What is behind Zille's criticism of the Commission for Economic Equity

The release of the 2011/2012 annual report on the Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) in Parliament by the Labour minister Nelisiwe Oliphant elicited a lot of white noise that signifies the hard trenched attitudes against change by some white people.

On the report the minister lamented; "A rather obvious observation in the workforce, which continues even today, is the gross under-representation of black people, women and people with disabilities in key labour markets."

You would have expected black people to be the ones enraged, shouting at the rooftops, and so forth.

The Employment Equity report showed, among other things, that white men remain dominant in almost all top management levels in the workplace. They make up 65.4% of top management positions, six times the part of the economically active population they represent. 

The Commission also notes a positive trends‚ for example, among the skilled and professionally qualified‚ where equitable representation would be achieved "in the not so distant future if current progression patterns continue". The same could not be said for senior and top management. Although whites accounted for the highest number of terminations at this level‚ they also accounted for the most number of recruitments and promotions.

A barrage of criticism of the CEE report came from the usual suspects, the white trade union, Solidarity, who criticised the methods used by the Commission to arrive at its results. 

The Freedom Front went as far as to dispute the findings, saying white people are rather underrepresented. Mr. Mulder said when the two lowest categories were considered, white people were under-represented. "What makes this under-representation serious discrimination was the fact that it affected nearly three million positions".

 Say that was true, how does it compare with the totally unemployed blacks? Or, as some guy told me recently, ‘It does not matter much because black people are used to being unemployed. While white people's psychological making cannot carry that sort of a burden.'

 Most countries with unemployment figures greater than 8% understand themselves to be in a crisis; 13% is regarded as a depression. Here 35% is regarded as normal just because it is mostly black people who bear the brunt.

The leader of DA, Helen Zille, answering a question from a Cope MPL, Mbulelo Ncedana, in the seating of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament (WCPP) went for nothing less than character assassination of the CEE. Its cardinal sin was daring to put the Western Province at the forefront of violating the Equity Act. Her answer has since been developed into an article published in the media.

Many organisations, like the South African Institute For Race Relations, South African Human Rights Commission and Dr Sabie Surtee and Prof Martin Hall of the UCT Development Policy Research Unit which exposed racism in Western Cape and Cape Town in particular, know the sting of Ms Zille's vitriol first hand. Anything that criticises the Western Cape Province is either misinformed, dishonest, corrupt or a deployed cadre of the ANC with an axe to grind because the DA controls the Western Cape.

In her response to the CEE report the Premier, at her disingenuous best, said: "... we don't understand where those figures come from. For example, in the opening part of the report on p 1 it says the report is covering statistics from April 2011 to March 2012, but in fact those statistics have not been submitted - they've never been submitted, they've never been asked for. So right on p 1 of that report statistics are being used that have never been compiled and have never been collated. That is my first question."

First of all the paragraph the Premier is referring to says: "This report reflects on the status of employment equity in the country covering the period from 1 April 2011 to 31 March 2012 and which is submitted to the Minister by the Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) in terms of Section 33.... This report covers highlights for the stated period, the Economically Active Population (EAP) workforce distribution, a trends analysis of information contained in reports received in 2011..."

The Premier's feigned ignorance about the source of the figures is designed to discredit the Commission by attacking its character. She knows, or at least she should have been advised by the myriad advisors she keeps, that the workforce population distribution is largely based on the Quarterly Labour Force Survey published by Statistics South Africa on the Economically Active Population (EAP). The EAP is meant to provide guidance to employers to determine resource allocation and interventions needed to achieve an equitable and representative workforce.

The Premier, clutching on straws, went on to say: "Deputy Speaker, we believe it is a great danger for South Africa to sink into demographic representivity where demography is your destiny..."

The CEE said the Western Cape was "... the worst performing province in terms of race at nearly every occupational level and also the worst in relation to black women‚ even when taking the provincial demographics into account." [my emphasis]

It is fresh to be told by a woman whose cabinet is filled with nationalists of the worst kind, from the Nationalist Party. The Premier is used to getting away with murder because she indulges in sophisticated bigotry that she knows no one holds into account for it, certainly not the media. Her statement above is like a rapists who believes that using a condom makes the dastardly deed acceptable and victims who object to it is lacking ‘maturity'.

The truth of the matter is that since the implementation of the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Codes (BBBEE Codes) there has been subsequent increase in the number of employers submitting reports in terms of the Employment Equity Act to the Department of Labour. On this too the Western Cape lags far behind to other provinces.

There's also an ongoing collaboration with the Department of Trade and Industry that has become an essential item on the CEE's diary in order to promote and align employment equity on the BBBEE Scorecard. The Western Cape Province does not feature much in this also.

The national Cabinet recently approved the Employment Equity Amendment Bill for submission to Parliament which stipulates tough penalties for companies that meet the turnover thresholds to qualify as designated employers that are found to be guilty of contravening the Act [fines start at 2% of the business's turnover for a first-time offence to 10% for those who commit four contraventions of the same provision in three years]. Guess where the most noise against this proposed Bill is coming from? Western Cape. No prises for guessing why.

Lastly the CEE stated that the longer the amendments to the Act were delayed, "the greater the prejudice" would be in achieving employment equity. 

Western Cape has to stop behaving like a seceded lilly white province of the last white racist frontier for those who resist change in our country. But I don't see it doing that under the current administration, instead it looks as if things are getting worse in that sense.

In the two years or so I've worked close to the DA in the WCPP I took interests to its thinking and performative contradictions (saying this and doing the opposite). I had thought that as a black person perhaps I misunderstand them because of their historic baggage. I'm certain now that the DA is nothing more than sophisticated sophistry, equivocations and disingenuinity of pseudo liberalism whose roots are in Plato.

Like Plato in The Republic and The Laws their proposals are only about "the arrest of change and the return to tribalism" in the form of elitism and aristocracy [modern aristocrats, of course, are established business men]. According to the DA, and Plato, "all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration." You can make right noises but everyone must know their place, and the status quo of maintaining white privilege must remain at all costs.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni is Cope research manger in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter