DA needs to rethink its stance on job equity

IN AUGUST last year, Gavin Lewis, DA member of the Gauteng legislature, penned arguably the most racist letter to an editor I have ever read.

Published in a financial magazine, the letter was about transformation in the workplace.

Lewis argued that Mpho Nkeli, head of the Commission for Employment Equity, “an enthusiast of democratic representativeness in the jobs field does not know that the last country to seriously attempt this was Nazi Germany”.

He wrote that Nkeli could find some of those Verwoerdian SA Bureau for Racial Affairs operatives and bring them out of retirement to assist in identifying where African ends and coloured begins, or where white ends and coloured begins.

“One thing is sure, we will one day look back on this era with feelings of the same disgust we now feel for apartheid-era racism,” he wrote. “You will never achieve the goal of non racialism through this kind of neo-Nazi racism. Or is this the better life for all we were promised once, long ago?”

The DA did not distance itself from this characterisation of employment equity policies as “neo-Nazi” by its esteemed public representative. Clearly Lewis was not articulating a view many in the DA would disagree with.

Comparing the current democratic dispensation of which the DA is part with Nazi Germany should have drawn wide condemnation. Well, ideally. The differences are so glaring they obscure the sight of Lewis and his ilk in the DA.

Our constitution promotes diversity, human dignity and right to life. The Nazi regime killed Jews in preference to the Nordic race. The transformation laws are meant to ensure equity, not privilege; the Nazi regime sought to entrench privilege of one group over another.

I was reminded of Lewis’s offensive piece when considering the DA’s disgraceful and ill-fated opposition to the Employment Equity Amendment Bill.

The amendments are meant to ensure provincial demographics are taken into account by employers when they consider their employment equity targets. They also provide penalties for entities which fail to meet equity targets.

The DA sees nothing wrong in insulting the policies meant to empower black people who have been at the receiving end of South Africa’s version of nazism.

Some within the DA could argue that apartheid and colonialism have long been abolished so why the fuss.

True, they have been abolished. But we have to contend with legacies that refuse to die. The legacies of want, poverty and stark racial inequality are dangerous as they can be exploited by political demagogues to the detriment of all. It happened in Zimbabwe.

Transformation policies such as employment equity and broad-based black economic empowerment are important for political and economic stability.

Stability is important for business. Flourishing business is important for growth which is a requisite for citizens’ and national development. Transformation policies that are properly implemented and supervised to combat corruption can also help deal with potentially the biggest cause of economic and political instability: inequalities.

As a party that styles itself as a promoter of economic growth, it is rich of the DA to attempt to block legislation meant to ensure the necessary stability for growth.

The DA must accept that employment equity is partly responsible for the rise of the black middle class and is a constitutional imperative.

Ironically, the DA is one of those parties looking at gaining an electoral share of the black middle class. How does the DA think this growing black middle class, which also drives consumer spending and growth, came about?

The party, through the likes of Lewis, will stop at nothing to insult the very policies that gave black people a chance for employment, shareholding and procurement opportunities.

At the heart of the DA’s policy position is an attempt to pretend the past didn’t exist and did not shape the present and is irrelevant to the future.

This fascination with so-called liberalism would work well in a society that has no history of racial segregation.

But even in terms of the DA’s own slogan of “equal opportunity for all”, the party’s position on employment equity does not make sense.

You must remove from the opportunity equation inherited privileges and disadvantages that could introduce a bias to “equality”. Anyway, these arguments were discussed in the early years of the political transition and need not be rehashed here.

DA leader Helen Zille usually criticises transformation policies for benefiting a few politically connected individuals.

She also has a point when she takes on the cadre deployment practices of the ANC, especially when this benefits those who do not have qualifications. But her opposition to the Employment Equity Amendment Bill suggests her criticism of ANC practices is not entirely altruistic.

The DA needs to undergo a huge transformation to enable it to deliver a compelling, alternative vision if it wants to be taken seriously. The racial division within its ranks and equating employment equity with nazism show the party is far from reaching that goal.

Seeing measures as “neo-Nazi” and counter to the idea of equal opportunity for all is to pretend that 1994 signified the disappearance of history.