On Friday former South African president, FW de Klerk accused President Jacob Zuma of using apartheid to cover the ANC government’s failures.

De Klerk said:

Attempts to blame these failures on ‘apartheid’ will simply divert government and public attention from the urgent need to implement the kind of realistic solutions.

They also serve intentionally or unintentionally to stir up racial animosities that we simply cannot afford.

These remarks came after Planning Minister Trevor Manuel told Zuma that apartheid could no longer be used as an excuse for poor public service.

Zuma responded, saying:

To suggest that we can’t blame apartheid for what we are doing now or for what is happening in our country, I think is a mistake, to say the least.

But former president de Klerk feels:

When President Zuma says that ‘we cannot stop blaming those who caused it’, he is playing the very dangerous game of making whites the racial scapegoats for the manifest failures of his own government.

He added that almost two decades after democracy, the country’s inequality levels are even higher, a gross fallacy that a number of keen economic minds have already debunked.

The fact that, 19 years later, we are an even more unequal society is the consequence of the failure of government policy.

[Source: News24]