Affirmative Action is an issue of extremes in South Africa. Like abortion in America, those both pro and anti it tend to adopt hardline positions with little compromise offered. It’s then not so much a situation that Affirmative Action is a problem for its discrimination of other ethnic or racial groups that are better off, but because it favours the elite of those meant to benefit from it.

Sadly, the extremity is again reflected in the Gini co-efficient value, which is used to assess income inequality, showing South Africa a very high 0.593 in the waning days of Apartheid.

This very value echoes general racial income disparity and underlined the potentially explosive racial problem that even still lies beneath the South African socio-economic surface today. Affirmative Action was thus enacted with other measures out of pragmatic concern to resolve this problem.

But the underlying problem is that while Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), a facet of Affirmative Action, may be helping rectify a racial inequality version of the Gini Coefficient, the practice may instead be entrenching multi-racial, but still self-defeating, gross class inequality reflected in the Gini co-efficient.

Farrel notes such comments in his 28 June 2004 post about Tony Leon’s mention of BEE, and is also reflected in the warning by Thomas Sowell’s Affirmative Action Around the World.

While Mr Sowell’s book doesn’t focus on the South African situation, it does serve notice on an aspect of Affirmative Action often overlooked by its advocates and potentially applicable locally. It is one of a savage twist of irony in the egalitarian philosophy of Affirmative Action then that it usually benefits those already better off among the poor of the ethnic group it intends to help. It also serves warning on the repeated involvement of high ranking or similarly linked Government officials sharing in on unnecessarily large rewards from BEE when the poor black masses who supported the overthrow of Apartheid remain where they were ten years ago.

The recent election results pour scorn on any suggestion of popular dissent on the issue, but the country would be better served in the long run then if a BEE that encouraged wider black shareholder involvement from the growing middle and still large black lower class was undertaken.