Please supply me with a list of opportunities for white males of 50 years and older who have been adversely affected by BEE (read: affirmative action).

I am talking about men who had to train black successors who now supersede them, not necessarily because of skill and ability, and now face a “bright” future at the expense of his white tutor. I believe in this country, and I believe in the ability of black people too, when they have followed the normal channels of progression like we had to do back in the day, but I am getting really tired of BEE being forced down our throats. The normal law of nature is that when you force something for long enough, you will eventually break it.

To bring perspective to this e-mail as far as my reaction is concerned, I need to inform you that I have black personal friends in Louis Trichardt who are very capable people in their own right; people who are not looking to me to advance them, but they are putting in the effort all on their own. I applaud them! I am proud to be associated with them. Furthermore, I have been involved in many Bible School training sessions where I had the privilege of training many very capable black students. I state these things because I need to prove to you that my reaction is not based on racism, but rather on fact. BEE has the profound underlying hidden ability to rather act as a tool of destruction and the undermining of both personal and business relationships and integrity by enriching the one at the expense of the other, with no view to really get to the core of the issue which is training every individual in society to make it on their own. Remember, fewer opportunities exist for the white man today in SA than for his black counterpart, and BEE is seen by many whites as being the tool of their demise.

I see a multiracial South Africa succeeding on the basis of individual performance, where BEE is proving to be fair to all. We must be careful that BEE does not become the instrument of the demise of a country with great potential. The white man has got his place in this country, irrespective of the past. I have since my birth never pushed down any other human being on the basis of race, therefore I refuse to pay the price for what my forefathers MAY OR MAY NOT have done. Or are we going to be like Zimbabwe which, after 28 years of independence will still blame their fate on the injustices on the past? Or is it fair to say that whites may in future blame their negative disposition on the injustices of a currently unbalanced and biased BEE system?

My friends, I put it to you that we all need to wake up and smell the coffee before we run our country into the ground via biased and unfair BEE and other systems that will include some but exclude others for all the wrong reasons. What was the demise of Zambia and what is currently the demise of Zimbabwe? Robert Mugabe is still playing with a “toy” (imperial-ism) that was wrong in the day, is by now very broken and undesirable to play with, but which he wilfully uses to cause the demise of his own people (blacks). He is literally killing his own people and blaming it on the “injustices of the past”. Bill Cosby at his best could never be any funnier. But maybe I have forgotten the Caster Semenya deba-cle.

We need to all grow up and get with a real program that will work for all, black and white, and whoever opposes that, black or white, must be brought to book on the merit of real and actual facts.

- Willie Botha (Louis Trichardt)