ANC 'redistributing poverty'

2004-07-26 16:25

Cape Town - Recent media reports on unemployment and poverty, among whites especially, indicate the ANC is not succeeding in distributing wealth, the Freedom Front Plus said on Monday.

"Current trends point to a redistribution of poverty instead," FF Plus labour spokesperson Willie Spies said in a statement.

Spies was responding to figures published by the Bureau for Market Research at the University of South Africa (Unisa).

According to Unisa's Professor Carel van Aardt, unemployment had risen among all South Africans.

However, the increase in unemployment over the past 14 years had been the highest among white South Africans, rising from less than 1 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2004.

"News reports the past week in various South African media ... tell stories of white squatter camps, prostitution and terrible poverty in places like Vanderbijlpark and the west of Pretoria.

"In one suburb in the west of Pretoria, a charitable resident is housing 87 unemployed and elderly people on an ordinary municipal housing plot," Spies said.

Poverty had no colour and just as the African National Congress had previously opposed the National Party's use of apartheid to curb poverty among whites, the FF Plus condemned the ANC for using affirmative action and black economic empowerment to curb poverty among black people.

"In the new economy where economic growth does not necessarily lead to an increase in employment opportunities, race-based mechanisms like affirmative action and conventional economic growth models, are not the right medicine for poverty."

The FF Plus supported the idea that affirmative action should be phased out for all young people that entered school after 1990.

The party also wanted to see the end of race quotas in empowerment projects.

"The focus should rather be on empowerment of communities with the view to their economic independence," Spies said.

- SAPA