Entrenching mediocrity

Stephen Mulholland

Simple logic of the type which seems beyond the grasp of such as the infantile and, one often suspects, mentally retarded ANC Youth League, the SA Students’ Congress and others of that ilk, suggests that using race as a criterion for university admissions can only result in damage to society.

Just as the National Party’s discriminatory approach to education favouring whites over all others led inevitably to the loss to society of the latent talents and energies of millions of its people, so such discrimination will now lead to distortions in our young democracy.

For example, at the University of Cape Town the medical school demands that black students score an average of 74% in the National Senior Certificate, coloureds 78%, Indians 88% and whites 91%.

Now it does not take genius to grasp that over time this will result in a small number of brilliant white doctors being produced while those of other races will always be regarded as not being quite up to scratch.

It is one matter to enforce quotas on rugby and cricket teams which, by the way, the very recipients of such favouritism resent as it casts doubt on their own abilities. No one wants to be a token. Just ask those young men. They want to be selected on merit.

Such is the hypocrisy of our new elite who favour such racist discrimination, that when they or their loved ones need medical help they want only the best and, of course, they can afford it having made billions out of BEE or, at the least, handsome rewards from politics.

When they are in need, considerations of race go out the window. When the light-fingered and intemperate (in more ways than one) Manto Tshabalala-Msimang had her liver transplant one can be sure that she was not the slightest bit interested in the race of her medical team.

Such is the inanity of these neo-apartheid practices that in one instance an Indian girl was rejected by UCT on the grounds that she was white. Hendrik Verwoerd must be smiling in his grave.

Race has nothing to do with the ability to practice medicine. Recently a black radiologist inserted needles deep into my spine in a delicate procedure in which he used considerable expertise to train highly sophisticated scanning instruments on precisely the points he needed to inject.

Thankfully there are some sane voices in this debate. For example, according to Cape Town Alive, UCT philosophy head Prof David Benatar said it is disadvantage itself, not race, that should be the qualifying factor – even if the majority are black.

He added: “The very classifications that were regarded as ludicrous then are now deemed vital to ‘redress’.”

Eminent educationist Prof Jonathan Jansen is equally outspoken, describing UCT’s policy as perpetuating apartheid philosophy. He says UCT is “oversimplifying this, waving the race card 15 years after democracy.”

He points out that “more and more students coming to UCT are black middle-class kids who went to Rondebosch Boys or Bishops and had all the benefits of private education.”

So according to UCT’s racist design, a poor white kid who struggles through a government school achieving a 90% pass will be excluded from the medical school in favour of a black kid whose parents could afford to send him to a privileged private school and who managed to scrape by on 74%.

And seeing that UCT has regressed to neo-apartheid values, how would they treat the kids of Tokyo Sexwale, the BEE billionaire who could one day be our President and who is married to what our race classification describes as a “white” woman.

What will UCT demand of the Sexwale kids? Do they have the guts to answer that question?