isn't nearly strong enough in the African context where governments tend to just do what they want. And yeah, we didn't try free markets for nearly long enough. But yeah, so those are what I would identify as the two biggest mistakes.
Race Relations: South Africa vs USA
00:19:17
Speaker
So one of the things I'm fascinated with South Africa and comparing it to the United States is we had Jim Crow, we had slavery, and there's a lot of correlation between those two. Race relations are a hot topic and probably will be a hot topic as long as you and I are alive, unfortunately. I want to live in a world where it doesn't matter. It's just not an issue, but it will always be an issue in our lifetime. So that's one of those things we have to figure out solutions to deal with these and patch things up.
00:19:44
Speaker
My mother lived in a small town in Texas, and her school lost its accreditation because it refused to desegregate. And that was in 1969. So in America, our history isn't that far back to going back to some of these things that you dealt with only 30, 35 years ago. What are some of the
00:20:06
Speaker
correlations between the United States and South African apartheid? What are some of the social policies? We talk about economic policies. What are some of the social policies, some of the social issues that could have been done either in the United States or in South Africa that either helped or hurt race relations? What are some of the issues that you brought up? Did you guys have an issue with desegregating
00:20:32
Speaker
uh schools or universities or what were some of those the social issues that came up after apartheid and what what could have been done and what should have been done and what was done yeah so i mean i
00:20:45
Speaker
I don't know if it's a self-serving comment, but I think as far as the formerly powerful grouping in South Africa, the white South Africans, I think that there has been a bona fide push for integration, and I think that has gone very well.
00:21:03
Speaker
So you don't have hard-line groups of kind of white South Africans like the self-war eyes again in South Africa. There is no groups that say let's bring back apartheid. There's no groups that really say let's have a whites only
00:21:18
Speaker
state, there are secessionist movements, but they're decidedly non-racial. There is also a kind of called Afrikaner-only town in South Africa that springs into the media and the press every now and then, but it's a cultural town. Any black South African who is fully committed to Afrikaner culture and the Afrikaans language would, I think, be more than welcome to live there. So you don't see
00:21:46
Speaker
kind of that lingering, I don't know how to describe it, almost a kind of sense of superiority, of white superiority in South Africa that I think you sometimes do see amongst fringe groups in the United States.
00:22:01
Speaker
Certainly we have races in South Africa, that goes about saying, but that's not due to any kind of insight into, oh yes, but whites are just so much more intelligent and so forth. You just don't see that in any way. The remaining white races in South Africa, it's kind of a cultural thing that they've just grown accustomed to and that's like, well, they're different from us and we do our own thing.
00:22:26
Speaker
So I think as far as the bulk of the white group in South Africa, there's been a remarkably accepting approach to race relations. So when the national party
00:22:42
Speaker
was finally committed to bringing a party to an end in 1992. It held a referendum, a white-only referendum, and at that point about 60-something percent of the white electorate voted in favor of negotiating with the ANC to end the system of
00:23:00
Speaker
apartheid. There was no trouble around desegregation. If you ask the kind of the radical left in South Africa, they will say that we still have segregation in South Africa today because white people kind of still live where they've always lived.
00:23:16
Speaker
And the amount of the number of Black people living in those suburban areas is not, it doesn't reflect the demographics of South Africa. And that's true. But that's not segregation. That's simply the fact that the pattern of poverty has kind of remained constant. And as I would argue, simply because the government didn't pursue nearly enough liberalization of its stranglehold of the economy to allow Black South Africans really in
00:23:44
Speaker
great masters to empower themselves out of poverty.
00:23:49
Speaker
So yeah, our universities and so forth, most of which were state universities. They were desegregated, I think, even before apartheid ended. The National Party did that kind of of its own accord through the 1970s, I think, even into the 80s and into the 90s. School segregation, I think that kind of held out a little bit longer than the 80s. So schooling was very strictly segregated here.
