Some months back, as we understand it, a chap by the name of Charles Pettit, who is a successful businessman and investor, and who by all accounts cares about South Africa’s success, decided to try to resuscitate the quality of business and financial journalism by committing some of his own money to it. He accordingly worked to put together a new business media group by combining Currency News, a recent start-up, with the old Financial Mail, which he arranged to be bought, and the specialist mining industry publication Miningmx.

Great. And what a nice and good thing for someone to do, who might otherwise just have gotten on with the more pressing and important matters of running his business and investing in more lucrative enterprises.

We know some of the people at Currency News a bit since their early days and they’re great too – real journalists, journalists with ink in their blood. We don’t know much about Miningmx, and the Financial Mail has, of course, seen better days. But in its heyday, it was an astonishingly important and influential publication and if that could be restored then South Africa would be better for it.

A week or so ago, these guys posted a picture of their newsroom – all whites, or so it appeared. And the world comes to an end. Every race chancer out there goes after them. The unbelievable charge is made that black people think about economics, markets, and finance quite differently to white people and that Mr Petitt’s new project is therefore a racist undertaking designed to silence black voices and undermine black professionals.

The new media group subsequently put out a statement on where they stand, which is their affair.

What this newspaper thinks is what a lot of racist nonsense the attacks on the new outfit are. Your race determines nothing of your understanding of economics, finance, or markets. Maybe if you grew up in dire poverty, you’d be able to deliver some unique angles, but that is about it. The quality of your analysis would still depend on the rigour you put into the task – and in the case of journalism, rigour that pays very poorly relative to what might be earned in business.

How terrible a world it would be where black writers wrote on black economics and markets and finance in a way impenetrable and of no utility to white readers and vice versa.

Blessedly that world does not exist and never did – beyond which, South Africa of 2026 is not that of 1994, let alone 1984 (how they would be shamed if the baying mob knew what the Financial Mail of that era had helped to do, and with what journalists and under whose direction it did it). In part thanks to those journalists, the South Africa of today has a thriving black middle and business class. Anyone who wishes to can launch a media start-up. There is no obstacle to that other than how much money you are prepared to invest, and then delivering content that draws readers and advertisers.

There is no case that the upper end of the black business strata in South Africa is too poor to do any of that. They could do it 100 times over – just as is true of the top of the white strata. The pity is only that too few people do. The Financial Mail has been on the market for some time and anyone could have bought it. Business Day too is available, we understand, at the right price, as are a host of other publications.

The correct way to respond to what Mr Petitt and his colleagues are trying to do is to say thank you, South Africa needs a plethora of news and media groups, around the world small independent media groups have become really successful, and what you guys are doing sounds interesting and we will read it with great interest. That is how a civilised and thoughtful person would respond – not by yelling about supremacy because to your mind the colour of skin of the writers means the articles published have no merit.

That really is the crassest race essentialism employed in the basest fashion to break down the constructive things that good people are trying to build up and it has no place in the kind of country that committed and thinking South Africans are trying to build.