Countering wokeness requires leaders to be awake

Even as black economic empowerment (BEE) begins to unravel, reducing the importance of race in economic opportunity, an industry based on emphasising race flourishes, undermining education.

Last week’s column said cadre deployment was being sidelined in statements by Eskom board member Mteto Nyati and in the revised National Implementation Framework towards the Professionalisation of the Public Service. This week, Sakeliga added to the trend.

The business organisation said: “BEE and local content requirements in public procurement have finally been scrapped.”

It said regulations promulgated “in the wake of Sakeliga’s Constitutional Court victory against BEE in public procurement will enter into force on 16 January, 2023 containing no BEE or local content requirements. Even the definition of ‘B-BBEE’ [broad-based BEE] has been removed from the regulations”.

Such developments are resisted by unions, political parties and others who have vested interests in maintaining race-based criteria. Those whose livelihoods depend on racial emphasis include diversity trainers who have for years been carving a swathe of destruction through educational institutions.

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Diversity trainers have plundered South Africa’s wealthiest and most successful schools, charging fortunes to spread the canard that white people are inherently guilty and racist, while black people are incapable of racism.

These are tenets of critical race theory (CRT) which, as Helen Zille pointed out in her 2021 book #Stay Woke: Go Broke, evolved in the US. In a soon-to-be published book, #School Capture, Richard Wilkinson is expected to provide insights into what “woke” folk have been doing in South African schools.

In March this year, Caiden Lang wrote in the Daily Friend: “School capture describes the ideological takeover of a school, from hiring practices to curriculum design to discipline, by a theory of social justice informed by the foundational beliefs of critical theories, most commonly critical race theory and gender theory.”

Thus, the process of capturing a school includes compulsory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training workshops; establishing transformation task teams and “decolonising” curriculums. Ideologically, CRT has Marxist origins, at odds with the liberal, nonracial basis of Democratic Alliance (DA) policies. This is why the recent meltdown at Fish Hoek High School in the DA-governed Western Cape has raised eyebrows.

Sara Gon of the Institute of Race Relations says the Free Speech Union South Africa, which she represents, wrote on 4 July to Western Cape education MEC David Maynier about the potentially detrimental effects of DEI, CRT and critical gender theory in schools.

On 12 July, this was followed by a letter about Fish Hoek High. Unheeded. On 31 October, there was uproar when a facilitator told Fish Hoek pupils that whites were the only people capable of being racist.

She also read a poem mocking Christ as “this blue-eyed and blond-haired Jesus” and suggested the 12 disciples “could have been queer, the holy trinity some weird, twisted love triangle and the Holy Ghost transgender”. Teachers were not allowed into the meeting and pupils not allowed out.

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On Sunday, Maynier suspended the programme immediately, saying: “Investigation is underway to ensure it never happens again.” We should hope so. Countering wokeness requires leaders to be awake.