IRR: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS KILLING BABIES AND MUST BE SCRAPPED
The CEO of the IRR, Dr Frans Cronje, says that it is time to scrap race-based affirmative action in South Africa given the damage the policy is causing to poor and vulnerable communities. According to the IRR, the policy has created a very small black elite that uses its capacity to control access to the benefits of the policy to perpetuate its own advantage.
It is largely for this reason that, 20 years into our democracy, fewer than 10% of black-African people and/or households have private medical insurance or pay bonds on houses -- two of the best benchmarks of middle class status. At the same time, more than half of young people are unemployed. The juxtaposition of this small elite against the masses of desperately poor people suggests the extent of the gate-keeping practices that have been going on.
Worse than the gatekeeping, said the IRR, is that race-based affirmative action is a veil behind which to conceal corruption and incompetence - and mainly vulnerable communities are paying a deadly price for this. Because many people are appointed to positions on the basis of their race, there is little public criticism of those appointments even when the people in question are manifestly unfit.
Take the example of events in Bloemhof this week. The Bloemhof municipality ‘lost its capacity' to maintain the sewer plant. People drank contaminated tap water and three babies aged 7, 9, and 13 months died, while scores were hospitalised.
There is no doubt that the officials responsible for these deaths were appointed, at least in part, on grounds of race-based affirmative action and that a direct causal link therefore exists between the policy and the deaths. Sheer state incompetence also saw babies die in Limpopo and Gauteng this week - and there can again be little doubt that affirmative action played a role in appointing the people responsible for those deaths.