00:24:16
Speaker
But the moment the apartheid ended, it became illegal to constitutionally illegal to deny anyone schooling based on the color of their skin. And to my knowledge, there weren't any school governing bodies or anything that kind of litigated about that or tried any schemes. I know in the United States, some sovereign schools became private and then they kind of used that a strategy to keep black Americans out.
00:24:41
Speaker
That didn't happen here. There is, to my knowledge, no private school group in South Africa that kind of tries to deny people on the basis of their race entry and so on.
00:24:52
Speaker
So yeah, I think that there are parallels certainly between Jim Crow and the American self and South Africa.
Cultural Shifts Post-Apartheid
00:25:01
Speaker
The one thing I'm quite happy about is that South Africa never had the kind of eugenics type of biological argument. Even the National Party and their predecessors never, to my knowledge really, made the argument that blacks had some kind of
00:25:21
Speaker
biological inferiority that would just permanently mean that they need to serve whites. The kind of the argument for apartheid was that these are two different cultures and that to protect, of course, a very perverse idea, but to protect these cultures, we have to keep them separate from one another. And that obviously ended up serving whites South Africans significantly more and armed blacks of Africans to a huge degree.
00:25:46
Speaker
But there was never that kind of race realist or whatever they call it nowadays kind of push for
00:25:56
Speaker
that there was never a black genocide or anything like that. A lot of people on the radical left say that the apartheid government tried to wipe out black South Africans. No such thing ever happened, nor did it ever cross anyone's mind. So that's the one thing I'm quite happy about, and I think that's one of the reasons why race relations in South Africa really aren't that good. We've really adapted to the new reality of having a largely integrated society.
00:26:26
Speaker
But yes, race is obviously still a big topic here. And like the United States, it's very much something that's being kept alive by the intelligentsia, by media and by universities. It's not something that you really come across
00:26:44
Speaker
in your ordinary everyday kind of interactions at coffee shops and restaurants and in the streets, people aren't obsessing over race and so forth. So I think that's something that post-apartheid South Africa can be very proud of. But yeah, I mean, like I said, the kind of
00:27:05
Speaker
the government's inability to, or unwillingness rather, to really liberalize economics, really did produce the fact that socially we still see these shanty towns, ten built towns that are basically exclusively black,
00:27:24
Speaker
And suburbs, which are in large part still white, but by no means exclusively white.
Advocating for Free Markets
00:27:31
Speaker
So yeah, it's kind of these things are downstream and upstream from each other. We do need significantly freer markets here and significantly more limited government before the mass of poor South Africans, largely Black South Africans, can have that ability to empower themselves to get a job and to provide for their families.
00:27:49
Speaker
I had a quick question, Jonathan, if it's okay with you about that. So I do want to talk to you before we run out of time at some point about what tactically that looks like, what are those liberal solutions, maybe some policy ideas, and we can talk about that here in a minute. But I am curious because we met before we close the book on race relations.
00:28:06
Speaker
In the United States, a big topic of conversation is reparations. It's this conversation that, hey, these people were enslaved, there were systemic hurdles to their ability to build generational wealth, and it caused them to be impoverished because of these governments.
00:28:23
Speaker
systemic barriers to their success historically. So obviously, you know, situations like, you know, like district six in South Africa, there are so many examples of the government getting in the way of people's ability to thrive historically. And I can you can imagine, I'm sure you, you know, you know, this more better than anyone else, it creates a barrier for them to build that generational wealth, which obviously, so
00:28:44
Speaker
I see correlations between the same kind of conversations happening on the United States and in South Africa.
Reparations and Economic Inequality
00:28:49
Speaker
Do you think there's a liberal solution to that question? Like how do you account for these historic injustices? How do you think about that kind of question, that kind of conversation?
00:29:00
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. So the former head of the Free Market Foundation said that there is such a thing called the tough shit rule. And I think that's true to a significant extent, but it's not great. But it is, unfortunately, a reality. And that is that human history is ugly.
