[I must say, I admire the spunk of many of these white students. Look at what they pulled off. Very well said indeed. Yes, we whites are now the 2nd class citizens in this country.

That is NOT what we agreed to in the negotiations at Kempton Park which ended 30 years of war. But as I have said, I have yet to see a treaty that we have signed with the blacks where they ended up keeping their word. I’ve not seen it in my lifetime.

The question is: Will Affirmative Action get better or worse? My money is actually on the chance that it will get WORSE!! Yes, the blacks will claim that things have not improved enough for them… and… they need MORE “TRANSFORMATION” not less. Let’s see how it pans out. Jan]

Pretoria – A group of white students painted themselves black and turned up at President Thabo Mbeki’s office on Thursday, saying they wanted to be first class Africans.

Under the banner of the civilian pressure group AfriForum, students handed a memorandum to the presidency stating that whites were being forced into second rate citizenship by affirmative action and black economic empowerment (BEE).

“We will not allow racial ideology to take away our being African,” said Ernst Roets, 21, spokesperson for the group and a member of the University of Pretoria’s students’ council.

Racial classification

According to Kallie Kriel, chief of AfriForum, the department of labour’s attempt to classify all employees according to race had no legal grounds, “as racial classification laws have already been scrapped in 1991”.

The department announced new regulation for the Act on Equal Employment in May this year according to which employees must indicate on a form (EEA1) whether they were African, coloured, Indian or white.

Kriel called on all employees to tick the African-square. The students had filled in these forms and were calling on Mbeki to acknowledge their status as Africans and to confirm that these forms had been filled in correctly.

‘Inequalities must be corrected’

“Everybody is jumping on the affirmative action wagon because it is politically correct. We hope to inspire a debate about how affirmative action can be applied to the benefit of the whole country.

“Inequalities in the community must be corrected, but race should not be used as a measurement. It should rather happen according to socio-economic circumstances,” he said.

According to Kriel there were no objective criteria according to which race could be determined.

For the sake of affirmative action, the term ‘blacks’ was used to identify Africans, coloured and Indians.

Elias Ndlovu accepted the memorandum on behalf of the presidency. He said it was difficult to say when feedback could be expected since the contents of the memorandum were still unknown to the president.

Source: News24
URL: http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/New…/p>