THE recent pronouncements by Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie that coloureds, whites and Indians would be given preference for jobs in his department has again reignited a 30-year-old debate on the use of racial quotas in employment.

Initially, it was correctly intended as a means to ensure racial representation, especially in sectors where, as a result of historical injustices, there has been deliberate and systematic exclusion of the disenfranchised. The situation has now come full circle where people regarding themselves as minorities believe they are facing unjust discrimination mainly because of the simplistic conflation of racial quotas with the complex concept of transformation.

After 1994, all progressive South Africans were of the view that the inequalities generated by the systematic, legalised racism of apartheid needed to be addressed. There was no doubt in the minds of those committed to a new dispensation based on human rights in a non-racial democracy that mechanisms of social redress were essential, so as not to perpetuate social class inequalities, largely racial, in our “free-market”, one person-one vote polity.

From the beginning however, the right-wing declared affirmative action policies and programmes to be racist without reflecting on the ironic extent to which Afrikanerdom achieved dominance through its own affirmative action policies beginning in the 1920s with policy initiatives to tackle the “poor white problem” in South Africa.

These policies entrenched white power and wealth, which continues until today.

Since the reintroduction of “progressive” race quotas post 1994, however, very little has changed. A black political and economic elite has emerged as the real beneficiaries of the so-called “transformation” project and there is very little evidence to show that the majority of black citizens have benefitted.

Inequality has risen, unemployment is off the charts, criminality has become a norm, corruption is endemic and racial resentment seems to signal a dismal failure of the much-sought after nation-building project so critical to the noble (but jettisoned) quest for reconstruction and development. The apparent failure of the transformation project in South Africa has resulted in a Government of National Unity led by the ANC and the DA both parties having similar outlooks on macro-economic strategy.

Fundamentally, they believe that economic development should be led by the private sector and that privatisation, lower corporate tax, cuts in social spending, removal of tariffs, duties and protectionism for local industries, corporatism to avoid industrial actions, and deregulation of labour all create conditions for high profitability, increased investment and economic growth.

The results of such an approach, with its band-aid racial employment quotas, have been the failure of state-owned entities, malfeasance, capital flight, jobless growth when it did occur, and a re-racialisation of the job market contributing to the emergence of the Gayton McKenzie's of South African politics.

The point here is that the imposition of racial quotas in the absence of truly transformational, equity-producing policies is bound to fail; but more perniciously, is dangerous in a volatile, racialised society where people see and identify themselves as members of particular race groups. The use of racial quotas in job allocation and business contracts cannot be regarded as true transformation leading to racial equity. It will lead to more conflict, suspicion and resentment.

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Racial quotas in South Africa: A path to equity or a source of division?