A write-up in the London Times expresses disbelief that in South Africa the majority of the population failed to assert themselves against 9% of the population and found it fitting to mount a political campaign called affirmative action, to masquerade their failure to develop wealth-making structures, such that their only resort is to take wealth from others, who have worked hard to amass that wealth. The writer sarcastically coins the word: ‘ineptocracy’, which is defined as a system of government elected by the least capable to lead, least capable to produce and least able to sustain themselves through production, who are rewarded with goods and services paid for by wealth confiscated from a diminishing number of producers.

Another article from elsewhere challenges the position of the London Times write-up. It departs from the position by pointing out that the minority (9%) had all the latitude to amass wealth, because they had the exclusive political power to create structures of wealth. The article holds that unlike in the past, where by law the majority was forbidden from participating in the political dispensation that created wealth for the minority, at least the minority has the legal protection currently, to participate in the contemporary political dispensation.
This discussion is interesting and timely in that it interrogates affirmative action, albeit emotionally.
There seems to be a dichotomy between the rationale for affirmative action and the absence of its wide-spread results. This reality has only enabled the politically powerful to amass wealth for themselves and their kith and kin, while the intended beneficiaries of the philosophy continue to toil in bondage. The philosophy was intended to create programs that would compare and contrast two equally qualified persons, a white and a black, and give preference to a black person and more so a woman. But it seems to have given rise to creating jobs for persons with little or no matching qualities at the expense of the deserving. This practice has diffused further the need for new recruits if found unqualified as happens often, to be upgraded in order to at least live up to the minimum requirements of the job at hand. And this is where both Namibia and South Africa run the risk of degenerating into economically-challenged states, more so in the public sectors.
The further after-effect of this practice is that whites do not seem to have economic futures in this milieu, except when they create wealth for themselves parallel to the business of state. And this threatens in the long run to bestow upon white males, the title of endangered species, as they run the risk of becoming economically extinct, which the language of the London Times article defines as the diminishing group of producers.
We need an interrogation of affirmative action policies in both South Africa and Namibia and in the United States of America too, for after two hundred years of affirmative action there, the black minority still sings the song, ‘We shall overcome!’