What Roets gets right, and what wrong

THIS week, Ernst Roets, executive director at the Afrikaner Foundation, appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show in the US, spotlighting what he sees as the dire plight of Afrikaners. His supporters are cheering, seeing a champion for their cause. His critics are fuming, branding him a privileged, treasonous racist, peddling misinformation. 

So who is right? 

Roets made four bold claims – about South Africa’s collapse, the ANC’s governance, Afrikaner persecution, and societal breakdown. As an Afrikaner myself, living in the same community as Roets (our kids even attended the same school for a time), I see the same reality he does but draw starkly different conclusions. Roets is partly correct, but fundamentally wrong. 

Roets’ four claims

1. State of South Africa: Roets paints the country as crumbling under a racist government, one that discriminates against minorities, pursues land expropriation like Zimbabwe did, and presides over rampant crime and failing infrastructure.
2. ANC governance: He casts the ANC as a socialist liberation movement with a violent past, committed to black nationalism and communist allies, pushing a two-phase “national democratic revolution” while denying atrocities like farm murders.
3. Afrikaner community: Roets describes Afrikaners as a resilient, religious people with deep roots in South Africa, facing targeted farm attacks, dehumanisation and a looming genocide risk, arguing their only future lies in self-rule as an ethnic enclave.
4. Societal dynamics: He sees South Africa as a tinderbox of racial tensions and mob violence, forcing communities to self-organise amid a failing state.

Roets and I share some ground, but his lens distorts the bigger picture. Here’s where he stumbles:

Struggles are real, but structural, not racial

Yes, the country grapples with high poverty, crime, and a fiscal crisis, as Roets notes – and I agree these partly stem from ANC ineptitude over three decades. But the root lies deeper: an economy shaped by apartheid that can’t absorb our young democracy’s workforce. 

Crime statistics show that murder and robbery plague all races, not just minorities. Infrastructure – like Eskom’s blackouts or potholed roads – is crumbling, but so is that of the US, due to gridlocked politics and self-interest. Our crisis isn’t racial; it’s structural.

ANC isn’t a socialist bogeyman

True, the ANC has socialist roots, bolstered by Soviet support during the Cold War against Western-backed apartheid. Its distributive policies – think bloated public debt and BEE – have spooked investors. But look closer: former president Thabo Mbeki ditched the 1990s’ socialist Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) for the market-friendly Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgi-SA). 

Because of this pivot, he was ousted in a 2008 coup by trade union grouping Cosatu, Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma, who then opted for state capture. Zuma’s technocrats drafted the National Development Plan (NDP), but Cosatu rejected the “neoliberal” bent in its economic chapter, and corruption eroded confidence. 

By the end of that era, Cyril Ramaphosa inherited a hollowed-out state.

The ANC did have one socialist experiment: social grants for 27 million poor South Africans, a de facto universal basic income which Japan, the US, UK and EU all copied during Covid-19. 

It’s unsustainable, sure, but it’s kept millions from starvation.

So, in essence, the ANC has been quite centrist, capitalist, pragmatic and rational in its policy approach. But it tried to govern, debilitated by its alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu, both of which collapsed as global communism waned and the majority of affiliate unions left. 

The ANC, now in the government of national unity alongside the market-fundamentalist DA, has been incompetent, but as a centre-left party set up to fail by the structure of the political landscape, not on the basis of socialism or race hatred as Roets imagines. 

Afrikaners are scared, and thriving

As for the Afrikaner, in this same period the vast majority have become wealthier, healthier and more culturally expressive. Afrikaner music, art and festivals have become a staple of social life, with outdoor food markets, live events and smiling school children singing in support of a now world-famous and increasingly multiracial Springbok rugby team. 

Why? Apartheid’s investments in white education and infrastructure handed us a head start. Roets mourns decline from a perch of privilege. 

Crime? It’s brutal – our rape and murder rates rival war zones – but it’s a national scourge, not an Afrikaner-specific one. 

Part of the reason for the Afrikaner’s relative success has been our dominance of the private sector and strong civic institutions in which the likes of Roets, and I, have found ourselves. 

By way of example: if you have a new pool pump or geyser installed at your house, it will be a white entrepreneur in a bakkie who arrives with a team of black workers who are most often undocumented Zimbabweans, Ghanaians or Mozambiquans, who do the work. The white man gets the profit and the migrants get the wages, and black South Africans get left behind. 

