Afriforum’s head of policy and action Ernst Roets made an appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Show to talk about parallels between the state of South Africa’s ‘leftist’ government and the Democrats-led United States.
Ernst Rotes returns to Tucker Carlson Show
This is Roets’ second appearance on the firebrand Republican host’s show. In 2018, the Afriforum leader sat down with Carlson to detail what he termed the persecution of Afrikaner people, a manifesto contained in his book Kill The Boer which was published in that year.
According to Roets, farmers, particularly those of Afrikaner descent, were being lynched in brutal murders. He also claimed that the government, being partly complicit in farm murders, was amending Section 25 of the Constitution to force minority land owners out of their properties in favour of black empowerment-driven redistribution.
In his latest appearance, the lobby group leader made a number of interesting assertions about South Africa’s foreign policy and delved deeper into the ideological constructs of the Afrikaner culture.
What he said about South Africa
The 11-minute clip posted on Fox News’ YouTube page is only a snippet of the entire interview which recently aired on US cable TV. However, there was enough in there to draw a number of things Roets talked about.
South Africa’s rainbow nation is killing identities
The Afriforum leader believes that South Africa is the breeding ground for globalisation. Roets claims the whole notion of former president Nelson Mandela’s dream of a rainbow nation is nothing but a ploy by a leftist government to kill ethnic identities.
“South Africa is a very diverse country. it’s a multicommunal country, in other words, there are a bunch of different cultures, languages and so forth, and now we are being told that – there was a saying by Samora Machel from Mozambique who said that, ‘for a nation to prosper, the tribe must die’.
“What that affectively means is that for the South African project to prosper, these natural identities that people have should be suppressed,” he said.
SA government is anti-Western
Roets also suggested that South Africa, a member of BRICS, is anti-Western. He claimed that the idea of the umbrella South African identity, coupled by the fact that the ANC-led government flirts with communist nations like China and Russia, only proves that in truth, the country is anti-Western.
“Just yesterday, they (the ANC) spoke about their friendship with the Communist Party of China and they are still very big supporters of the Soviet Union and all of these things. So, there is, as far as the government is concerned, to put it frankly, there is a very strong anti-Western sentiment underneath this whole thing,” Roets claimed.
Afrikaners belong in Africa
Carlson pressed Roets about the reasons behind the increase in the number of South Africans expatriating to other countries.
For the Afriforum leader, the answer is twofold. Yes, South Africa is seeing a drastic increase in expats because “people are concerned about their future.” However, Roets added, for Afrikaners, there is no passport of origin for this ethnic group and so, Africa truly is home.
“We are a community that was developed in South Africa. We literally named ourselves after the continent, y’know, the Afrikaners… I’ve been to the Netherlands, for example, I don’t feel at home in the Netherlands. Great country but, it’s not my country, it’s not my home,” Roets said.
How white people became the richest minority in SA
In providing reasons for why the job market was, in Roets’ view, skewed towards black empowerment, the Afriforum leader detailed how, in a way, South Africa’s ‘discriminatory’ policies helped minorities claim the largest share of wealth.
Roets indicated that after more inclusive laws were introduced in post-apartheid South Africa, “white people got richer.”
“There is an important lesson to that. In the previous system (apartheid), white people in South Africa were the dependent on the state. The government was caring for them and they were working for the government and so forth.
“They were, sort of, forced out of this and to survive you had one option left. You had to start your own company. And so, people were, sort of, pushed into entrepreneurship,” Roets explained.
You can watch the full clip below: