Ebrahim Harvey has no doubt that the draft regulations in accordance with newly inserted provisions of the Employment Equity Act was designed by the ANC to influence the outcome of the 2024 elections. However, he is most surprised by the backing of the Act from the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
I am confident that the proposed amendments to the labour market in the Employment Equity Amendment Act (EEAA), released last week for public comment, will not pass constitutional muster when challenged in court.
On May 12, Employment and Labour Minister, Thulas Nxesi, published a relevant gazette and called for public comments.
The Act requires the Department of Labour to prescribe sectoral demographic employment targets in each province for companies that have more than 50 employees. These amended employment quota targets will be enforced and if companies do not comply with them, they will face penalties of up to 10% of annual turnover.
The first political party to strenuously object to what is very clearly prescribed racial employment quotas, which specifically refers to white, Indian and Coloured employees, was the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), whose leader, John Steenhuisen, said that if the Act was implemented, the number of especially Coloured and Indian people in skilled positions in certain job categories in particular regions would be considerably reduced.
Steenhuisen argued that, "The ANC is introducing a law that will ban entire groups of South Africans from working in specific areas or sectors." He went on to assert that if the Act stood it would push many businesses into bankruptcy through fines, that young people might emigrate and that skills would leave the country.
"The quotas seem especially targeted at the groups defined by the regulations as 'coloured males', 'coloured females', 'Indian males' and 'Indian females'. People from these communities suffered discrimination under the previous regime, and now they are being re-victimised by a democratic government that has learnt all the wrong lessons from the past. In sectors like agriculture, forestry and fisheries, mining and quarrying, manufacturing, finance, arts and science, the targets set for coloured employees in provinces like Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North West, is 0.0%, effectively banning these groups from employment."
It is very important to point out that the impact of this Act will certainly be detrimental to the employment interests in specific job categories and sectors of the so-called "minorities", of Coloured, Indian and white workers. But the widespread media interpretation of the Act correctly is that it will mainly adversely affect Coloured and Indian people in particular.
This is why Herman Mashaba, leader of ActionSA, argued that the party "is concerned that the strict EEAA targets will have the unintended consequence of excluding people who were previously disadvantaged from becoming employed".
Mashaba makes a very important argument against the Act, in the sense that Coloured and Indian people who also suffered from discrimination in many ways during the long apartheid years were now again being targeted for discrimination and exclusion from the labour market through these racial, racialist and arguably also racist exclusions from the labour market.
But what Mashaba does not point out is that the proposed amendments is in fact an extension of the current Employment Equity Act, which was already loaded against all "minorities" in the labour market, in that there was in some cases a lopsided application of prevailing racial demographics, such as in the Western Cape, where Coloured people have always been the majority of the overall population, although considerably reduced after the huge influx of "African" people after 1994.
It is this problem which substantially contributed to the DA becoming the ruling party in that province for almost two decades by winning their electoral support.
Mashaba also does not point out, which is critically important to do, and which I had already in 1999 - after the ANC lost Cape Town and the broader Western Cape again in the 1999 elections - attributed mainly to the emergence of an "Africanist majoritarian chauvinism" within the ANC in that region, and in fact the rest of the country eventually, which clashed with its demographic weight in that region, in which Coloured people were the majority.
This is largely why the ANC lost much of the electoral support it did have to the DA in that region, which it has never recovered since the 1990s. To the contrary, the DA won an increasingly greater percentage of the Coloured and Indian vote in Cape Town over that period, as it did in most other Coloured and Indian communities in other parts of the country. But it is important to bear in mind that the ANC on its own has not once won Cape Town since the 1994 elections.
However, Mashaba failed to also realise that the fate of Coloured and Indian people after 1994, such as those discriminatory racial exclusions, contradicted the notion of a "previously disadvantaged" people, which he refers to. This is a widespread fallacy because there was a perpetuated racial discrimination and exclusion after 1994, which was in fact worse than during apartheid era because it was happening under the ANC's "black majority" rule.
Steenhuisen correctly also pointed out, in yet another example, that in the Northern Cape, the employment of "black females" at private firms was limited to below 15.8% and that consequently a company that happens to employ more skilled black women than the quota allows will also be punished and excluded from government contracts.
I have absolutely no doubt that the EEAA is consciously designed by the ANC, a party in rapid political decline, to influence the outcome of the 2024 elections.
They needed something big to woo voters, especially in the midst of the worst unemployment crisis in post-apartheid South Africa, who have been so demoralised with the ANC that they have been staying away from the polls, especially since the 2016 local government elections.
But this is the "racial engineering", which Steenhuisen regarded as the most dangerous expression of since 1994, and therefore condemned. However, what the ANC has evidently not realised is that after this Act, especially if it is implemented, there will be much bigger declines in electoral support for the ANC from those communities at the 2024 polls from. Of that I am certain.
As has been made very clear, the DA, ActionSA, Solidarity, AfriForum and other civil society organisations, are gearing up to a huge constitutional challenge against the Act, which I am confident they will win. Should they lose that highly significant legal challenge it will be probably the biggest setback to civil society in post-apartheid SA.
But it is the stance of the biggest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in an increasingly troubled alliance with the ANC, which surprised me most. Its support for the Act is, I believe, a serious blow for the cause of non-racialism and anti-racism and especially as it applies to the wider trade union and labour movement.
However, what Cosatu has failed to realise by its support for the Act, aside from the adverse impact it will have on support for the ANC in the 2024 elections, is how it is going to bedevil relations between Coloured, Indian and "African" members in the federation.
Finally, a gaping weakness of the Act is the lack of an emphasis on the requisite skills and competency in the imposition of the contemplated racial employment quotas. It also neglected to appraise the very negative impact these racial quotas will have for relations between people which has already been very strained under the impact of the worsening socioeconomic and political crises, for which the ANC has largely been held responsible.
The racial amendment to the Act reminds me of the stirring words of author of Why Race Matters in South Africa, Michael MacDonald: "The ANC is resuscitating a culturalist conception of politics. Culturalism, in combining identity and interest to the advantage of the new black elites, avails itself of the great lesson of 20th century politics: Who does something counts more than what it is that is done."
- Dr Ebrahim Harvey is an independent political writer, analyst and author of 'The Great Pretenders: Race and Class under ANC Rule', which won the South African Literary Awards in November 2022.
*Want to respond to the columnist? Send your letter or article to opinions@news24.comwith your name and town or province. You are welcome to also send a profile picture. We encourage a diversity of voices and views in our readers' submissions and reserve the right not to publish any and all submissions received.
Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.
