ANC’s Magaxa challenges remarks on race exclusion
ANC MP and the governing party’s former acting Western Cape chairperson, Khaya Magaxa, has taken issue with his colleague, Faiez Jacobs, for publicly claiming that the organisation is sidelining coloured, Indian and white communities.
Magaxa said Jacobs’s assertion that the ANC must prioritise and focus on what the party’s former Western Cape provincial secretary referred to as “non-African wards” to build a stronger, more inclusive party that represents all South Africans and fosters social cohesion in order to secure longterm political success “lends credence to an unfortunate falsity”.
Last month, the Sunday Independent reported that Jacobs, also an ANC MP, said that the coloured, Indian and white communities’ feelings of exclusion were a major threat. There was a sense that current affirmative action measures were unevenly applied, and in some cases prejudicial, and that this remained a sore point requiring urgent intervention.
“This assertion, which sounds foreign, is not just contradictory but confusing and extremely problematic,” Magaxa wrote in the latest edition of ANC Today, the party’s weekly newsletter.
According to the chairperson of the National Assembly’s portfolio committee on public enterprises, the ANC-led national government is still continuing with progressive policies while they continue to be thwarted by the DA-governed provincial and local government.
This week, a war of words erupted between the ANC and the DA over the draft Employment Equity Amendment Act regulations, which the official opposition has threatened to take to the country’s highest court for setting racial quotas across 18 economic sectors for companies with more than 50 employees.
Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi published the draft regulations for public comment for 30 days last Friday.
But the ANC accused the DA of pushing propaganda by suggesting that the governing party was promoting new race laws prohibiting employment of specific racial groups in certain provinces and sectors, and expressed its confidence that the draft regulations were consistent with the country’s Constitution and would help transform the labour market and society.
Magaxa said implying that the ANC government policies did not resonate with particular communities without concrete evidence, except to casually refer to affirmative action, was vague and imprecise.
”We need to understand and appreciate the real reason as to why coloured people, as part of the black majority, have been behaving negatively towards the ANC even before it took power in 1994,” he said.
Magaxa described it as dangerous to assume that socio-economic challenges faced by historically oppressed masses are somehow different and certain communities among the poor need special attention irrespective of their class.
He said that since 1994, the coloured community had been consistently voting for reactionary political parties against the ANC.
He said any view that the ANC did not care about minorities and its understanding of these communities was always narrow and not based on its national democratic revolution.