Christopher Rutledge attacks the DA’s attempts to challenge employment equity regulations while blaming unemployment on relics of apartheid (DA’s assault on employment equity masks the real threat, May 12). Yet he doesn’t seem to realise that racial quotas were the bedrock of apartheid.
Before the Bantustans, before the pass laws, before laws against miscegenation, the entities that would become the National Party and the apartheid government pushed for racial quotas to protect white jobs against competition from other race groups. These laws inevitably evolved into even harsher racially motivated repression.
Rutledge is right that relics of apartheid continue SA’s plight. But it isn’t in the form of some economically naive, ultrarich mining elite.
Rather, the relics of apartheid dragging us down are a persistent obsession with race and racial quotas. After the fall of apartheid, we shouldn’t have even considered policies such as BEE and employment equity. We should be focusing purely on the contents of one’s character and creating a society that allowed for all to participate without bias or state favour.
Instead, we got a racially obsessed klepto-state, that hides behind racial redress while pushing for policies that make us all poorer.
Nicholas Woode-Smith
Cape Town
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