00:29:18
Speaker
Its human history is a never-ending process of migration and conquest and oppression, which we as liberals finally kind of have the answer to ending, and that's great and we need to persist with that. But one cannot indefinitely look back into history and try and repair every individual case of oppression that still kind of has legacy effects
00:29:43
Speaker
today. There are places where you can do that. And the one thing that I think is very clear is land property. If you as an individual
00:29:53
Speaker
can prove that this piece of property belonged to your kind of ancestor in title, the person who would have bequeathed this property to your ancestors and so on to you. And you can prove that in court, then you should. And under South African law, you can apply to court and get that property back. And there's been a sense
00:30:14
Speaker
Since 1995, there's been a great process of land restitution in South Africa. It's been very successful. The radical left in South Africa will say it's been a total disaster. But it's been very successful because most of the claims have been dealt with. I think there were about 1.6 million claims. And most of them have been dealt with. There's still a backlog. But the thing that the left is unhappy about is they want these individuals who
00:30:43
Speaker
make these claims to become farmers. I mean, this is not something that is true only for the South African left, this romanticization of kind of like the peasant kind of, we need to go back to a pre-industrial revolution day where people lived on the land and they were farming and they were peasants and so on.
00:31:02
Speaker
So they're very unhappy about the fact that the Black South Africans who make that case in court and prove that this land is in fact theirs, choose rather to be compensated with money. People want to live in urban areas, and that is as true for Black South Africans as it is for anyone around the world. They don't want the farm to go on farm. They choose money. So the law does allow you to either get the land back or to be compensated for the loss. And by far, most have chosen to be compensated so that they can
00:31:32
Speaker
live in the cities, get jobs, live in the suburbs, as one would expect from anyone anywhere around the world. There are some South Africans who say that there should be kind of a white tax where people pay reparations. The fact is South Africa is I think one of the 10 most highly taxed countries in the world.
00:31:53
Speaker
And white South Africans being more wealthy relatively have paid, I think, a huge proportion in taxes since the 1990s. So that's been there and done that. But ultimately, and this is maybe another mistake we made.
00:32:11
Speaker
is that at some point, South Africa needs to stop being post-apartheid. Like at some point, the society needs to shift its gears to looking forward. And unfortunately, our constitution is a permanently post-apartheid constitution. It has many references to apartheid. So as far as constitutional law is concerned, South Africa will permanently be in 1995 forever more.
00:32:36
Speaker
which is it's not ideal. You kind of want to have a system where policies are made based on evidence and rationality rather than based on history that is now receding further and further back into the past. So I think that as far as liberals are concerned, we need to look at what is fairly and possibly givable and that is land. It's identifiable. You can
00:33:01
Speaker
say that this person is rightly the owner of this land. It was taken from his ancestors 100 years ago and he should receive the land back or if he wants he must be compensated.
00:33:11
Speaker
A random guy saying, well, I'm unemployed and I happen to be black, so kind of someone owes me some money. It gets a bit iffy there. And the added complication in South Africa is that we are largely a poor society. We do not have what Europe has, what the United States has, which is a very long history of huge amounts of economic growth, huge economic reserves. We simply cannot
00:33:36
Speaker
even if we wanted to, we could not even afford to pay a fraction of the type of reparations that would be payable in theory if such a program were to be implemented. And increasingly, high net worth South Africans are leaving in droves, immigrating, Black South Africans included, simply because of how the situation in this country has been mismanaged, how crime is just not being addressed and so forth.
00:34:03
Speaker
The pool of economic resources here is so limited that none of that would even be possible. So rather skip that point and implement the tried and tested methods of economic growth and economic empowerment that liberal economics have shown worked.
