By Nco Dube

The Democratic Alliance (DA) champions neo-liberal, race-blind policies, which are detrimental to the country’s slow and faltering (thank you ANC) efforts to address the deep-seated social and economic inequalities rooted in the country’s history of colonialism, apartheid, and ongoing systemic racism. 

The DA’s approach, which emphasises equal opportunity and colour-blindness is, I argue, a thinly veiled attempt to maintain the status quo of racial inequality by removing race from the equation and thereby protecting white privilege. This is in a country where lack of opportunity, poverty, and unemployment have a black face.

The DA’s policies are rooted in a neoliberal ideology that emphasises individual merit and personal responsibility over structural and systemic issues. This approach is problematic because it fails to acknowledge the significant role that race plays in shaping opportunities and outcomes in South Africa. 

The country’s history of colonialism and apartheid has created a deeply entrenched system of racial inequality, where white people have historically held power and privilege, and black people have been marginalized and excluded from economic and social opportunities. This has been exacerbated by the current government’s failure to effect any meaningful transformation of the structural barriers in the economy.

The DA’s policies, such as its emphasis on equal opportunity and colour-blindness, are designed to maintain this status quo by removing race from the equation. This approach is problematic because it deliberately ignores the historical and ongoing systemic barriers that prevent black people from accessing the same opportunities as white people. By not addressing these systemic issues, the DA’s policies perpetuate racial inequality and maintain the power and privilege of white people.

Furthermore, the DA’s policies are overly focused on individual merit and personal responsibility, rather than addressing the broader structural issues that contribute to racial inequality. 

This approach is seen as a form of victim-blaming, where black people are expected to overcome the systemic barriers that prevent them from succeeding without any support or assistance from the government or other institutions.

In contrast, the African National Congress (ANC) government has disappointingly failed to dismantle the racist structure of the South African economy and society. This failure perpetuates racial inequality through bad implementation of its policies, which has resulted in a failure to address the systemic issues that contribute to racial inequality. The ANC’s implementation of some of these policies has been seen as a form of tokenism, where the government makes symbolic gestures towards addressing racial inequality but fails to make meaningful changes to the underlying structures that perpetuate it.

In essence, the DA’s race-blind policies, while claiming to promote non-racialism and human equality, effectively maintain the status quo of racial inequality by ignoring the realities of systemic racism and the need for targeted interventions to address historical and ongoing disadvantages faced by black South Africans.

(Dube is a Political Economist, Businessman, and Social Commentator on Radio and various newspapers. Read more of his articles here: ncodube.blog)