Saturday 29 July was the 19th anniversary of the Constitutional Court’s judgement in Minister of Finance vs Van Heerden. It is a significant date because it marks a crucial point in the erosion of the foundational value of non-racialism and the unravelling of South Africa’s historic national accord.
A “ground-breaking” settlement reached yesterday between Employment & Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi and trade union Solidarity states that “affirmative action shall be applied in a nuanced way… and the economically active population (EAP) statistics will only be one of the many factors that will be taken into account in the compliance analysis of affirmative action in any workplace”.
Last week, the FW de Klerk Foundation made a submission to the Department of Employment and Labour on the Draft Employment Equity Regulations 2023. The Foundation believes that the Regulations, along with the EEA Act and the practice of demographic representivity (DR), constitute one of the most serious threats to our constitutional order since 1994.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE FW DE KLERK FOUNDATION AND PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI’s GOVERNMENT President Mbeki went to a great deal of trouble to engage with minorities
Judge Jody Kollapen is one of eight candidates who are being interviewed this week by the Judicial Service Commission to fill two vacancies on the Constitutional Court. In the course of his interview he is reported to have said that “in the transition to democracy, South Africans had perhaps focused too much on reconciliation and not enough on transformation.” He added that “reconciliation could not be achieved without transformation – without all South Africans accessing the economy.”
On Friday, 28 July 2017, the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CFCR) hosted a panel discussion on the interpretation of section 9(2) of the Constitution, as laid
“This Court and the country as a whole are now confronted with a situation where the executive admitted that it is unable to perform its constitutional and statutory responsibilities to provide social assistance to its people. And in the deepest and most humiliating irony it places its hopes in a private corporate entity to get out of this situation”
– Justice Johan Froneman, the Black Sash pronunciation, March 17, 2017
“The problem is that Hlaudi on went a campaign to appoint freelancers on a permanent basis. Now we are left with an exorbitant wage bill… They do not know what to do with all these people, because they do not have the skills to be moved to critical areas such as television and sales”
– Unknown senior SABC employee, Rapport, March 19, 2017
In his State of the Nation (SONA) appearance, President Zuma said “we had stated our intention of using the Expropriation Act, 1975 (Act 63 of 1975) to pursue land reform and land redistribution, in line with the Constitution” (my emphasis).
In debating this, the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, on 14 February, said that the Government will undertake a pre-colonial audit of land ownership and “(o)nce the audit has been completed, a single law should be developed to address the issue of land restitution without compensation. The necessary constitutional amendments should be undertaken to effect this process”.
At the launch of Operation Phakisa’s agriculture, land reform and rural development leg on 24 February, Zuma asked the following rhetorical (and nonsensical) question: “How are we going to achieve all the goals mentioned in the State of the Nation Address and all the laws and policies that we are busy amending to enable faster land reform, including land expropriation without compensation as provided for in the Constitution” (my emphasis). On 3 March, in his official opening of National House of Traditional Leaders, the President repeated the Nkwinti statement almost verbatim. Land reform “in line with the Constitution” has quickly become “land restitution without compensation”.
In an article that he wrote for Rapport last Sunday, Frans Cronje of the Institute for Race Relations quite rightly warned South Africans to plan for all eventualities.
