LETTER: Parliament complicit on EEA

Michael Morris’s most recent column refers (“ANC scandalously sustains apartheid legacy of racial laws”, January 30). The problem goes way beyond the ANC. The buck doesn’t even stop with the president, but with parliament. Ever since 1998 parliament has been complicit in the extralegal rewriting of the Employment Equity Act (EEA). All official statistics supposedly arising from the EEA (and related subsequent legislation) use the separate apartheid racial categories of African, Indian and coloured, along with their gendered equivalents. Yet, none of them appear in either the original EEA or any of its subsequent amendments. The wording of all the EEAs couldn’t be clearer: “‘Designated groups’ means black people, women and people with disabilities.” The exclusion of the hated apartheid “races” — other than white — wasn’t an oversight. The issue was heatedly debated in parliament’s labour portfolio committee. It was in fact the ANC that resisted pressure from other parliamentary parties (as well as within its own ranks) to have a divisive hierarchy of racial oppression. I was the ANC’s labour researcher at the time and directly witnessed these proceedings within both the ANC’s labour caucus and parliament’s labour committee.