Dear Mmusi
In your moment of shame, in an interview with News24, titled 'Maimane urges black professionals to trust the DA to reduce black tax', you make one of the most offensive claims that you as the Democratic Alliance will reduce black tax.
It is the election season, a mad season of course, but during this season we do not accept insults and embarrassing ignorance from politicians like yourself. It is clear that Mmusi, you are a white man in a black man’s skin. You are an epitome of a house Negro, whom because of his proximity to the master, he eats the masters leftovers and ends up thinking that he himself is a master. One can also say you epitomise class suicide. It is unthinkable that a boy born in Dobsonville in Soweto, would be so clueless and detached from the struggles of black professionals and black people in general.
Your continued views on black tax and how you will reduce it continue to affirm the notion that you are a political dwarf, a novice and a political imbecile.
Mmusi you don’t know what black tax is. Let me help you, Black Tax is a system we inherit as most black professionals by virtue of the families we are born in. This black tax responsibility comes as a result of decades of black deprivation and exclusion from the economy. It is not some money deducted from our pay cheque. I am therefore not sure how you will reduce our families to cut this family responsibility we carry as black professionals by virtue of our birth right.
Black Tax has to do with the embedded systematic oppression of black people by minority white rule for over 300 years. The battle for the soul of South Africa has always been about resolving the political and economic question in our beloved country. Only up until 1994 we got political freedom, we are a young democracy of 25 years.
In Black African families, we do not have extended families. My uncle, aunt, cousin, niece to my great grandmother and grandfather are part of what we call an African family. It remains a mystery how you intend to reduce a support for my family as a black professional? We carry black tax not as a burden but as a responsibility that we carry without fear or shame.
The biggest enemy for us as black professionals, is white supremacy and white privilege that you and your DA continues to perpetuate and advance. I am certain that your view on black tax is that of white Western privilege, where a family is defined as a mother, a father, son and daughter, which you define as a nucleus family.
We understand that systematic oppression of one race by another is our worst enemy, and to provide redress to that situation cannot be mechanical. It will take a systematic approach to reverse the situation we find ourselves in. The approach taken by ANC government after 1994, has delivered the fast growing number of black professionals. The ANC government opened doors of learning and increased the numbers of black peoples’ access to tertiary education. Through funding, a funding scheme the ANC government gave us TEFSA, now known as NSFAS, and now we are in the era of Free Education. These are the key strides. These are systematic ways of enabling education and empowerment of the most illiterate people in black communities. This is what sets us on a journey to change the economic situation of black people. The current advancements are achieved through nothing else but by the ANC government’s deliberate policy to educate the black oppressed. Again Mmusi I ask of you to clarify as to how exactly will you reduce black tax?
I must say that I take offence as a black professional to a point where I think your objective is to insult our very professionalism and intellect as your masters in corporate SA. Your lack of understanding our problems suggests that if we want to go back to oppression, we must give political power to arrogant white parties like your DA. This Window-dressing and putting a black face to influence black votes must be criminalized like government did with BBBEE Fronting.
We are in an era where our own black brothers and sisters do not hesitate, to be used by being invited into the dinner table of white privilege and offered crumbs to turnaround and sell a justifiable narrative about the master’s agenda who still wants to perpetuate oppression and white privilege.
Just to educate and reiterate this point, as black professionals, we are not burdened or ashamed of our African family structure. We lift and plough back to our families because we love them. We appreciate that a few of us continue to climb the corporate ladder under difficult and excruciating circumstances to earn better salaries and that helps us to look after our families. We suffer daily and get molested everyday by white privilege in corporate SA as black professionals.
Mmusi, are you going to go home and ask my aunt to not make a call and ask me for money to buy 50KG of mealie meal when she is hungry? Is that how you will reduce black tax? Will you tell my niece who is doing matric and is in need school shoes, or a new uniform that they should not call on me to help and buy the shoes? Will you cut the family tree of black families? This is why I am saying you have gone all out to make a charlatans political promise to wrong people, and sadly you have insulted many of us with your imbecile political electioneering promise to black professionals that you will cut black tax. Silithwele idombolo kuwe Mmusi and your DA.
Let me advise you what you should be doing as the DA if you want to win black professionals. Deal with abuse that corporate South Africa is doing to oppress, molest and treat black professionals as less qualified and less deserving. Deal with the regressing transformation in corporate SA at an Executive level. Black professionals are treated as second class citizens, in corporate SA. A true transformation of corporate South Africa is what South Africa needs. Such is the struggle of black professionals in South Africa, which we are picking as the ANCPL. Watch the space!
This is the reason why we always say, there is no political alternative to the African National Congress, if a leader of the opposition in this country could be so out of touch and ignorant of our realities as black professionals and black people in general, our hope is only in the ANC. Black tax is not a figure or a portion you can just solve through a reductionist approach. It is an inherited historical legacy of black economic oppression and exclusion from economic opportunities. The demons of job preservations for white people, killing and maiming of black people for land and white control our economy is what brings us here.
Mmusi, your lack of understanding and comprehension of the history of black oppression in this country is despicable!
*Thulani Ngubane Acting Secretary General for the African National Congress Professionals League.