The First of September is an infamous date. In 1939, it marked the German invasion of Poland, the opening act of a war that would kill tens of millions and lead to the most systematic genocide in history. The Nazi state, drunk on race, sought to cleanse Europe of its Jews, reduce the Poles to a nation of slaves, and wipe out their culture and leadership to make way for German colonisation.
In South Africa, September 1 now carries its own ominous meaning. On this day in 2025, new employment quotas come into force - not with armies and invasions, but with decrees and quotas. The scale and violence is different, yet the principle is chillingly familiar: a state that proclaims race as destiny, and sets out to push a minority to the margins until it disappears.
The Machinery of Race-Based Policy
The legislation is hardly new. The Employment Equity Act was passed in 1998, clothed in the rhetoric of good intentions. Its stated purpose was to “redress” apartheid’s injustices by reshaping the workforce through affirmative action. Yet like so many destructive ideas, it was justified by noble words and implemented through the blunt tool of discrimination. South Africa today has more than 140 race-based laws on its books - an astonishing fact in a country praised abroad as a “non-racial democracy.” The Constitution itself embodies the contradiction: it declares that no one may be discriminated against on grounds of race, gender, or disability, then immediately grants the state the power to discriminate if it deems the discrimination “fair.” In short, racial discrimination is banned, unless the government declares it virtuous.
And what has this accomplished? Has it produced greater equality? Has it raised living standards? Has it made the state more capable? On the contrary. The mass removal of skilled white engineers and administrators crippled the institutions they once sustained. Eskom, once a world-class power utility, plunged the nation into darkness. The Post Office collapsed. State-owned firms bleed out, hollowed shells of what they were. The purge did not build capacity; it destroyed it.
Nor did it enrich the majority of black South Africans. As Professor William Gumede of the Wits School of Governance has pointed out, over a trillion rand was transferred to fewer than one hundred politically connected individuals under the guise of “Black Economic Empowerment.” A tiny elite prospered; the rest remained excluded. The only whites who thrived were those who adapted. A Boer makes a plan, and many did: shut out of jobs, they started businesses of their own. Ironically, the very policies designed to suppress them often left them materially better off than before.
The Limits on Opportunity
But the government is not loosening its grip. President Cyril Ramaphosa - who himself journeyed from trade unionist to billionaire with suspicious speed - insists that these policies will remain in place until “equality” is achieved. In practice, that means forever. Under the Employment Equity Amendment Act of 2022, the scope of the law has been widened: over the next five years, every employer with more than fifty staff must now comply with numerical targets set by the Minister of Labour, regardless of whether the firm does business with the state. The effect is unmistakable: a de facto numerus clausus, in which whites are restricted to their shrinking percentage of the population across all industries and levels of employment.
The penalties are severe. Firms that fail to comply face crushing fines unless they can prove they bent every sinew to enforce discrimination. The logic is totalitarian: the state commands you to discriminate, then punishes you if you fail to discriminate enough.
And what does this mean in practice? For young, able-bodied white men - those neither black, female, nor disabled - the system brands them pariahs from the outset. Under the new rules, in many sectors such as agriculture, construction, administration, and healthcare, their opportunities as “skilled technicians” are capped at just 4.1%. In most others, the ceiling is scarcely higher, at best 16%. Skill, competence, and qualification no longer matter. In South Africa today, it is not merit but the accident of birth that determines a person’s fate.
What choices remain for young whites? One is to start a business. But who dares build for the long term when government may at any moment lower the threshold from fifty employees to twenty-five, twenty, or even ten? To invest in the future is to gamble against an ever-tightening law. The other option - and the one preferred by the overwhelming majority of graduates - is to emigrate. Emigration has become almost a rite of passage: finish your studies, then leave.
This is not hypothetical. We have already seen the precedent. In Zimbabwe, where the ANC’s ideological kin ZANU-PF rule, similar policies drove the white population from 250,000 in 1979 to barely 25,000 in 2022. Their farms seized, their businesses destroyed, their presence rendered impossible. The ANC has never condemned this. On the contrary, it has often stood shoulder to shoulder with ZANU-PF, with President Ramaphosa praising their policies, even as Zimbabwe collapsed into penury before the eyes of the world. Whether or not Pretoria consciously seeks the same outcome, the effect of its policies will be identical: relentless pressure that drives minorities to leave, draining skills, capital, and hope, and scattering communities across the globe.
A Call for Clarity and Pressure
I have lived here almost all my life. My father’s family has been rooted in this country for centuries. I do not wish to emigrate. I want South Africans to succeed, but that will only be possible if race ceases to be the organising principle of public life. That is why I am committed to efforts to change course, including a legislative campaign by the Referendum Party to outlaw all race-based laws through our Non-Racialism Bill.
We harbour no illusions: the ethnonationalist regime in Pretoria will not embrace it. But the debate must be forced. And minorities of every kind - not only whites, but all who are punished by this legislation - must actively resist being treated as disposable. Only then is there a chance of a political order that is sustainable, fair, and genuinely non-racial.
The United States and its Western allies retain enormous influence over South Africa, should they choose to exercise it. They acted in the 1980s, when apartheid was still in place, and the moral arguments they advanced then remain unchanged today. The principle is not reversed because the races are. A majority subjugating a minority is no more defensible than the opposite. What is happening in South Africa is not “redress” or “equity.” It is institutionalised discrimination, pursued with bureaucratic precision, and sanctified by those who know better but are too craven to admit it.
What is required now is clarity, and pressure. Clarity in naming what this is - not empowerment, but exclusion; not progress, but regression into racialism. Pressure in making it costly for those who enforce it. That means sanctions not only against malicious political actors but also against the captured corporate giants who eagerly implement quotas, boast of “transformation,” and profit from government favour while betraying their own citizens and employees. It further means support for those regions, businesses, and communities who resist the diktats - who try, against all odds, to preserve merit, fairness, and equal treatment before the law.
The West should not delude itself that this is a distant curiosity. The same ideology runs through its own veins, under the language of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” If you want to see its logical conclusion, look south. South Africa is not a sideshow. It is the laboratory in which the future of the West is being tested. If you tolerate it here, you will import it at home. And if you refuse to act - if you look away - you will not only have abandoned the minorities of South Africa to their fate, you will have abandoned yourselves to the same destiny.
Robert King
Co-Founder Referendum Party | PPE Student
