Race-based empowerment policies have been implemented for more than a decade, and they have not worked, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has warned.
‘Instead, their intended beneficiaries continue to suffer, while a select few among the politically connected elite flourish,’ the IRR says in a statement.
In the light of this, says IRR Campaign Manager Mlondi Mdluli, ‘South Africans are in for a shock if they think that the country will easily bounce back from the jobs blood bath shown in Stats SA’s latest Quarterly Employment Statistics’.
Mdluli and colleague Marius Roodt hosted an online media briefing this week on the IRR’s opposition to the amended Employment Equity Act (EEA) and the Draft Employment Equity Regulations.
In a statement, the IRR points out that major contributors to the South Africa’s unemployment crisis are ‘bad and job-destroying policies’, of which the amended EEA and the proposed regulations that go with it ‘are just one example’.
The latest EEA measures ‘are the more aggressive BEE which Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi called for in July 2021. But race-based policies are not new. They have been implemented for more than a decade, and they have not worked. Instead, their intended beneficiaries continue to suffer, while a select few among the politically connected elite flourish’.
Mdluli said in the briefing that the IRR would continue to fight against the implementation of the amended EEA and the draft Regulations in the same way that it had opposed all race-based policies since its inception in 1929. Mdluli also pointed out the extent to which the legislation and its associated regulations were inconsistent with the Constitution.
The IRR was putting together a legal strategy to oppose these measures in the courts.
Turning attention to the IRR’s Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED) policy proposal, Mdluli and Roodt explained that, in addition to the BEE scorecard being replaced by an EED scorecard that would reward job-creation, higher tax and foreign exchange earnings, and innovation, the EED system would introduce tax-funded vouchers for the key services of education, healthcare and housing.
Such government-funded vouchers would be available to means-tested South Africans earning below a certain amount to pay for schooling, medical care, and housing options.
The vouchers would be funded by redirecting – not increasing – the budgets of the affected departments. Tax-funded education vouchers, for example, would give all parents a choice of schools for their children, freeing them from having to rely on government services.
Schools would then have to compete for the custom of voucher-bearing parents, which would give them a real incentive to improve the quality of the education they provide. A similar approach would be applied to healthcare and housing.
Says Mdluli: ‘This morning’s press briefing was an opportunity to provide the public with an update on our fight against the EEA and the draft Regulations. Setting up racial targets that produce racial moratoria on hiring – as took place at Dis-Chem in 2022 – is the opposite of non-racialism. It is clearly evident from the results of polling that we presented during the briefing that most people reject this approach. They want an expanding jobs market, not a shrinking one. The implementation of the amended EEA and the Draft Regulations will significantly deter job creation, which we will not allow.’