AfriBusiness writes to Maimane about alleged support for race-based employment

25 October 2017

AfriBusiness will today be writing to Mmusi Maimane, DA leader, requesting him to confirm, dispute or clarify the party’s alleged support for the ANC’s system of race-based employment.

Maimane is reported to have said: “Affirmative action is something the DA supports. We’ve maintained that affirmative action works this way: if there are two candidates of different races and they appear for the job, pick the black one. We will support it; we wouldn’t abandon the policy.”

The quote appears in an article titled “DA shifts its focus to the poor” by Dineo Bendile in the Mail & Guardian of 20 October 2017.

Piet le Roux, CEO for AfriBusiness, says: “If quoted correctly, Maimane would effectively have made common cause with what is perhaps the single most destructive policy of the ANC, namely racial engineering on a national scale. Contrary to being pro-poor, as Maimane envisions, such persistence with failed ANC programmes would be decidedly anti-poor.”

Le Roux continues: “AfriBusiness’s members and other business people are working harder than ever to keep the economy going – to put bread on people’s tables – amid a deluge of regulation, taxation, crime and general state ineptitude. A pro-poor Maimane should welcome it if businesses increasingly ignore foolish insistences that they should employ based on race, rather than on whoever puts the most bread on consumers’ tables.”

Issued by Piet le Roux, CEO, AfriBusiness, 25 October 2017