Wieder Trip a Waste of Time

Supervisor Harriett Wieder has been to South Africa and back and, we are expected to believe, is certain to be a much better local official as a result of the 19-day excursion for her and her husband that was fully paid for by the South African government.

But if Orange County were going to send a local government representative to play in the international league of politics, it should have been someone else. Someone who at least had an interest in what was going on in South Africa and, once there, a keen desire to meet everyone involved--including the government’s harshest critics.

After all, according to Wieder, before she went to South Africa she knew little about the country. She even joked to one reporter, saying that “she wasn’t even sure where it was on a map.” That’s a surprising and embarrassing admission from a public official who was so eager to accept an expenses-paid trip to a troubled nation in which she apparently had little interest.

The violence and bloody confrontations in South Africa, where a small white minority rules a black majority and whose official policy is racial segregation, should, by now, be familiar to most Americans. And the anti-apartheid protests that have been held across the United States in recent weeks should have piqued Wieder’s interest. But if Wieder didn’t know too much going in, her attitude once there only makes us wonder about how much she really has brought back. And what conceivable local public good the junket has accomplished.

Once there, Wieder says, she was offered the chance to name anyone she wanted to meet. Wieder says she didn’t want to meet Bishop Desmond Tutu, the black Anglican archbishop of Johannesburg and foe of his government’s racial injustices, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. She said she had no particular reason to meet Tutu. Instead, she left it to the government to decide who she would see.

We don’t understand how that approach supports Wieder’s contention that the trip gave her a look at problems on the local and national level in another country and the chance to see how others try to solve them. The South African government can’t hide apartheid, which Wieder naturally denounces, but she saw essentially what the South African government wanted her to see.

That government is waging a propaganda campaign in the United States in hopes of stemming the growing pressure for economic sanctions. It has distributed material that distorts facts and seems intended to discredit government critics, such as Tutu. It must be very pleased to hear Wieder refer to its rule with such mild phrases as as “they haven’t addressed the problem” and “they made mistakes.” One problem they haven’t addressed and one mistake they keep making is keeping 73% of the nation’s population segregated with no right to vote only because of the color of their skin.

Whatever South Africa’s reason for inviting her, and Wieder’s reason for going, all she has done is invite criticism and controversy--and waste time talking about South Africa’s problems, time better spent talking and working on county problems such as the airport, the jail and transportation corridors that Orange County residents elected her to resolve.