00:34:23
Speaker
When you kind of compare, it's interesting kind of comparing the United States against South Africa in terms of coming out of these systems, either coming out of slavery, coming out of the Jim Crow laws, and they're coming out of apartheid, it strikes me as very different that South Africa was able to come out of apartheid where the people who are giving up power, the whites in South Africa were giving up this power. They didn't feel like it belonged to them. Whereas in America,
00:34:51
Speaker
whenever power was taken away from the ruling class, either slavery or Jim Crow, where they were actively discriminating against people,
00:35:03
Speaker
that they felt, you know, it seems like in South Africa, they've avoided this kind of systemic undertones of what something was taken from us, you know, the this idea that that, well, you know, it's this federal government forcing us to give up slaves are forcing us to give up these Jim Crow laws. It's really interesting. It strikes me that it turned out quite differently in South Africa, because it seems like it sounds like from what you were saying, there was a
00:35:28
Speaker
cultural shift away from those apartheid policies just on its own naturally in the United States, sadly, to never happen. And so I think that that's that's caused a lot of our our issues going forward. And in many cases in the United States,
00:35:43
Speaker
you have a lasting history of Jim Crow laws, because we ended Jim Crow, well, then we started up the drug war. And so they were able to arrest all the same black people that they wanted to after that. So you kind of have this, you know, Jim Crow didn't really end, right? It just kind of continued on in different ways. Are there still things with apartheid that have kind of continued on, or was that pretty clearly cut off?
00:36:09
Speaker
So yeah, a lot of the logic of the apartheid government continued uninterrupted.
Legacy of Apartheid in Modern Policies
00:36:16
Speaker
So the state-owned enterprises thing continues on. It's not like we went from a socialist government to a capitalist government. It's very much a different form of socialism. So those structural assumptions remain the same. As far as race is concerned, interestingly, so for the Institute of Race Relations, I still run
00:36:36
Speaker
The Race Law Project, you can have a look at racelaw.co.za, which catalogs all the race laws that are currently, and in the past, on the books in South Africa. So in total, since 1910, when the Union of South Africa was first created, there have been around 300 and something race laws in all. And nowadays, we have about 116 race laws still in South Africa on the books at the national level.
00:37:05
Speaker
Now, granted, all of these, virtually all of these, 90% plus, are justified as trying to undo the consequences of the past, so it's kind of affirmative action laws and so forth, but they still fundamentally make use of the same racial categories that the apartheid government may be use of, which is white, black,
00:37:27
Speaker
Indian, which would be we have a large population of Indian descended South Africans in South Africa, and coloreds, which are people of mixed race in South Africa. So these four races still continue in in the kind of law in South Africa as those categories, they're no longer in your line, you're like ID book or on your passport or anything like that, as they used to be. But you have to self
00:37:49
Speaker
classify your race in many business areas of the country. So if you want to do business with government, get a contract to supply government of something or other, or to supply an area of something on behalf of government, you have to show that your shareholding is X percentage black, you have to show the latest thing quite ridiculously is if you are like an agricultural commercial farmer, or you have another business that relies on water,
00:38:21
Speaker
They nationalized water in South Africa in 1998. Then you have to show that you have a 75% black shareholding before your water use license will be approved by the government. So, I mean, this is not something that would be out of character for apartheid South Africa. And it's being done today. In fact, it's a new regulation. It's a new policy of the year 2023.
00:38:42
Speaker
So we still see quite a bit of that public racialism in public policy being implemented here. And of course, it's always going to be justified on the basis of no, but we're trying to undo the effects of apartheid. But that's simply not
00:38:59
Speaker
Once you get an insight into how the ANC, the African National Congress, works and that ultimately everything it does is a way to plug some new political ally into some stream of tax money, then you'll understand that this is all just a facade for the ANC to increase its power and to enrich individuals within the party. The only way the ANC kind of
00:39:24
Speaker
functions is because there are huge patronage networks that kind of keep it all going and as morphs political support becomes dependent on that for for an individual like the current president to kind of get through a party congress to kind of remain the leader he needs to give increasingly amount larger access to tax resources and so on to
00:39:49
Speaker
political functionaries somewhere. And that's what these types of regulations ultimately get used for, despite being justified on the basis of being a redress, a measure of redress after apartheid. So yeah, unfortunately, I think South Africa is still one of the countries in the world with these
00:40:07
Speaker
greatest sheer number of race laws and race policies on the books. So that's very much still here and that's something that as liberal as the IRR and the Free Market Foundation and so on that we certainly condemn as the IRR which
00:40:24
Speaker
Josh mentioned was it's probably the oldest continuously existing classically liberal organization in the world. It was founded in 1929. It was against apartheid and race policy back then, all through today. The Free Market Foundation was founded in 1975 at the height of apartheid, very much against race policy back then and remains so very much today. Very interesting.