So, the difference between Roets’ perception and reality, is that insecurity is a South African reality shared across race groups – while fearful and seemingly embattled Afrikaners draw the risk onto themselves, as they make money in the private sector and live under a perceived race-specific threat. 

To do so is at first irrational, until one considers that Afrikaners, including myself, were socialised to see the world through a prism of “race first”. This meant that people in a public park were first and foremost “black or white”. That the politician driven around in a luxury car is first and foremost a “black or white” person – not a mere person. 

This is the residue of an apartheid mentality, and it is no surprise that when individuals in the Afrikaner community suffer violent crime, as they often do, their response is to think, “Why am I, as a white person, being targeted.” 

Now to be fair, South Africa does sport our fair share of hateful race-baiters who spew divisive rhetoric. Where I do agree with Roets, is that the ANC government and the institutions of state under their influence, including the courts, have naively condoned unhelpful expressions of political speech, such as the singing of the “Kill the Boer” song. They have described these as tolerable, against the background of the historical context. But the context has changed, and these words are no longer helpful, but harmful. 

In my view, this has been a major misstep by the ruling black majority from the perspective of nation-building and has reinforced the sensitivities and fears of many South Africans, especially the Afrikaners. In that sense, Roets is now a symptom of the failure to put a stop to the divisiveness. 

In light of all these national challenges, Roets is right to ask, “When will the big black mob come for me?” 

But where Roets is wrong, is that the mob is not sitting around plotting over him as an Afrikaner in particular. Rather, the forms of mass social unrest, destruction of property and anarchical looting that we occasionally see in South Africa, targets truck drivers of African descent, public and private infrastructure alike, and finds its roots in inequality, and a decimation of the social fabric – a breakdown in law and order. 

In that regard, Afrikaners today are unfortunate bystanders, and historically were the not-so-innocent architects. 

Land reform isn’t Zimbabwe 2.0 – yet

As for Roets’ major assertions about land and property rights being under threat: the facts are that the ANC government is committed to changing the racial composition of land ownership, as was the Afrikaner apartheid government. 

However, far from arbitrarily “seizing land” as in Zimbabwe, the ANC initially set out to use a system of compensation of owners, against whose property land claims had been instituted, and later through a process of constitutional review and law sought to enable the state to expropriate land. 

Any honest analyst would admit that the ANC has drifted dangerously towards populism in relation to the handling of land reform, forced to do so once again by their own ineptitude at executing their earlier principled policy stance. 

But the forces demanding the wholesale expropriation of land held by whites, have increasingly been from outside the ANC and not within, such as from the EFF and the MK Party of Jacob Zuma. Criticism of the ANC by these more radical margins of the ANC’s own historic constituency is that it has been too pragmatic and responsible, and not radical enough. 

In saying so, I share Roets’ view of the risk of the ANC’s populist slide, but know that the underlying drivers, as they were in Zimbabwe, are the inability to govern the economy in an inclusive way for the benefit of the black majority, not on the basis of race hatred. It was a matter of political survival for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and similarly it’s a matter of political survival for the ANC after Ramaphosa. 

The tragedy of Roets’ narrative

In conclusion, the tragedy of Roets’ privileged ignorance is that it decimates the one monument around which 99.99% of South Africans have rallied – non-racial democracy, united in its diversity. 

Roets says he “respects” Mandela, and this is the reason: Mandela’s legacy of reconciliation was real and has been the only reason the particularly fraught social contract in South Africa has held as long as it has. 

Were it not for the humanity of the black majority, and their patience in the face of persistent white welfare, even as they suffer, Mr Roets and I would not have the freedom today to have this debate. 

His enclave dream and tall tales of “black danger” echo apartheid’s swart gevaar paranoia. Instead, he should thank his stars for this stunning country and its peace-seeking people, desperate for a better future. He is fortunate to be part of a society in which forgiveness rather than retribution is the organising principle. 

Starting there, we have much work to do to build a better South Africa, and in that regard, we are no different from the rest of the world.

• Watch the full interview here.
  
• This article originally appeared in Daily Maverick.

♦ VWB ♦

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