Employment Equity is driving skilled white engineers out of SA - Andrew Kenny

Key topicsAmended EE Act targets white males in key skilled professionsEngineers emigrate as racial job quotas stifle local opportunitiesTransformation harms services, but elites avoid its consequences.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Andrew Kenny*.If you are a skilled white engineer who wants to develop South African industry, if you are a dynamic white entrepreneur who wants to employ a lot of people, if you are a proficient skilled white man with a driving ambition to make the South African economy grow faster, then the ANC government has a message for you: get out! Nor is the ANC alone in thinking this. Editorials in our mainstream media think the same: successful white businessmen, engineers, scientists, IT specialists and technicians are racist and unpatriotic.There are too many of them striving to help the South African economy. They must get out; emigrate; develop the industries and infrastructure of another country; help the economy grow somewhere else; reduce unemployment far away but not here. Here they are not wanted.All of this was confirmed by reactions to the government’s latest atrocious law, “EMPLOYMENT EQUITY (EE) ACT, 1998 (ACT 55 OF 1998 AS AMENDED) DETERMINATION OF SECTORAL NUMERICAL TARGETS”. The horrible, job-destroying, poverty-increasing, growth-reducing, skills-depleting Employment Equity Act of 1998 (passed under President Mandela) required that the ratio of the races at every level of employment in South Africa should strive to match their ratios in the country as a whole. This is also known as demographic representivity.Since “blacks” (never defined) are 93% of the population, all schools should strive to have 93% black teachers. The act was not only destructive nonsense but in its most important application the ANC leaders who drew it up and enforced it knew it was destructive nonsense. They would never dream of applying it to the people who provided them personally with services. In other words, it was a lie. In its latest manifestation, the setting of complicated Sectoral Numerical Targets, it just becomes a bigger, immensely complicated lie..Transformation.Driving all of this nonsense is the quest for transformation. This means kicking out the whites. The fewer whites in every level of employment, the more transformation.The main assault of the amended EE Act seems to be against white men working in the field of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). These are the white men the ANC wants to drive out of the country. Fortunately I am too old for it to matter much to me but when I was younger, it could have stymied any ambitions I might have had in South African science and engineering. My only qualifications are degrees in maths, physics, and engineering and registration as a professional engineer. These are now terrible qualifications for white men in South Africa – although great in other countries. I graduated with my engineering degree in 1986.By the early 1990s, when it was clear that the ANC would come to power, it became more and more difficult for young white engineering graduates to get jobs. Employment agencies were specific: white engineers need not apply. Of the people who graduated with me, most emigrated to the UK, Australia and elsewhere, where they are now doing splendidly, earning far more than they ever could have done here, leading more secure lives and, above all, made to feel welcome rather than resented as here. They miss South Africa but the South Africa of the ANC does not miss them. One of my engineering friends went to London, studied IT and eventually set up a high-tech industry near the City employing 300 people, something that would have been very difficult in South Africa then and impossible now. (Elon Musk, a deluded politician but an industrial genius, could never have set up his industries here.) White South African engineers are highly valued everywhere around the world except in South Africa.The central feature of the amended EE Act is a very complicated table containing 13 economic sectors and four columns of employment levels, giving racial sectoral targets for each level. I struggled to get the table into understandable form but in a superb article in Politicsweb, William Saunderson-Meyer, has done so. The racial targets are for “designated groups’, which may be white, Coloured and Indian, male and female. For white males, here are some targets..Read more:.South Africa’s new racial quotas could deter crucial foreign direct investment – Katzenellenbogen.For Section 17, “Water Supply, Sewage, Waste Management and Remediation Activities”, the target for white men in “Skilled Technical” is 4.1% and in “Professionally Qualified & Middle Management” is also 4.1%. Water and sanitation are of particular interest, especially to people living in Johannesburg and in the black township municipalities. Water and sanitation in these areas has been very successfully transformed; the ANC must be delighted. The white engineers have been kicked out.Many of these engineers have emigrated and some are now helping to provide the people of Australia with clean reliable water and decent sanitation. The EE’s racial targets have been met for Section 17. True, water supply has failed horribly, there is sewage flowing into the streets and a failure of a water purification plant led to the deaths of over 20 poor black people by cholera. (Edwin Sodi, the star BEE contractor of the ANC and best friend of Paul Mashatile, was awarded a contract of R295 million to repair the Rooiwal Waste Water Treatment plant in Tshwane. He pocketed the money and did nothing and black people died.) But transformation was achieved! A wonderful success for Employment Equity! The clear intention of the amended EE is to make all sectors the same as Section 17..Vital significance.Section 6 on “Education” presents an entirely different picture, one of vital significance. White men in “Skilled Technical” must not exceed 4.1%, and in “Professionally Qualified & Middle Management”, which I assume means teachers, must not exceed 10.9%. Well now, it so happens that these racial targets have been met in most schools in South Africa. 