AfriBusiness will today be writing to Mmusi Maimane, DA leader, requesting him to confirm, dispute or clarify the party’s alleged support for the ANC’s system of race-based employment.
Maimane is reported to have said: “Affirmative action is something the DA supports. We’ve maintained that affirmative action works this way: if there are two candidates of different races and they appear for the job, pick the black one. We will support it; we wouldn’t abandon the policy.”
The quote appears in an article titled “DA shifts its focus to the poor” by Dineo Bendile in the Mail & Guardian on 20 October 2017.
Piet le Roux, CEO for AfriBusiness, says that: “If quoted correctly, Maimane would effectively have made common cause with what is perhaps the single most destructive policy of the ANC, namely racial engineering on a national scale. Contrary to being pro-poor, as Maimane envisions, such persistence with failed ANC programmes would be decidedly anti-poor.”
Le Roux continues: “AfriBusiness’s members and other businesspeople are working harder than ever to keep the economy going – to put bread on people’s tables – amid a deluge of regulation, taxation, crime and general state ineptitude. A pro-poor Maimane should welcome it if businesses increasingly ignore foolish insistences that they should employ based on race, rather than on whoever puts the most bread on consumers’ tables.”