TWO DEBATES
Introduction
There are currently two significant debates playing themselves out in South Africa’s press.
They are not unrelated and both provide very good examples of how political correctness – and an over-reliance on rhetoric, as opposed to logic or evidence - damages one’s ability to make a proper and cogent argument.
Where the two debates do differ is with regard to the nature of their respective subjects.
The first concerns a principle - the nature of affirmative action - and the second, a practical situation - the extent of South Africa’s skills crisis.
As such, each requires a different set of analytical tools to interrogate properly.
The first, which deals with a principle, requires a firm grasp of logic and, indeed, the subject at hand: affirmative action (it also requires a common set of principles and values – the South African constitution will suffice). The second, which deals with a practical situation, needs a proper statistical analysis of appropriately collected data, which will definitively answer the question, one way or the other.
In short, because the former relies more on words and language, it is harder to prove definitively, simply because logic is often subverted in favour of subjective interpretation and political correctness substituted for principle – nowhere more so than with regard to a subject as politically sensitive as affirmative action. The latter, however, is far easier to prove or disprove as the situation can be statistically described, one way or the other.
In some respects, the second debate – South Africa’s skills crisis – can be seen as a practical consequence of the first debate – affirmative action.
(In fact, even if it is agreed that affirmative action is necessary and correct, a skills crisis could still be seen as an unintended consequence.)
There have been two recent and significant contributions to these two debates: a report by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) (titled “The South African Skills Crisis”) and an article in the Cape Times newspaper by Professor David Benatar (titled “My critics have failed the rigorous test of reason”). Both contributions are powerful and persuasive and worth exploring in greater depth.
But first, some background to the two debates.
Affirmative action, morally right or wrong?
The first argument or debate was initiated by UCT Professor David Benatar, who used his inaugural lecture to raise a number of principled concerns he had with affirmative action on the basis of race (these concerns obviously had practical consequences but, Benatar argued, the fundamental problem lay with the nature of the principle).
This debate has been well documented on InsidePolitics.
On the other side – and in response to Benatar – are those people who have argued in favour of affirmative action, as a correct and defensible programme of action.
Skills crisis or no skills crisis?
The second argument concerns South Africa’s skills crisis (or the supposed lack thereof).
On the one side, there are those who argue that the country is in the grip of a serious skills crisis, resulting in a large number of vacancies in both the public and private sectors. The problem has been attributed, in large part, to a failure to train young South Africans properly and to affirmative action, which has supposedly driven away a large number of skilled, white South Africans.
On the other side – admittedly a far smaller side – are those that say South Africa does not, in fact, have a skills shortage and certainly not with regard to black South Africans. Rather, skilled black South Africans are being ignored or underutilised because of racism (on the part of white South Africans). This second view has been driven, in large part, by Jimmy Ma
| Posted on 3/7/2007
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