MICHAEL MORRIS: Snide racial aspersions in the empowerment argument - Business Day

Michael Morris 
The irony of advertising industry veteran Peter Vundla’s recent recommendation in the Sunday Times that resistance to socioeconomic empowerment ought to be punished, is not only that those he attacks make the empowerment argument better than he does. 

The larger unforgiving truth is that there is no need to impose any special penalty on the political and economic backwardness, indifference and incompetence of those who stand in the path of an ambitious, deserving and long-suffering society, since history itself does the job cheaper and more brutally than anything even the most perverse ideologue could possibly devise.

Vundla might wish to consult the once mighty ANC on this unnerving phenomenon. Yet, judging by the argumentation in his article (“Punish opponents of apartheid redress”, June 29), Vundla − such as others, no doubt − sorely mis-appreciates the testing measure he himself highlights in quoting Black Business Council president Elias Monage's warning: “We are sitting on a ticking time bomb... The have-nots would not sit by and watch the well-to-do eating prawns.”

Quite.

Only last week, colleague Makone Maja, strategic engagements manager at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), observed with piercing clarity: “The government pays lip service to economic transformation, yet its conduct tells us that it is dedicated to fake transformation.

“We all know fake transformation when we see it. It is characterised by racial and gendered swapping of candidates in management positions, subordinating value for money to race and gender quotas which have destroyed service delivery, and high levels of inequality that result from reserving privileged access to economic opportunities for the political elite. It doesn’t empower people who need it the most. That is what makes it fake.”   

How pathetic, in contrast, that Vundla should so childishly slur the IRR by writing of “(t)he white brigade [which] has been led by the oddly named Institute of Race Relations” (he mentions some others, too) in opposing what we all now know is the chronic, costly failure of the BEE experiment.

When, as the pioneering founder of HerdBouys, the first black-owned and black-led advertising, marketing and branding agency in SA, Vundla was given an honorary doctorate by Wits University in 2018, the citation noted meaningfully that the firm “directly challenged the white male hegemony that dominated the industry at the time” and, in competing “against local and global agencies for business in a concentrated market ... exuded incredible insight into the local market, previously ignored”. 

It went on: “Under Vundla’s leadership, advertising changed from merely reflecting the lives of South Africans at the time, towards creating lifestyles towards [to] which ordinary people could aspire.” In 2025, could you imagine anything as plaintive, once so rhapsodic, as these last eight words?

Vundla needs reminding that the masses, who most certainly are not eating prawns, have rapidly diminishing tolerance today for the sort of adolescent puerility that deceives an adult into relying on expressions such as “the white brigade”.

Perhaps he only gives his age away by resorting to snide racial aspersions. After all, no lithe and agile intellect would settle for the kind of stifling racial cliché that Vundla is evidently willing to see contaminate his own thinking.

But chiefly, in proceeding with a confidence apparently unblemished by curiosity he ultimately betrays an indifference to the argument itself, the search for solutions, and the plight of the millions still waiting, after all these years, for the better life once plausibly illustrated in all that assuredly revolutionary advertising gumpf of yore, now tarnished by sour experience.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-07-14-michael-morris-snide-racial-aspersions-in-the-empowerment-argument/