OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday
SOUTH Africa’s foreign affairs department has launched a programme to ensure that blacks will fill 80% of the posts in the country’s diplomatic missions within the next 12 months, Business Day newspaper reports.
The newspaper quoted foreign affairs director-general Sipho Pityana as saying that at the beginning of the year about 60% of SA’s ambassadors, high commissioners and consuls-general were white.
Pityana estimated that below the top level, 80% of counsellors were white. In addition, 70% of first, second and third secretaries were also white, with women’s representation only “marginal”.
These were the “core diplomats, but they had not seen the wave of affirmative action that government in general has seen,” he said.
When the issue of transformation of foreign affairs came up for discussion in Parliament months ago, ANC MPs made it clear they were unhappy with the department’s lack of representativity when it was supposed to be the country’s face to the rest of the world.
Pityana said that at junior level, consisting largely of administrative support staff, the picture is different and there were more blacks, and women are in the majority.
The new plan, the first phase of which ended last week, entails calling back some representatives already serving in SA’s foreign missions to make way for others in the department who were previously “overlooked”.
“Of course the imminent restructuring is causing a great deal of discomfort within the department,” Pityana admitted. “But the shock is likely to ease out.”
The department’s headquarters in Pretoria would not escape the process either, Pityana said. The aim was to fill an extra 30% of senior management posts with blacks and women, and there would “be a relook at the department’s structure and the way it is functioning”.
“Affirmative action is not driving the programme, but it is very much an element of it,” he said.