G20 leaders and delegations should insist when they visit the country this month for the final events of the G20 summit “on being held to the same standards of racial classification that South Africans are legally bound to meet”.
This is the message the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) will be conveying by letter this week to all the G20 visitors.
In a statement, the IRR notes that “(as) state-required racial classification has over recent decades again become a staple of socio-economic policy, defended in Parliament by President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier this year, the request from the IRR seeks to illustrate to observers and guests the unfortunate survival of apartheid-era racial classification that ought to have ended in 1991 with the repeal of the Population Registration Act 30 of 1950”.
Says Makone Maja, IRR Strategic Engagements Manager and author of the letters to G20 delegations on this matter: “We of course appreciate the sensitivity of the IRR’s request for G20 guests to adhere by laws applicable in South Africa, but the unfortunate fact is that racial classification today is a reality for South Africans who are required by law to be sorted into racial categories created by the cornerstone law of apartheid.
“More than three decades after the repeal of the Population Registration Act, the South African government has shown itself unwilling to embrace substantive constitutionally- required non-racialism and an end to state-enforced, race-based segmentation of people in South Africa. The IRR takes no pleasure in illustrating as much through this action, with the eyes of the world on our country.
“To not apply the standards of racial categorisation to G20 guests which the South African government applies proudly and daily to its own citizens would reveal a shameful double standard: a government diminishing the individual dignity of its own citizens while electing to not apply the same to foreign guests. If guests and foreign leaders to South Africa can be spared the embarrassment and indignity of being subjected to racial classification, the people of South Africa deserve nothing less than long-overdue relief from such degrading and outdated race conscription.”
In line with South African law and jurisprudence, relating specifically to the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998 and the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act 53 of 2003, the IRR will be advising G20 guests like President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Republic of India to categorise themselves as “black”. Where definitions of race are similarly contrived and opaque in terms of the most accurate interpretation of South African law, the IRR will offer assistance to all G20 delegations to ensure correct racial classification in terms of South African law.
Says Maja: “If President Ramaphosa is perhaps embarrassed by the IRR’s request to G20 leaders and delegations to simply adhere to the degrading race laws and values he has defended in Parliament, it would be prudent for his government to consider why the denial of individual dignity through coercive racial categorisation by the state is still being practised at all in South Africa more than three decades after the end of apartheid.
“South Africans deserve government policies that align with the fundamental non-racialism of the Constitution and the reconciliatory non-racial spirit that permeates the beliefs of ordinary people who want all South Africans to work in fairness and harmony for a better future. We want an end to race conscription and the perpetual obsession of those in power with dividing people by imposing unjust and outdated categories on them.”
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