By PHAKAMISA MAYABA
Before the controversy went to seed, the Afrikaans Uber clone Wanatu must’ve known it faced an uphill. In the labour courts it would have been seriously up against it. In the immediate court of public opinion, its PR was viewed as something straight from the dark ages.
By the time the promotional pictures of a lily-white staff (if you ignore the two brown-looking gentlemen) — all supposedly Afrikaans-speaking, and posing in front of the Voortrekker museum — did the rounds, the issue had slid from a ‘language’ thing down the slippery slope of race. Given its customary savagery, the issue of gender parity hardly featured in the outrage.
Ayanda Allie of the Gauteng provincial legislature was first out to castigate the Tshwane Metro Police Department for allegedly targeting permitless Uber, Bolt and inDrive drivers ‘who happen to be black’ whilst turning a blind eye to white Wanatu. By Thursday 6 February, the City of Tshwane had impounded a chunk of the company’s fleet, citing issues of permits and by-laws.
In response, the company has dug in its heels, vowing to take the city to court and – get this – appealing to drivers from other e-hailing companies (who happen to be black) who aren’t able to represent themselves to join the potential class action. By then, the kindest thing the critics were saying about the e-hailing service was to compliment its slick advertising. Wanatu, a play on the Afrikaans ‘waarnatoe’ or ‘where to’ in English. Danstu, Kerktu, Huistu – off to the dance, the church, home. Pretty creative stuff.
Sadly, the marketing ingenuity didn’t quite extend to the company’s other departments. According to a Werksmans comment on BusinessTech, employing only Afrikaans-speaking drivers could contravene ‘Section 9(4) of the Constitution and Section 6(1) of the Employment Equity Act (EEA) [which] prohibit both direct and indirect discrimination based on language’, In such cases ‘excluding potential employees based on language may constitute unfair discrimination unless the company can prove that the requirement is rational, justifiable, and inherently linked to the job. However, Wanatu faces a challenge in proving that Afrikaans proficiency is indispensable for its drivers.’
This comes against the backdrop of a raft of racially contentious issues, most notably the Expropriation Bill signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa on 23 January, and which has reintroduced none other than Potus 47, Donald Trump, into the fray. In rushing to sign an executive order to cut financial aid to the country and prioritize the resettlement of white South African ‘refugees’ hit by ‘government-sponsored race-based discrimination’, The Donald effectively opened the flood gates, and South Africans of a particular hue in particular were never going to let the matter slide. All hell broke loosem and everyone had to think twice before opening their mouths, tweeting, or having the wrong slogan on a garment.
Still the UFC middleweight champion … Dricus du Plessis. Image: Wikipedia.
Overnight, opinion about Dricus du Plessis, a South African darling in the mixed martial arts arena, was so divided as to impel sports minister Gayton Mckenzie to spring to his defence on Facebook. Du Plessis’s cardinal sin was a pre-match interview to which he wore a pro-Trump t-shirt, and in which he praised both the US president and Elon Musk. On any another night, this might have slipped through without much ado, but the timing was off and the vultures swooped, even just as Du Plessis went on to retain his UFC middleweight title against American Sean Strickland.
It was an orgy of scathing back and forths with celebrities and unknowns alike seemingly given license to spew what must’ve been simmering in their minds all along. Readers should visit the threads themselves, because I can’t bring myself to reflect the extent to which South Africans reveal their true colours when the moment arises.
Similar scenes played out seven years ago. Following the Brand family murders, I wrote on City Press: ‘Like some cyber throwback to the 2017 #BlackMonday protests, those dormant calls for government to prioritise farm murderers so as to nip in the bud what some swear is a slippery slope to an apocalyptic white genocide erupted on my timeline. Peering under that muck, one was saddened that the Brand family seemed, at best, a hapless conduit; at worst, an insignificant afterthought. Hate and paranoia denied them the respectful last rites duly owed to the deceased by, at the very least, putting them at the centre of their own misfortune.’
It seems the adage holds: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. At the heart of those events were the same figures, namely Afriforum and, later, The Donald – who even back then thumb-jerked into a tweet that left some in his office putting out the fires. He tweeted that he’d asked his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ‘to closely study the South African land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers. … The South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers … ‘
Back then, Afriforum and the paramilitary Suidlanders were on a mission to disseminate the message of a South Africa where the white farmer must sleep with one eye open lest the savages pounce on him and pound his head in with a claw hammer. At the time, Trump’s former lawyer was implicating him in federal crimes, and there were those who felt the hostility on South Africa was a deflection from his own woes. Now, there are others who feel his current move on the country is payback for its stance on Israel. Be that as it may, the Expropriation Bill needs to be looked into.
Whereas expropriation under ‘the 1975 Act provided for market value compensation commonly referred to as “willing buyer, willing seller compensation,” the latest variant allows for ‘just and equitable’ compensation. This formulation appears in Section 25 (3) of the Constitution.
What has triggered alarm bells is that this law could result in nil compensation when land is expropriated. Another is the ‘inclusion of a State power that enables the State to acquire property not only for a public purpose, but also in the public interest. This mirrors the Constitutional property clause, which defines the public interest as including the nation’s commitment to land reform.
‘This means that expropriations to make land available to enable citizens to gain access to land for land reform purposes now have a statutory basis in addition to the Constitutional basis.’
Fears have not been allayed by the fact that the Bill still needs to be signed into law, the minister of public works, Dean MacPherson has stated that ‘no expropriation without compensation of private property will happen on his watch’, and the the DA, ActionSA, Afriforum and the Cape Independence Group have indicated they would challenge it. This has also not stopped the doomsayers from spreading alarmist messaging and crying wolf to the West.
Despite Trump’s offer, it seems most Afrikaners, Afriforum amongst them, have no desire to leave the country, its blue skies, rugby, braai by the poolside, not even the vagrants who guide them into vacant parking lots at the mall. Definitely not from Mavis, the compliant domestic who tends to the babies and the house chores.
The black population is also facing similar worries. If the whities go, who will cough up the wages on the farm or in the restaurant, or who will sometimes pay the kids’ fees at boarding school? It’s something of a reality check, hardly affected by the high-flown threats from Washington or Pretoria. And the bigwigs who utter them haven’t been down Colesberg way in a while, especially because there isn’t much infrastructure for blue-light convoys, and certainly none for yachts.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.