KEY POINTS:
The unbridled joy at South Africa's Rugby World Cup triumph has been dampened by speculation that the winning squad is likely to be broken up and its coach sent packing to make way for a regime that will, through enforced government quotas, reflect all the colours of the
rainbow nation.
Following apartheid segregation, all institutions must now represent the country's diverse population and adopt a rights and value system based on the post-apartheid democratic constitution.
The word for this is "transformation". But some black politicians are cynically using transformation - or the lack thereof - to score points. They want to grab the headlines by targeting a "white" sport in order to compensate for poor performance. And some white politicians are using transformation to suggest that that whites are under siege from a black Government.
Transformation in itself is tricky enough, but now these additional minefields must also be negotiated.
South Africa's obsession with seeing "transformation" as only replacing white faces with black - be it in sporting teams, the judiciary, company boards, or the workplace - is misguided. The result of forcing the appearance of individual black faces at the top is less likely to lead to effective and lasting transformation.
Black players are often caught in this no-man's land: when teams lose, blacks are blamed, unfairly, for being responsible; if the team wins, they hardly get any praise. Consequently, some black professionals are refusing to be seen as affirmative-action candidates, whether in sport or in the workplace.
Transformation, if it is to work, will have to have a bottom-up approach. Access to opportunities, finance, training, world-class facilities and support must be made available to black clubs, schools and universities.
However, grassroots black club rugby is totally under-resourced. Because of the emphasis on black faces, all the big clubs and provinces do is secure the best black players, then ignore grassroots development.
Those shouting the loudest for black quotas in the national rugby team do not appear to care. But that is real transformation - it is harder, it takes longer, yet it will bring more sustainable results.
A similar argument could be made for business transformation. The popular idea has been to create a few rich black businessmen quickly - such as Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa and Saki Macozoma. But for the five million black small-business entrepreneurs who eked out a living during apartheid, government support, access to finance and training are distant dreams.
The obsession with replacing white faces with black ones has meant companies poach black talent from others rather than train their own.
Putting black faces in the national team or creating a few black business tycoons are band-aid measures. South African companies could have, for example, identified potential black talent in poor schools in 1994 and then supported them throughout their education. But very few "adopt" a township club, school or community.
The Government has also fallen far short. Sometimes its outbursts about the lack of transformation mask its own failure to develop schools and sport in poorer areas. School sport in many black communities has, in effect, stopped, because of lack of resources.
For me, and many of my generation, afternoon sport and other activities at our poorly resourced township schools gave new purpose to our lives.
Take, for example, the national soccer team. It is managed by mostly black administrators and has mostly black players. However, because of the faulty view that soccer is now "representative" of the make-up of the population, there is no government monitoring.
The national under-23 team has not qualified for the Olympics, and the national team is in the doldrums. The former reservoir of the youth league, the Chappies League, has been closed. The management of the national soccer body is a national embarrassment - yet the Government says nothing, even though South Africa will host the 2010 World Cup.
The issue should not be about perfectly representing all groups. It should be about the right of every individual, especially those from poor black areas, to be able to get the best support, training and finances to become worldbeaters and to become part of teams or managements on the basis of their own abilities.
This means there are not always going to be perfectly representative teams of all races.
The challenge of transformation is to continue excellence, while making the country's sports, companies and institutions more representative. This will mean making transformation more broadly based.
Getting it wrong, by focusing on supplanting white faces with black ones, or by doing nothing, will be a brake on the country's development.
- Independent
