“You won’t be appointed because you are coloured!”
With these words, Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD) acting head Angie Mokasi inadvertently or otherwise stripped away the veneer of legal sophistication that camouflages the ANC government’s employment equity legislation. On paper, the law may have seemed a good and worthy idea, restoring a sense of justice after decades of racially-inspired hiring practices. In reality, it makes good people say and do bad things that jar with ubuntu principles.
In real life, our employment equity laws and regulations have become, to their critics at least, a latter-day version of the “pencil test”, made infamous by apartheid officials who did the dirty work of the men in dark suits in parliament in Cape Town.
And what of nonracialism? Wasn’t the new, democratic SA meant to be a place where race no longer determined one’s chances for a better life? Conversely, are all attempts at restitutive justice, no matter how ham-fisted, to be rejected as “reverse racism”?
For her part, Mokasi was allegedly recorded spelling out the cold implications of the Employment Equity Amendment Act, passed in parliament earlier this year, to a group of coloured would-be permanent traffic wardens. They were among 74 traffic wardens who were given temporary 18-month contracts as part of an extended public works programme.
Of the 74, 14 are coloured and none of them received a callback informing them they had made the cut for interviews as permanent employees.
Opposition political parties were quick to criticise the JMPD. For their part, they’ve all devised similar stratagems aimed at redressing the employment injustices of the past, so it seems common cause that something has to be done. In their iterations, though, they put less emphasis on race as such and more on indicators that show actual and real disadvantage. To some, this is a solution that fails to define the problem it’s trying to solve.
The “Mokasi” recording continued: “The employment equity targets are determined by the metro centre people that are dealing with these targets. They look into the whole entity and a specific position and say in terms of the employment equity target currently, we have 90% people and you need coloureds across the city for that level.”
This amounted to “fair discrimination”, which was “allowed”.
Of course, when the honourable members in parliament were woken from their slumber for just long enough to vote on the legislation in April, transformation (and getting back to sleep) were the priorities. How much attention did they pay to the human dimension, to the impact on those prejudiced by the law and on those, like Mokasi, who find themselves drawn into areas of jurisprudence and competence that they can hardly be expected to possess?
Isn’t SA meant to be a nonracial country, where the colour of one’s skin no longer determines one’s chances in life?
Well, yes and no. The Patriotic Alliance, which sells itself as a party that represents “coloured” interests, moaned: “It is time to stop being black, white, coloured and Indian but to become South Africans.” Having made a pitch for a nonracial society, the PA was quick to add that Johannesburg “has a higher proportion of coloureds than the rest of Gauteng and this city deserves to reflect that and should reflect that”.
That the PA was referring to was the employment equity “targets”, which are meant to reflect the desired racial make-up in 11 categories of work. In Gauteng, for example, in the category “skilled employment”, 85.1% of workers should be black, and of those 47% males and 38% females. Coloureds can expect to occupy 2.5% of skilled employment opportunities, Indians 3.7% and whites 11%.
One can safely conclude that even if employment equity “destroys jobs”, as critics allege, it has at least created employment for bureaucrats to determine percentages, their decimal points deciding the fate of workers unaware that they’re within a 10th or a 100th of a fraction of having to apply for one of those traffic warden jobs.
To those who might have thought we were leaving apartheid behind, employment equity may be a let-down and a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s apartheid all over again, with a new cast and script.
For years, the apartheid government practised the “coloured labour preference policy” in the Western Cape, which was designed to deter Africans, especially migrating from the Eastern Cape, from doing jobs reserved by law for coloureds. Is this the template?
Are today’s efforts at redressing the injustices of the past aimed at entrenching a system of racial domination and exploitation? I doubt it, but that hardly helps the would-be traffic warden when he or she realises that being coloured means no job, for now, until the percentages shift.
Labour minister Thulas Nxesi, who is among that class of people that determines the law but leaves underlings to enforce it, has said work-seekers must “look for a job in the other companies” if their place of employment juggles the figures in such a way that they find themselves out on the street.
That’s the cold reality of laws devised in the comfort of a makeshift parliament and left to officials to interpret for the masses.
In any event, expect a nervous mob of young traffic wardens on the streets of Johannesburg in the coming months, but for coloured motorists who care about racial matters, it could be a disappointing experience.
It wouldn’t say much for our democracy if racially excluded and alienated residents of Eldorado Park had to take leave and drive all the way to De Aar or Kakamas to be harassed in the style and tone to which they had become accustomed before the advent of employment equity. Besides, what if the race percentages at their work are tweaked while they’re absent, obliviously savouring the bracing tonic of racial symmetry? Will they find themselves out of a job?
What then? Move provinces? Go somewhere where your statistical presence moves the needle on quota percentages? Go live in Limpopo?
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.