Saai says no to new apartheid laws

In the run-up to the 2024 elections, the ANC has passed and proposed legislation and regulations which are practically impossible to comply with and is morally unjustifiable. Saai, in a meeting with 25 organisations emphasised how devastating the impact of both the Employment Equity Amendment Act and the draconian race-based criteria for water licenses will be on rural jobs, livelihoods and food security.

Compliance with the Employment Equity Amendment Act will mean suicide for most businesses. It will be the most comprehensive socially engineered campaign ever. Replacing 600 000 white, Indian, and brown managers with black managers over the next five years, can at best, bring black unemployment down from 36% to 34%. All while destroying thousands of business enterprises in the process. Most farms are family businesses, how can the government implement black economic empowerment (BEE) in a family?

“Saai, therefore, recommends that our members simply do not comply with the Act while we increase pressure on policymakers through legal action, mass mobilisation, foreign governments and multilateral institutions, civil disobedience and public campaigns against the reinstatement of a race-based dispensation similar to apartheid,” says Theo de Jager, Board Chair of Saai.

Saai does not believe that the same government that destroyed the State Owned Entities (SOE’s), public services and South Arica’s credit rating, which cannot keep the lights on and has no success in reducing poverty, can now grow the economy or successfully drive these new apartheid acts to have a positive outcome.