93% or more of the teachers are black. These schools have met their EE goals. Furthermore they have promoted teachers on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), meaning that race rather than merit has been a criterion for teaching appointments. These schools have done everything that was required of them for transformation, employment equity and affirmative action.But, guess what? None of the ANC ministers or EFF leaders or editors of our mainstream media ever send their children to these schools. They send them to schools with mainly white teachers appointed on merit, schools such as St John, St Mary’s, St Stithian’s, Roedean, Bishops and Herschel – schools where there has been no transformation. They want transformation for other people’s children but not their own. They want DEI teachers for other people’s children but teachers appointed on merit for their own.Suppose you asked the poor black people living in black townships without water and with the stench of over-flowing sewage: what matters more to you, the quality of your water and sanitation or the colour of the engineers and managers responsible for it? Does anybody have the slightest doubt what their answer would be? They would give the same answer for their water and sanitation as the rich people would give for their children’s education.I graduated in engineering with an Eskom bursary, for which I am very grateful, and then worked in Eskom power stations at a low level. I began to see the white engineers kicked out on the grounds of EE, transformation, etc. This was known as “space creation”. Eskom, which provided the world’s cheapest electricity very reliably in the 1970s and 1980s, has since degenerated, partly because of this. Transnet (railways and harbours), PRASA, state hospitals and municipalities are even worse.What should a patriotic, ambitious and skilled white engineer do if he wants to develop South African industry and make the economy grow? What does the ANC and the editor of the Sunday Times want him to do? Suppose he joins an industrial company in South Africa. If he is successful and gets promoted to high levels of responsibility, he puts the company in desperate danger. If white men at his level exceed 4.1% of the total at that level, the company will be punished with ruinous penalties, which could destroy it. So he’d better make sure he is not too successful.But even at a lower level, he still might find himself among white men over 4.1% of the total. The only way he could play it safe is to resign. If he is hell-bent on being a successful engineer and developing industry, he’d better emigrate. That’s what the ANC and the editor of the Sunday Times wants him to do. They both support the EE Amendment Act and accuse its critics, such as the DA, of being racist..Foreign companies.Foreign companies thinking of investing in South Africa are treated in the same way by the amendment of the EE Act. Up to now, if you were, say, a German company wanting to invest in a big motor car manufacturing factory in South Africa, employing a thousand workers, whose skills you would develop, you would first have to give 30% of the value of your company to a BEE partner. You would have to be very careful whom you chose. You’d have to choose a rich black man with the right political connections. Otherwise you might be guilty of fronting, and be liable to ten years imprisonment. “Ten years in prison!” emphasised Deputy President Ramaphosa in September 2016.You would also have been faced with mountains of bureaucracy, miles of red tape and a mass of complicated racial laws. Now you will also be faced with sectoral targets. Be very careful, Herr Ludwig. If at “Senior Management” level in your factory you have more than X% of white males, we are going to smash you with a massive fine!South African companies are said to be sitting on huge piles of cash, which they would like to invest in productive, job-giving industries in South Africa but are reluctant to do so. The amendment to the EE Act explains why. If they invest in such industries they will be punished, reviled and perhaps destroyed. These companies contain some ambitious, driving types. If they want to retain their drive and ambition, they’d better emigrate. But they could just relax, become lazy sods like me, shut down their factories, and invest their money in South African government bonds, which are safe (so far at any rate) and bring in a good return, much better than bonds overseas.Since they would employ nobody, they could not be accused of racism, exploitation, white monopoly capital, infringement of this or that obtuse race law, and so on. There are plenty of beautiful places in South Africa, on beaches, on golf courses, in the bush, in the mountains and in the game reserves where rich lazy white men could be free to enjoy themselves. That’s what the April 2025 amendment to the EE Act wants them to do.Meanwhile unemployment in South Africa has increased to 43.1% (expanded definition, including those who have given up looking for work). Expect it to go higher when the amended EE Act kicks in..*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by DailyFriend and is republished with permission

Employment Equity is driving skilled white engineers out of SA - Andrew Kenny

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