‘Coloured lives matter’ – Community protest over high unemployment rate

Misconstrued or not, the draft Employment Equity Amendment (EEA) Act will further exacerbate the unemployment crisis within the coloured community, according to Westbury, Joburg, residents who took to the streets yesterday demanding employment.

Following peaceful demonstrations which saw roads in Westdene and Westbury blocked all day, the residents submitted at least nine memorandums to private and public entities – including Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa Mother and Child hospitals, Shoprite, South Bakels, Gauteng premier’s office and the Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD) – questioning their racial employment quotas.

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This after the Democratic Alliance (DA) was accused of using race politics to advance its political agenda by claiming the EEA Act introduced new laws banning coloured and Indian population groups from being employed in certain provinces and sectors.

“Even if we put the EEA aside, the reality of the coloured community is we have high unemployment rates which aggravate poverty, gangsterism, drug abuse, crime and even teenage pregnancy,” African Christian Democratic Party Gauteng chair and MPL Bishop Dulton Adams said.

He said the community continued to lose children to gang violence and crime, “all because they are not given an opportunity and are deliberately overlooked” when it comes to employment.

“We want to address this crisis, especially with shops and institutions around the area, because we need to see more representation,” he added.

A resident, Edwin du Plessis, accused Rahima Moosa hospital of disposing CVs from coloured applicants regardless of the positions, but “hired people from different provinces to become security guards”.

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He added: “We recently found a bin filled with CVs and when we went through them, surprisingly they belonged to coloureds only.

“More than 80% of the people employed in these places are black. It doesn’t make sense that in a coloured community you find less than 2% of the employees are coloured and rest are black, white and Indian.”

In a memorandum to the acting CEO of Helen Joseph hospital, Adams stated the community’s “deep concern, anger and frustration with the direction the government, the health department and Helen Joseph hospital are steering coloured communities”.

He said: “There has been a consistent and quiet acceptance of the unfair treatment meted out by successive governments, first by the apartheid government and now by our own brothers and sister who fought cheek by jowl against that hated system of social engineering.

“There’s a deliberate decimation of our communities in general and our youth in particular, physically and mentally. Our dignity has been stripped, layer by layer.”

The community urged all parties who received the memorandums to have a reply in 14 days or “they’ll see action”.

Joburg MMC for public safety Dr Mgcini Tshwaku acknowledged that the coloured community was overlooked in the recent process of recruitment in his department and promised they would deal with the lack of representation.

“We have coloureds who have worked with us for more than 40 years and they came and asked why the community was not considered…” he noted.

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“And I said we must deviate, you must cut down those things, scrap it and let’s start the recruitment process from the beginning. So we are dealing with it.

“We also had an employment equity presentation which claimed the city employment equity when it comes to coloured is saturated and I said no, because in public safety it’s not.”

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za