The government’s reckless implementation of the affirmative-action policy is forcing many white people to leave the country, creating a skills shortage crisis, Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi said on Thursday.
Writing in his weekly letter, Buthelezi said white people need to be offered incentives in order for them to stay in the country.
”We need to grant white South Africans a meaningful stake in the existing order … not only does this make economic sense, it is also in line with our vision of a non-racial South Africa of the struggle days,” he said.
The reason a majority of white people supported the then-National Party’s referendum calling for an end to apartheid rule was because they believed they would have a place in the new South Africa, said Buthelezi.
”If the majority of white South Africans had envisaged in the early 1990s the way affirmative action and racial classification would come to dominate the post-apartheid labour market, few would have voted ‘Yes’ in Mr [FW] de Klerk’s watershed referendum on constitutional reform,” he said.
The IFP, Buthelezi said, will be proposing a forum to explore ways of keeping white people in the country.
”My party proposes to hold a widely representative forum to look at why so many white people have left with their skills and what can be done to keep them and encourage those who have left to come back,” he said.
Buthelezi also criticised the government’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), saying it has failed to create jobs.
”The IFP has consistently pointed out the EPWP can never be an unemployment panacea [for the simple reason that that] it is not part of an open labour market and most of the working jobs created last only as long as the infrastructural programme that has prompted them.
”What South Africa needs to create jobs is an open labour market,” he said. — Sapa