Not every woman is an affirmative action appointment or candidate. Neither is every black person.
Take Maria Ramos, the chief executive of Transnet. She has been the only post–apartheid boss of the transport parastatal with a clear strategic sense of what needed to be fixed.
And she has moved quickly to take tough decisions to pursue her strategy: costs are being cut; South African Airways and Metrorail will be hived off, with Transnet becoming a pure transport logistics company. She promises no quick fixes and says Transnet’s restructuring is a 10-year job. With a financial skills-set to match her political weight, it’s clear that Ramos was not appointed only because she is a woman.
And, she is doing a better job than her predecessors, Mafika Mkwanazi and Saki Macozoma.
Consider Vuyani Ngalwana, the Pension Funds Adjudicator. He has taken a fire-cracker to the slumbering life industry with a set of rulings against it that is forcing an overhaul of costs, commissions and customer service.
It’s about time and though other (white male) adjudicators have sat in the chair none has dared stare the giant in the eye or seen the obvious problems with pension fund pay-outs and punitive fees.
With a set of relevant technical skills (Ngalwana is a lawyer who specialises in pensions law and has worked at the special investigations unit), he also has a fine sense of timing and an independent spirit.
Yet business and even the government, desperate to chase the targeted number of affirmative action candidates, notch up every black person and all women as such. It is wrong for many reasons, most importantly because you will always wear a label that says: ”but for employment equity I would not be here”. Of course, that is patently nonsense and does not take account of the history of apartheid or of the old, exclusionary boys’ networks that new policies seek to overturn. But the recruitment industry as well as the business and public sectors it serves is giving equity a bad name by labelling positions and appointments in these ways. A quick scan of the recruitment sections will show many jobs labelled ”AA Only” when this is against the law, which provides that positions must be run as equal contests though companies, government departments and organisations may state their commitment to achieving equity.
The practice is fuelling a dangerous white male victimology in society and makes more imperative the need to ensure that equity is seen as a process applied only to candidates in need of the hand-up. This would also be empowering to people like Ramos and Ngalwana because it would make it clear that they are there on their own steam.
It would also hasten the sunset of equity and black economic empowerment practices (and the consequent normalisation of society) as it would ensure that the private and public sectors widened the pool of black people available for advancement. At the moment, we’re all resting on our laurels as a small pool of black professionals do the ”black bounce” from job to job. The annual state of employment equity reports released by the Commission for Employment Equity reveal that a small percentage of eligible companies submit their reports.
In addition, with the government sitting on a 30% vacancy rate in key areas, it’s clear that firstly, there is still political resistance to equity and secondly, the national skills training plan is not yet producing the graduates able to take up the vacancies.
Equity is consequently expensive (big fish in small pools cost a lot) and can be a disincentive that will prevent the policies being implemented at the depth required to make a difference and to result ultimately in the non-racial society which is the desired outcome of black advancement.
But with the equity and BEE laws applied on the basis of designated groups, it is going to prove very difficult for individuals to claim their right to run equal races and to be regarded as the best person for the job, and not as not quite the best! It will come only at personal insistence that once affirmed you migrate out of the pool of equity candidates and assume your position as a South African, equal in every way.