WeeklySA_AdminCONCEITED: AfriForum’s report soaked in one-sided outrage and desperately crying out for recognition as a universal truth, writes former editor Themba Khumalo…
By Themba Khumalo
Strip away the gloss for a moment. Bypass the leather binding, the dutiful footnotes, and the sanctimonious tone. What AfriForum is delivering to the United Nations is not a report. It is a tantrum — a 15-page, overindulged, hysterical shriek passed off as research.
Its title, “The World Must Know,” reeks of an arrogance that believes a selectively outraged narrative should be accepted as global truth. This document is political theatre soaked in bad faith, a frantic collage of selective outrage and manufactured peril. Its presenter, AfriForum’s Chief Executive for International Liaison, Ernst Roets, is the lead actor in this tragedy of errors.
His stage will be the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Forum on Minority Issues. His performance will focus on a campaign built on what they call “expropriation without compensation,” “farm murders,” and the “veneration of human rights violators” by the South African government.
Slick, polished production
But before the curtain rises, let us state a fact that should disqualify this entire spectacle from serious consideration: This so-called “report” is pure Volkstaat fan fiction, a pathetic lament for a lost herrenvolk (master race) fantasy, typed up and presented as analysis.
It is a partisan pamphlet, a press release dolled up with the trappings of academia, too intellectually feeble and ideologically compromised to have ever faced the cold, hard scrutiny of independent analysts. It is a home-cooked meal presented as a gourmet feast, and they are asking the UN to swallow it whole without asking to see the kitchen.
The Great Lie
The cornerstone of AfriForum’s fantasy is the claim of “145 race-based laws”. They source this figure from the Institute of Race Relations’ ‘Race Laws Index’, and on a purely numerical level, it is accurate. But this is where their intellectual honesty ends and their deception begins. The term “race-based” is their weapon of choice, a deliberate and cynical semantic swindle designed to blur the line between the laws of oppression and the laws of redress.
What they conveniently, strategically, omit is a truth that unravels their entire argument: the overwhelming majority of these 145 laws are not the brutal statutes of the apartheid era.
They are not the laws that enforced segregation, that criminalised love across colour lines, that designated jobs and land and dignity by race. No. The laws AfriForum is crying about are overwhelmingly post-1994 laws enacted by the ANC-led democratic government.
These are laws like the B-BBEE Act, the Employment Equity Act, and the Skills Development Act.
These laws are “race-based” for one reason only: they explicitly aim to benefit “black people” (a defined term which includes Black Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) to redress the profound, deliberate, and violent economic imbalances engineered by apartheid. To equate these laws with their apartheid predecessors is not just a factual error; it is a moral abomination.
The most powerful rebuttal to their hysteria is found in the very foundation of our democratic order: The South African Constitution. Section 9(2) of our supreme law explicitly permits such measures. It states that equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms and that, “To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.” AfriForum’s entire argument is not just a complaint about policy; it is a scream of rage against the Constitution itself. They want to enjoy the fruits of a poisoned tree but cry foul when asked to help clean up the rotting orchard.
Fairy-Tale Economics of Grievance
Having built their fortress of victimhood on a distorted legal foundation, they then arm it with fantastical economic artillery. They proclaim, with an air of gravitas, that a “new study by the Free Market Foundation and the Solidarity Research Institute” has estimated that BEE has already cost South Africa R5 trillion and led to the loss of 4 million jobs.
Let us dissect this claim with the precision it lacks. First, the source: these are two organisations whose very raison d’être is fundamental opposition to B-BBEE. This is not a neutral observation; it is a pre-ordained conclusion in search of evidence.
Second, and most crucially, the R5 trillion and 4 million job figures are not observed or audited losses. They are not numbers found in a treasury vault or on a company’s balance sheet. They are the output of an economic model—a hypothetical, counterfactual estimate that attempts to project what South Africa’s GDP and employment would have been in a parallel universe where B-BBEE policies never existed.
This model is a fantasy, a daydream of an arsonist weeping over the beautiful house he imagines would be there if only he had not been held accountable for the fire. It presents a speculative scenario as a definitive, bankable fact.
Meanwhile, in the real South Africa—the one that exists outside of AfriForum’s ideological modelling—our economy is grappling with a complex web of very tangible, documented crises. Logistical failures at our ports and rail networks that strangle exports.
High levels of crime and corruption. Skills shortages that constrain growth. Mainstream economic analysis recognises this complex mix. While some economists argue that B-BBEE can create market distortions, it is not widely cited as the sole or primary cause of job losses on this scale.
For AfriForum, however, the simplest and most politically useful scapegoat is always the policy designed to include the majority who were previously excluded. It is a lazy, racist argument dressed up in Excel spreadsheets.
