By Editorial
On Saturday, Western Cape Education MEC Debbie Schäfer posted screenshots on her Twitter feed of a “rejection” letter from the University of Cape Town sent to one of the province’s top matriculants.
Michel Kühn attained a 90% average, matriculating from the prestigious Paul Roos Gimnasium in Stellenbosch and had his heart set on studying towards an MBChB at UCT’s Faculty of Health Sciences.
From the facts posted above, the uninformed would bristle with anger that such a brilliant student was rejected by UCT, and that’s exactly the response Schäfer got from her Twitter followers.
That Kühn happens to be white added to the vitriol directed at UCT and its vice-chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng, who has spearheaded transformation at the university.
Like a pyromaniac getting a kick out of seeing a building razed after setting fire to it, Schäfer must have been enjoying the responses to her tweet.
Her followers surmised that Kühn’s case was that of “anti-white discrimination” and “racial quotas” from UCT.
The university eventually responded to clear things up on Sunday, stating that instead of being discriminated against, every conceivable effort had been made to get hold of him, without a response, after he had been provisionally accepted to study medicine. When a professor eventually got him on the line, Kühn indicated that he had decided to study at another institution.
Last week, Kühn was featured in an Afrikaans daily newspaper where it indicated that he would study Actuarial Science at Stellenbosch University.
By the time everything was cleared up, the DA’s grievance ship, fuelled by misinformation, had set sail for a destination some in the party hoped would deliver them the white voters who deserted in droves in 2019.
DA leader John Steenhuisen “taking up the cudgels” for Afrikaans, after claims that the language had been banned from being spoken at Stellenbosch University’s residences, is the sort of virtue signalling the party hopes will stem the tide of electoral losses.
The DA might try to win back conservative white voters, but someone should whisper in its leaders’ ears that these voters will never come back.
The Star