Before the controversy had degenerated into seed, Wanatu must’ve known that they faced an uphill. In the labour courts they would’ve been seriously up against it. In the immediate court of public opinion, their PR would’ve been viewed as a page 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 posing in front of the Voortrekker museum did the rounds, the issue had slid from a ‘language’ thing into the slippery slope of race or a ‘white’ one. Those tend to be so particularly savage that even 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 on 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 – the irony! – 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 of the e-hailing service was to compliment the slick advertising. Wanatu, a play on the Afrikaans ‘waarnatoe’ or ‘where to’ in English. Danstu Kerktu Huistu – To the dance, to church, to home. Pretty creative stuff.
Sadly, the marketing ingenuity didn’t quite extend to the company’s other departments. A cursory glance at labour opinion, Wanatu employing only Afrikaans-speaking drivers could be a contravention of ‘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’ according to a Werksmans Attorneys comment on BusinessTech. 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 in the backdrop of racially contentious issues most burning of which is 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 floodgates and South Africans of a particular hue in particular were never going to let the matter slide. All hell broke loose and everyone had to think twice before opening their mouth, tweeting or having the wrong slogan on a garment.
Overnight, opinion on Dricus du Plessis, a darling of SA in the mixed martial arts arena was so divided as to impel sports minister Gayton Mckenzie to spring to hi defence on his Facebook account. Du Plessis’s cardinal sin was a pre-match interview to which he wore a pro-Trump t-shirt and went on to praise both the US president and Elon Musk. On any another night, this may have slipped without much ado, but the timing was off and the vultures swooped down hard even just as du Plessis went on to successfully 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. The readers will visit the threads because I cannot bring myself to repeat just how much South Africans are capable of revealing 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 indeed 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’d 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. “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 should pounce on him and pound his head in with a claw hammer. At the time Trump’s former lawyer was implicating the man 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 the country’s 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 will seller compensation,” the latest variant allows for what is called ‘just and equitable’ compensation. This concept of ‘just and equitable’ compensation was introduced into law when the Constitution was promulgated and is found in Section 25 (3) of the apex law.
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.’ That the bill still awaits the president to announce its commencement or that the Minister of Public Works Dean MacPherson has emphatically stated that ‘no expropriation without compensation of private property will happen under his watch’ or that the Democratic Alliance, ActionSA, Afriforum, and the Cape Independence Group have indicated they would challenge the Act has done little to allay fears. Or in fact to stop the doomsayers from spreading alarmist messaging and crying wolf to the West.
Despite Trump’s offers it seems most Afrikaners, Afriforum amongst them, have no desire to leave the country, its blue skies, rugby, braai by the poolside, not even from 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 the restaurant or who will sometimes pay the kids’ fees at boarding school. It’s something of a reality check. A check that the highflown threats from Washington or Pretoria have little bearing on the ground. And the bigwigs who say them haven’t been down here in a while especially because there isn’t much infrastructure for blue-light convoys, certainly none for yatchs.