‘Elite Capture’ Con
Perhaps the most venomous trick in AfriForum’s arsenal is their brazen intellectual theft. They quote a respected academic, Prof. William Gumede of the Wits School of Governance, who claimed that R1 trillion had moved to “100 politically connected individuals” after decades of race-based policies.
Here is the truth they surgically removed: Prof. Gumede’s actual argument. When he discussed this concentration of wealth, he was specifically criticising the flawed implementation of B-BBEE, not the principle of empowerment itself. His argument aligns with a common and valid critique known as “elite capture”—the idea that the benefits of empowerment have been narrowly funnelled to a small, well-connected black elite instead of being “broad-based” and benefiting the millions of poor and working-class Black South Africans for whom it was intended.
AfriForum’s report commits a gross act of discursive violence. It takes Gumede’s critique—a call for BEE to be fixed, to be made more effective and more inclusive—and twists it into a weapon to argue that the entire project of empowerment is a corrupt failure that must be abolished. They are not interested in the cure Gumede proposes; they are only interested in using his diagnosis of the disease as “proof” that the patient is inherently terminal. It is a breathtakingly cynical and dishonest manipulation, designed to lend a veneer of credibility to their pre-existing prejudice.
Landmark Legal Precedent
At the emotional core of their performance lies the “Kill the Boer” chant, presented as an unambiguous, literal incitement to genocide and a direct driver of “farm murders.” It is a terrifying story, one designed to provoke a visceral response. But it is a story with its most crucial chapter—a chapter they themselves wrote—deliberately ripped out.
In 2016, AfriForum took Julius Malema to court over this chant. The case, AfriForum v. Malema, went all the way to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), the second-highest court in the land. The SCA delivered a landmark judgment that completely dismantles the very narrative they are now selling to the UN.
The court set aside a lower court’s finding that the chant was hate speech. It ruled, unequivocally, that the “context in which the words are sung is paramount.”
The judgment found that as a historical struggle song sung at a political rally, the word ‘Boer’ was a metaphor for the apartheid system and its security forces, not a literal incitement to murder individual white farmers. The SCA established a vital legal principle: the chant is not inherently hate speech; its legality depends entirely on the context in which it is used.
By omitting this pivotal legal precedent—a precedent from a case they themselves brought—AfriForum commits an act of profound intellectual corruption.
They are not just lying to the United Nations; they are lying to their own supporters. They are selling a fantasy of unaddressed victimhood and judicial abandonment, while hiding the fact that the highest courts in the land have already examined their claims in detail and found them wanting. This is not amnesia; it is a calculated, strategic decision to inflame rather than inform.
Ghost of the 1913 Land Act
Their orchestrated hysteria over “expropriation without compensation” follows the same cynical playbook. They frame it as a policy of mass theft, a communist plot to seize all white-owned farms. The reality, which they deliberately obscure, is that the debate has centred on amending the constitution to make it explicitly clear that in certain, specific, and limited circumstances, nil compensation could be considered just and equitable. This is a world away from the racist fantasy of a chaotic, blanket land grab they peddle to their base.
This hysteria is also steeped in a staggering historical amnesia. They cry about the potential for loss, while remaining utterly mute about the original, actual expropriation without compensation: the 1913 Natives Land Act. This was the true, violent, and wholesale theft of land, which reserved most of the country for white ownership and created the racially skewed land ownership pattern that remains South Africa’s single most enduring and explosive issue.
The post-1994 laws and debates AfriForum decries are the legislative and social response to this enduring, unaddressed legacy. Their tears are for the potential loss of property acquired through a system of historic theft, while they remain wilfully deaf to the centuries of screams from the dispossessed.
Propaganda Corpse
The autopsy of AfriForum’s “The World Must Know” is now complete. The cause of death is clear: intellectual dishonesty, compounded by acute historical amnesia and terminal racist vitriol.
The document:
• Counts laws, but murders their constitutional and historical context.
• Cites economic models, but worships the ideological fantasy that underpins them.
• Quotes critics, but assassinates their true meaning and intent.
• Condemns a political chant, but spits on the Supreme Court’s definitive ruling on its meaning.
• Whines about potential expropriation, but celebrates (through silence) the historical theft that made the debate necessary.
• Presents itself as a “report,” but flees from scrutiny, which is the bedrock of credible research.
This is not a good-faith effort to document South Africa’s complex challenges. It is a virtuoso display in political grievance-mongering, a carefully constructed edifice of victimhood built on a foundation of half-truths and strategic omissions. Ernst Roets is not a diplomat presenting evidence; he is a propagandist taking a bomb of lies to the UN, hoping to blow up any rational, nuanced understanding of our nation’s past and present.
The UN must not be a passive audience for this theatre of the oppressed. It must not provide a platform for this venomous and transparently racist spectacle.
It must see AfriForum’s document for what it truly is: not a plea for justice, but the last, desperate, and poisonous gasp of a privilege that history has rightly, and irrevocably, left behind.
