"Why I shall join the ANC"

Colour blind, amoral and irresistible, the market generates wealth and distributes it with an efficiency no government planners can match.
Forget "affirmative action", an ideological hand-me-down from America, so similar to Verwoerd's vicious laws of racial discrimination. Provide equal opportunities and the market's invisible hand will do the rest. That is why I have decided to join the ANC, so that in my rough-and-ready way I can bump a bit of practical business sense into their well-meaning but sometimes ideologically rigid heads. Parties change. That is how politics works.

In fact I had no choice. I could hardly join that sorry little rump of white, English-speaking snobs led by the obnoxious Tony Leon, who wears platform heels and shoulder pads in a forlorn attempt to appear tall and manly. I am sickened but not surprised to hear that yapping little runt attacking the ANC's Employment Equity Act. By his vicious defence of white privilege and denial of economic development to millions of blacks living in bitter, grinding poverty Leon has painted himself into a corner.

Of course affirmative action is necessary. How else will white managers, who have been earning obscene salaries from exploiting black workers, promote black men to senior positions?
                          
Apparently 4x4s now outsell BMWs and Mercedes in the salesrooms of our smart suburbs - and this in a country of bitter, grinding poverty. Is there no end to the search for shiny baubles and status symbols that so obsesses our white posturing classes and our black nouveau riches?

I returned from my villa on the Côte d'Azur to find that the marriage between the DP, which uses ruthlessly efficient opinion polls to find out what mix of bigotry its privileged electorate wants to hear next, and the NNP, a disorganised gang of failed racists, had ended in divorce. I knew it would. I take no pride in being proved right. Van Schalkwyk reminds me of the sort of plump, snivelling Afrikaner boys we used to beat up at the bottom of the playground when I was at primary school in Potgietersrus in the 1920s. No doubt Leon, who sports inflatable rubber biceps, would like to beat him up too if only he were tall enough and had not painted himself into a corner.

The NNP will never change. Parties never do. That is the nature of politics.

Next week: Why I have decided to ignore Tony Leon.