Jobs, Aids and race
From Mr R.W. Johnson Sir: I was astonished to read Margaret Legum's letter (16 September) which seems to have virtually no contact with reality at all.
She says that it is untrue that South Africa's agriculture minister has been to Zimbabwe to learn from their 'land reform'. So why has this visit been widely reported in the South African press? She says that unemployment stood at 40 per cent when the ANC took over in 1994, but in fact this is not so. Estimates of unemployment today vary between 30 per cent and 37.5 per cent, but the one point on which all concur is that unemployment has grown massively since 1994, and that well over 500,000 jobs have
LETTERS
been lost. Ergo unemployment was not 40 per cent in 1994. Given South Africa's fast- growing population, it would have been pos- sible for unemployment to rise even had the number of jobs increased, but a large net loss of jobs is disastrous.
Similarly, Ms Legum says there has been a lot of new investment since 1994, but within the last fortnight the Reserve Bank published figures — widely reported in the press here — showing a large net capital outflow in every year since 1994, and even those figures fail to capture a great deal of the capital flight which has taken place. And so on and so on.
To understand how people can depart so far from reality, one has to understand the fevered nature of South Africa's political atmosphere these days. Two points are rele- vant. Just over a week ago the minister of health here circulated a chapter of a book to all provincial premiers and health ministers in which it was suggested that the Illumi- nati/Bilderberg conspiracy had invented Aids as a plot to kill black people, that they have a cure which is being concealed until a suffi- cient number of blacks have been killed, etc. It is difficult to believe this document was cir- culated without presidential agreement. The document was written by a Ku Klux Klan enthusiast who is a world expert on UFOs, who treats The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a serious historical document and who talks in the chapter about 'extra-terrestrials landing on the White House lawn'.
Ms Legum herself, who, whatever she says, is indeed a high priestess of the view that racism is the preserve of the privileged, has now announced that 'racism in its widest and most useful meaning cannot be proved, only recognised'. Which means that people can be labelled racists without proof. This is wacky stuff.
R.W. Johnson
South Africa
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