Affirmative Action (AA) must be done away with for equal access to the labour market

21 November 2018

To ensure equal access to the labour market, Affirmative Action (AA) must be abolished. It is not only racist, but also counter-productive and a great contributing factor to poor service delivery at local government level.

At present, there are thousands of vacant positions in our local government for, among other things, water engineers. These positions are vacant because they are being reserved for AA appointments.

There are white and coloured engineers who can fill these positions, but the ANC government refuses to appoint them because of their skin colour and consequently, raw sewage flows in our streets and ends up in our rivers.

It is absolutely unacceptable that young people who were born after 1994 must today still pay just because they are white.  Just because they are white, they cannot get a job. Because they are white, they cannot be appointed in certain positions and they cannot get bursaries.

Even President Cyril Ramaphosa's own youth development plan is a shining example of this kind of racial discrimination related to job opportunities.

Young white people are excluded from the President's job-seeking initiative. When they try to apply online, they are automatically disqualified just because they are white.

Only after the FF Plus went as far as lodging a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) about this, the programme was changed and now white people can apply, but they can still not join the scheme.

Their CV's will only be made available to companies that decide to employ white people in spite of the conditions of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). That is what racial discrimination in the labour market looks like at present.

The only way to ensure equal opportunities and equitable employment is to abolish Affirmative Action.

Issued by Pieter Groenewald, FF Plus leader, 21 November 2018