It’s been 30 years of our constitutional democracy, and the subject is back in the news. Do we still need employment equity? No more than those mainly white, all male cast of 135 cardinal electors circling around the Vatican in bright purple gowns need a 21st century shake-up. Truth is, I have never believed in employment equity. There are smart and competent black people as much as there are smart and competent white people.
Given equal chances, all South Africans would stand a fair chance of being selected for a job. That’s the problem right there: unless you’re blind, we do not have equal chances available for every job seeker. Ask a person with disabilities; ask a rural worker with little English; ask a black professional in the private sector; ask an immigrant academic with excellent credentials.
Employment equity is needed to compensate for the inability of white people to see and reward black talent. It is as simple as that. I find it perplexing that the people fighting against employment equity for blacks are precisely those who benefited from centuries of job reservation for whites. The sheer arrogance of it all. The facts matter: senior positions in the private sector are still dominated by whites and males, and you are much more likely to obtain a job outside government if you’re a white male graduate than anyone else.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the ways elite public and private schools are organised in South Africa. Drive the main road snaking from the City Bowl to Fish Hoek, and you will find some of the most expensive, white majority schools on the African continent. Through a process called enclosure, these white majority schools have found ingenious ways of hoarding resources for the benefit of their own while actively excluding in enrolments and staffing those who are black and poor. The mechanisms of exclusion include place of residence, the capacity to pay and previous connections to the school; we have detailed these strategies in our book, Who Gets In and Why?
If you want to make our government look bad (and by the way, they do a good job of this all by themselves), this is your chance. You can even get a ticket to America by claiming white oppression (don’t laugh).
True, as a matter of conscience, the white privileges of these schools are offset somewhat by smaller numbers of black middle class pupils including those from wealthy families. But their smaller numbers make the point that these are careful political calculations rather than any genuine concern for the underclasses. No child from Khayelitsha can walk into Springfield Girls or Bishops no matter how smart they might be unless special arrangements are made.
Here is the racial and class advantage: if you go to one of these schools, you will not be unemployed because of the market value signalled by where you studied and, of course, your superior marks that give you access to high-value degrees in commerce, medicine and engineering. With a university degree you, the product of elite schools, do not even have to worry about fighting for a job in South Africa; you can travel and find work anywhere in the world.
I believe that one of the reasons that employment equity is being pushed in the present by white politicians is because of the permissive politics inspired by Donald Trump. If you want to make our government look bad (and by the way, they do a good job of this all by themselves), this is your chance. You can even get a ticket to America by claiming white oppression (don’t laugh).
There is, however, a dark and twisted side to equity that goes under the name xenophobia. You might not have noticed but there is a huge misinformation campaign on university campuses under way right now claiming that places like Wits and Fort Hare employ more foreign nationals, especially Zimbabweans, than South Africans. This is a blatant lie, but it has taken on a truth of its own in the metaverse. Not that it should matter, a university is not a government department and throughout the world higher education institutions thrive when their doors are open to the best talent and expertise from anywhere in the world.
The despicable spectacle in parliament the other day when a MP from the Patriotic Alliance grilled the vice-chancellor of CUT for appointing a foreign national instead of a black South African was a low point in our national discourse around university appointments. Here was a black Trump with the same bag of grievances: that foreigners are taking our jobs. The pathetic politician insisted that his native candidate was “excellent” based simply on the fact that the person had a PhD (seriously) when what was sought was a dean of an engineering school for which a range of competences apply including a superb record of research accomplishment.
Xenophobia, in such cases, is simply employment equity dressed up in camouflage uniform fighting other Africans. Beware.
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