AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN SOUTH AFRICA DEBATE TO PHASE OUT August 22, 2008
Posted by frostygirl in News, Uncategorized.Tags: , affirmative action, whites
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Good news for white South Africans!!!
The ANC has opened the door to a debate on whether a sunset clause should apply to affirmative action, after Kgalema Motlanthe, the new minister in the presidency, announced that the government would consider phasing out the programme. (Ref: The Business Report.)
The affirmative action policy was set in 1998, when labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana piloted the Employment Equity Act through parliament. The act sets targets for companies to meet so that their workforces become demographically representative.
It has been welcomed by the Afrikanerbond as well as by the most strident supporter of the programme, Jimmy Manyi, the employment equity commission chairman and Black Management Forum president.
A clearly pleased Solidarity yesterday said the union had been in talks with ANC president Jacob Zuma and his deputy Motlanthe - both before and after the watershed Polokwane conference last December - to shift the ground on affirmative action. Motlanthe had suggested that a joint ANC-Solidarity task team should discuss the matter, the trade union reported.
The union (Solidarity) argues that a moratorium should be placed on affirmative appointments in scarce and critical positions, and that young people should be exempted.
The Afrikanerbond said that Afrikaners are flowing out of the country while jobs are deliberately kept vacant in all spheres of the government. While Dirk Hermann declared “the end of the Jimmy Manyi era” and a sign of a new willingness of the government to engage, Manyi said Hermann had misinterpreted or misunderstood the issues involved.
Motlanthe had specifically referred to taking into account scientific considerations, noted Manyi. In this context, he pointed out that in top management positions blacks held about 20 percent of the posts - far off the 87 percent target set in terms of equity legislation.
Once the targets for designated groups - women, coloureds, Indians, Africans and the disabled - were met, the need for legislative teeth would fall away, Manyi said.
Thus he had no difficulty with the statement by Motlanthe, who said: “Perhaps if we take an approach in an objective and scientific way, we can then have a way of phasing it [affirmative action] out rather than say, ‘Let’s do away with it.’ You may find that we do away with it prematurely and settle with a problem.”
The time is long overdue to end this type of discrimination, especially to those born after the Apartheid era, why must we lose our young people to overseas destinations when there is such a shortage of engineers, scientists, etc in our country.
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Every time read your blog, almost daily, I learn something new about your country. Today you are talking about Affirmative Action being possibly phased out. Affirmative Action in my own country has been in place for a very long time, but of course is, I think, much different than the official policy of South Africa by that same name. There is no serious plans in the works, as far as I know, to even debate ending Affirmative Action in the U.S. I should study your system in more detail, and I will try to do so. To me is sounds more like reparations than true Affirmative Action, since it is benefiting the majority rather than the minority - precisely the opposite as it is in my own country. Very interesting indeed. I hope you might find the time to post a little bit about the origins of Affirmative Action in your country, and what the goals are. Have they really been met? Astounding, if true. And (just curious) will there be a new program for whites, now that their position has deteriorated and eroded so badly? An effort to get them back on a par with non-whites in South Africa? Or are they already still pretty much equal? So much to learn!
Thanks for your comment Relax Max I hope my new post will help you to understand AA in SA