Gary Player Should Stick to Golf

GOOD Statement by Brett Herron, Unite for Change Leadership Council Member and GOOD Member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament:

Gary Player, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, was a wonderful golfer. He was also an unapologetic supporter of apartheid ideology. In the 1980s, he claimed to no longer support apartheid but became an outspoken critic of the anti-apartheid campaign for South Africa’s economic isolation.

Player’s nine Major golf titles and career grand slams on both the regular and senior tours earned him the right to global respect for his sporting prowess. But he should really have learned to keep his political views to himself.

To hear him parroting DA/AfriForum/Donald Trump speaking notes about the instruments of post-apartheid redress to assembled media over the weekend, while taking a break during his birthday golf day, once again diminishes him from unadulterated sporting icon to representative of South African whiteness.

South Africa is a multicultural democracy with constitutional obligations to rectify societal imbalances and injustices bequeathed by history and unsatisfactorily resolved in the first 30+ years of democracy.

The greatest beneficiaries of the country’s transformation to democracy, besides the handful of super-rich connected cadres, are arguably its white population, which still holds much of the country’s wealth and land, lives in the most desirable locations, and occupies a disproportionate number of senior jobs.

Mr Player is entitled to his views on land expropriation and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). One would have hoped, however, that he’d be worldly enough to grasp that it is not the policies meant to narrow inequality, but the extent of inequality itself, that poses the greatest threats to the privileged few.

Criticism of the State’s implementation of land reform and BEE policies is warranted. But opposing the need for transformative policies is something else: it undermines the central pillars of equal rights, equal justice, and equal opportunity in the Constitution. These rights protect all South Africans, including Mr Player, whereas the white victim narrative corrodes them.

*The GOOD Party is a founding member of UNITE FOR CHANGE.

GOOD Manifesto on Land Reform: Supporting fair land reform that respects property rights.

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