The DA and EFF have expressed support for criminalising racism.
The office of the ANC's chief whip announced that the party would "soon investigate creating a specific law or amending the existing legislation to ensure that acts of racism and promotion of apartheid are criminalised and punishable by imprisonment".
This followed Penny Sparrow, a former Jawitz Properties employee, likening black people to monkeys on social media.
"We can no longer, as a nation, tolerate such dehumanising violations, where [the] black majority are treated as subhumans and are referred to as monkeys, baboons and other derogatory racist epithets in the land of their birth," The ANC said in a statement.
DA leader Mmusi Maimane expressed support for criminalising such statements.
Sparrow's membership of the party is expected to be suspended, and the DA says it has laid criminal charges regarding the statements.
Sparrow was not the first case in which the party was tied to racism on social media recently. MP Dianne Kohler Barnard was expelled from the party last year after sharing a post calling for the return of Apartheid leader PW Botha.
Barnard successfully appealed the expulsion at the end of last year.
The EFF meanwhile has stated that the ANC's plan is consistent with their manifesto, and said it had proposed similar motions several times within Parliament, but "the ANC rejected these motions."
"This demonstrates that ANC lacks ideological foresight, particularly around questions of anti-black racism. It also confirms that the EFF is a leader of society which consequently also leads the ANC in ideological solutions to problems that confront society," the EFF said in a statement.
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