Unmasking the DA’s “Open Opportunity” policy

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 01 July 2009

Democratic Alliance (DA) leader and Premier of the Western Cape Province, Helen Zille, likes talking about the need to transform South Africa into what her party calls an “Open Opportunity” society.

An Open Opportunity society, according to Zille’s DA, would be characterised mainly by “individual freedom and the limitation of state power”.

In an Open Opportunity society, “individuals [would be] free to be themselves and pursue their own ends”, with “both the law and the attitudes of the population provid[ing] the space” for individuals to be who they want to be.

On face value, demands for an Open Opportunity society would sound perfectly legitimate and convincing; but there is one big impediment:

South Africa’s history of more than 300 years of white domination, inequality, racism and oppression renders white South African liberals (once partners with the National Party in the apartheid government) unfit to champion social transformation.

An Open Opportunity society, if you really think about it carefully, is a society in which all are given equal opportunities to compete in the market place. The poor are given the know-how to compete with their fellow well-off countrymen and women on an equal footing.

The problem with the application of such a policy in South Africa now would be that only the previously advantaged, few as they are in numbers, would get the biggest slice of the country’s resources because they have had unfair advantages in the recent past.

An Open Opportunity society then becomes a survival-of-the-fittest society. And, as we know, in South Africa today, the fittest would be those who have had access to the best universities, best investments – and 80% of those would be white. And, would that still be a real “Open Opportunity” society, where the rich and the poor are expected to compete on an equal footing?

The DA itself puts it more bluntly thus: “In an open opportunity society, therefore, your path in life is not determined by the circumstances of your birth, including both your material and ‘demographic’ circumstances, but rather by your talents and by your efforts.”

Simply put, it means this: we want to do away with policies such as Affirmative Action because we do not really see the need correct the imbalances of the past. The Open Society policy then effectively translates into apartheid denialism. I do not understand why any South African from a poor background would support such a policy.

The "limitation of state power", in the context of the DA's Open Society, would encourage private enterprise and create jobs. But the limitation of state power, in a country such as South Africa, as is the case elsewhere in the world, means privatisation of state resources.

Rampant privatisation, as history teaches us, results in mass retrenchments, joblessness, poverty and, inevitably, death. In such a society, the rich get richer whilst the poor get poorer. Is that what the DA wants?