Critique of Focus on Past Grievances
00:40:48
Speaker
One thing I love about liberalism and just the tradition of through enlightenment is how forward thinking it is, how forward looking it is. Let's focus on the future. And it sounds like, to me, from what I've understood from this conversation, that the South African government is very much backward looking.
00:41:04
Speaker
It's looking at the past and it's understandable. There's a lot of horrific things happened in the past as really any government and I like the tough shit rule. I think that that applies in a lot of things. Life isn't fair. Life isn't ever going to be fair. We just have to figure out the guidelines for society and
00:41:28
Speaker
try to apply them equally to everyone. So I appreciate this conversation. I think it was fascinating to kind of get a different perspective. I think that Americans in particular are very American centric. We don't really pay attention to what's going on in other countries unless it makes the news, unless it's Russia invading Ukraine, unless it's
00:41:48
Speaker
unless it's somebody chanting kill the boars in South Africa, right? So we lose sight, I think, of a lot of context in a lot of things when we just see snippets of the news here and there. And so I think that that's what we really wanted to accomplish here was to kind of give a broader picture of what's going on in South Africa. And I think you did a really wonderful job in kind of describing what's going on down there. I really appreciate you coming on. Do you have anything you want to kind of plug or throw out there?
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So the Free Market Foundation in particular considers itself quite connected to the rest of the liberal slash libertarian movement around the world. We're partners of the Canadian Fraser Institute. We're also close partners of the American Atlas Network, also a Koch Brothers founded conspiracy and so on. So we're very keen on that.
00:42:41
Speaker
We have historical relations with the Cato Institute and so on. A lot of people around the Mises Institute, some savory, others kind of not always savory. We have those relationships and we're proud of that and we definitely see ourselves as part of a global movement where we're not
00:43:01
Speaker
We do have specific problems in South Africa, but increasingly we think that a lot of these problems are global and that the solutions obviously are global. We are all part of the same kind of liberal tradition of free markets, individual liberty, constitutionalism, and we're very proud of that.
00:43:19
Speaker
So, yes, I, personally, I tend to comment mostly on South African issues, but if anyone is keen to follow me, I'll add you to get the kind of liberal perspective on these things.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:43:31
Speaker
I'd really appreciate that. You can follow me on Twitter. It's at Martin underscore ASFL.
00:43:39
Speaker
By the way, ASFL is African Students for Liberty. You might be aware of Students for Liberty. Josh, I know you were involved there. That was kind of my entry into the libertarian movement. So I'm very proud of my history of SFL.
00:43:55
Speaker
So it's always going to be in my Twitter bio, Twitter tag at least. So yeah, follow me on Twitter. I'm on Facebook as well. But if anyone wants to stay up to date on all of my articles, my media appearances on TV and radio, et cetera, and podcasts and stuff like this, my website is the best place to see that. And that's martin vanstaden.com.
00:44:19
Speaker
And yeah, please also follow the Free Market Foundation, it's freemarketfoundation.com and the Institute of Race Relations, which is irr.org.za. And yeah, I must just as a parting shot say I really appreciate what you guys at Project Liberal are doing.
00:44:36
Speaker
I know that there's kind of been an attempt to make classical liberalism in the United States an increasingly national conservative thing, which I look at very trepidatiously and then very concerned about that. That's the last thing liberals around the world need is the
00:44:53
Speaker
the American liberal movement becoming even more insular. So what you guys are doing is great. Reclaiming the word liberal is something I'm trying to do in South Africa. And I'm very glad that you guys are doing that in the United States. I can only say, keep it up. Make sure the Libertarian Party gets back on message at some stage. And yeah, thanks again for having me. And let's do it again sometime. Thanks, Martin. Have a great day, guys.