THE last undemocratically elected president of South Africa, the Nobel Peace laureate FW de Klerk, has in recent months been holding forth on the state of the nation. It’s a familiar view: that South Africa is becoming yet another post-colonial country destined to fall into maladministration, corruption, famine and finally war because the white man has lost political power.

In his utterances, it seems, the only thing that can save the nation from this preordained state of affairs is continued protection of white minority privileges and rights. All attempts to discuss a South Africa that is not riven by the terrible inequalities wrought by apartheid are seen, by him, as a threat to these privileges.

We heard elements of this narrative again this week. “The Mandela and Mbeki era of reconciliation is over,” de Klerk warned darkly. “White males are quite unjustly blamed for the continuing triple crisis of unemployment, inequality and poverty.”

He did not ask South Africans to come together and find solutions to these problems. Instead, he asked them to “get [on to the] playing field and become politically active”.

The message is clear: they must fight and stop the ruling ANC’s talk of speeding up measures to stem unemployment and poverty. These utterances come in the wake of De Klerk’s interview on CNN in May when he claimed that black people under apartheid “were not disenfranchised, they voted”. In this he was defending the heinous homeland system, under which Africans were “cleaned out” from “white South Africa” and confined to impoverished “black reserves” known as homelands.

It increasingly seems that De Klerk cannot change from the person an angry Nelson Mandela identified during the democracy negotiations in 1991: “His weakness is to look at matters from the point of view of the National party and the white minority in this country, not from the point of view of the population of South Africa.”

Though De Klerk chooses to appoint himself defender of the country’s white males, they need very little defending. Almost all of the 20 best-paid directors in Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies are white men. This is not to vilify them, but it is a reminder that all of us South Africans need to do something, urgently, about inequality and poverty.

After all, just this week the World Bank said South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with the top 10 per cent of the population accounting for 58 per cent of its income and the bottom half less than 8 per cent.

But the De Klerk soundtrack, that South Africa is on the verge of collapse because the white man is allegedly under threat, is tiring and depressing. De Klerk still believes he is the leader of a threatened white minority. — The Guardian, London