With questions around service delivery, economic and social transformation reaching a crescendo, affirmative action is again on the political radar screen. The fascination with race is to be expected given our history. Notably both sides of the debate and racial divide have found the present affirmative action initiatives wanting. Some argue that transformation is too slow while others find the instruments aimed at redressing apartheid imbalances inappropriate in advancing the project of non-racialism.

But unlike earlier efforts, South Africans are now beginning to talk to each other rather than pass each other. Kick starting the debate earlier this year were philosophical renditions by Professors David Benatar and Martin Hall from the University of Cape Town. Benatar argues that more weight an affirmative action policy attaches to "race" the less easily it can be justified. A point Hall struggled to refute.

The trade union Solidarity also chipped in, arguing that both employment equity and affirmative action are in conflict with the spirit of the Constitution. The policies are found to undermine the unifying message of President Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech of May 1996. Solidarity is not opposed to the principle of racial redress. It quibbles with the present forms of achieving this. Instead it advocates for an ‘input-based approach’ for the development of the previously disadvantaged. An input based approach emphasizes remedial steps as opposed to an approach that focuses on racial representivity. The union proposes a class based approach in which inequality is tackled by focusing on socio-economic status. Since the largest segment of the poor is black, blacks would remain the main beneficiaries. Such an approach will remove the sense of alienation felt within the white community.

Disgruntlement also emanates from within the black community. Recently Sunday listeners to the Tswana-speaking radio station, Motsweding FM, called for the scrapping of affirmative action. They argued that in the North West where the community is largely black and rural, affirmative action is meaningless. Instead, affirmative action is used as an excuse to appoint unqualified and incompetent individuals who are politically connected.

Callers to the Motsweding programme and the recent Monday programme of SAFM The After 8 Debate regard the present failure in municipalities as a consequence of these mediocre appointments. Indeed, government’s Project Consolidate profiled 136 municipalities requiring various levels of support from national government according to objective service and performance indicators. Commenting on failure at this level during the 2007 State of the Nation, President Mbeki noted that: “in many of these municipalities, many vacancies remain or have emerged in senior management and the professions. For instance, in September last year, 27% of municipalities did not have municipal managers; in the Northwest Province, the vacancy rate at senior management level was over 50%; and in Mpumalanga only 1% of senior managers had concluded Key Performance Agreements.”

The practice of appointing unqualified individuals has promoted a view that affirmative action equals black incompetence and the lowering of standards. However, the celebration of mediocrity is an alien culture in the black community. What we have is cronyism linked to the imperative of rewarding comrades through political deployment. The challenge is that of finding a balance in addressing a sense of historical grievance while not promoting a culture of entitlement.

The debate has now been taken by up President Thabo Mbeki, former President FW de Klerk, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana and Pik Botha former foreign affairs minister in the apartheid government. The protagonists in this debate straddle the racial divide. An added complication is that Botha is now a card-carrying member of the ANC. Botha will probably be heartened by the comments of his comrade Erwin that in considering job applications “affirmative action was in many respects dead, not as a policy”. Erwin went further, possibly to avoid excoriation, that there would have been an even greater shortage of skills in South Africa if were not for affirmative action. For De Klerk and Botha the present redress policies are a betrayal of the promises and the spirit with which they entered into the negotiations that ushered the present political dispensation.

President Mbeki’s entry into the debate is perhaps by far the most measured. In his letter in ANC Today, Mbeki assembles local and international reports to engage issues that are raised against affirmative action. The UK and Canadian experience, where affirmative action policies have been tried, indicate that South Africa is “not alone in the challenging struggle to contend with the difficult issue of employment equity, placed within the context of the effort to build a non-racial society.”

Marshalling statistics from the Commission for Employment Equity, Mbeki explains that the unforgiving statistics indicate that his response is “not about point-scoring. It seeks to draw attention to the critical challenge our nation faces to sing from the same hymn sheet as it responds to the fundamental challenge to create a non-racial and otherwise equitable society.” Mbeki concludes that “apart from anything else, the very medium and long-term stability of our democracy depends, critically, on our collective ability visibly and meaningfully to sustain the advance towards the creation of a non-racial South Africa.” 

This is a welcoming contribution, a sobering up of previously rose-tinted vision. Let us regard it is an invitation for further dialogue.