Banning the bakkie brigade will worsen income divide
November 23, 2009
By Donwald Pressly
On my walk to Parliament each day, I pass a line of rather disconsolate work-seekers waiting outside the Roman Catholic cathedral, just opposite the entrance to President Jacob Zuma's Cape Town office, Tuynhuys. The church runs an outreach programme. Nearby in Strand Street every day dozens of young black men wait patiently for the opportunity to snatch a day's work from a passing bakkie.
Their presence is a representation of the failure of our democratic state to provide what ANC MPs like to call "decent work". It is a graphic display of poverty and desperation virtually at Parliament's door. One enters the hallowed halls of the parliamentary precinct and a different world confronts one.
I don't know if it is my imagination, but each time I bump into MPs they seem to have grown substantially, with the odd exception. There is certainly no sign of poverty and want inside Parliament's gates.
It is not as if parliamentarians should be poor, certainly not. It is just the enormity of the divide that is so shocking.
I could not help thinking about Jimmy Manyi, the chairman of the employment equity commission and labour director-general. I won't tell you how much his salary package is, it would spoil your breakfast. Yet it would pay about 100 workers over R1 000 a month. The nearly 500 MPs are not earning much less.
Manyi, who also leads the Black Management Forum, which hasn't exactly cast itself in glory over the goings-on at Eskom, was on his hobby horse again last week.
Speaking at a Sandton ANC Youth League meeting - which sounds like the flipside of the DA's Tembisa branch - he said it was time to get tough on companies that did not comply with affirmative action and empowerment laws.
His department was planning to introduce a clause into the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act that would allow the government to terminate contracts that did not comply with the law by June next year.
"When you are breaking the law, something has to happen," said Manyi. "Not just discussions and asking them to comply."
Sapa reported him as saying that affirmative action was not an "anti-white" policy. Somehow, he believes, "white people might be the group that gets the most advantage out of it". There's a thought.
Earlier in the week Deputy Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene complained that many government contracts were artificially expensive because the private sector was overcharging the state.
I don't suppose we can ever admit that perhaps it is because of this insistence of artificially created black companies, many of them fronts for white companies, which benefit. But it comes at a price.
On top of this we want to ban labour broking, which Manyi refers to as "the bakkie brigade". Perhaps he should stand in Strand Street and explain to these poor black men how banning the bakkies will improve their lives, because the consequence is that these men will move from being erratically employed to facing no employment at all. That is hardly decent.
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