Jimmy Manyi, chairman of the Commission for Employment Equity, is right to suggest that white women should be removed from the list of ‘designated groups’ under the Employment Equity Act. Manyi argues for this removal on the grounds that white women have surpassed their employment equity targets. This may or may not be true – Manyi’s statistics are open to question – but the real reason why white women should be removed is that they should never have been on the designated list in the first place.

This is not to say they were not victims of discrimination, some of it statutory, although most of it arising from male prejudice rather than the law. But the discrimination they suffered was of an entirely different order from that to which blacks, women as well as men, were subjected.

For a start, white women had the vote. They did not have to carry passes on pain of imprisonment, their families were not split up by the migratory labour system, they were not forcibly removed from their homes, they were not herded into schools designed to educate them for menial jobs only, their children were not shot down when they marched in protest against such education, and they were not denied the right to form registered trade unions. Quite a large number, as was the case with many white men too, grew up in homes with domestic servants. Not too much disadvantage there.

The Black Management Forum, also headed by Manyi, wants a ‘sunset clause’ to be inserted into the Act for white women. This is a good idea, because it would introduce into the Act something which the labour minister has thus far refused even to consider. Once there it could be extended to other designated groups, and a process of eroding the act thus set in motion.

Like black economic empowerment legislation, the Employment Equity Act contains at its core a paradox. These laws are concerned as much with white achievement as with black achievement. Perhaps more so. ‘White’ companies must make their workplaces demographically ‘representative’. White companies must hand over a certain portion of their equity to blacks in order to get mining licences. White companies wanting government contracts must do x,y, and z for blacks. Whites must fill in scorecards of what they are doing for blacks. A host of ratings agencies are being set up to measure white achievement - in doing things for blacks.

Is South Africa not interested in black achievement? How many black entrepreneurs – professionals such as lawyers and accountants as well as businessmen and women - have been made offers they cannot refuse by white firms pursuing some or other target or quota? And whose interests does this serve – those of established white firms or the cause of black entrepreneurship? What are the government’s priorities – making blacks independent or whites compliant?

The labour minister’s refusal to contemplate a sunset clause for affirmative action means that the current generation of white schoolgoers is in effect being told to prepare for a life of entrepreneurship (or emigration) while their black counterparts are being told to prepare for a life in which the government can be relied on to make whites do things for them, a life in which failure can always be blamed upon someone else.

Earlier this year there were complaints that the tourism industry had not ‘transformed’. Only small proportions of catering businesses and bed-and-breakfast operations were owned or run by blacks. The subtext in this and similar complaints about other industries is that somehow whites are to blame for the fact that ‘their’ industry has not brought enough blacks in as partners, directors, shareholders, or whatever. Maybe they haven’t and maybe they should have. But, hey, it’s a free country now. Where are the black tourism entrepreneurs? Why are they not muscling in on tourism in competition with all those ‘untransformed’ whites?

Recently I attended a conference of private security firms. Quite a few are apparently run by ex-policemen, some of them no doubt pushed out of the police force by its employment equity policies. Who are the ultimate beneficiaries of these policies? White ex-cops forced to become entrepreneurs, or black policemen tied to a career in one of the worst-led organisations in the country?

We are building an economy in which whites have to become more and more self-reliant while blacks become ever more dependent on what the government forces whites to do for them. That is a strange form of liberation.