IRR to ask leading companies what apartheid-style race audits cost consumers

The IRR will this week be writing to prominent South African corporations on the issue of race- and sex-based employment equity "targets" to investigate the extent to which they drive up prices of goods and services.

The reporting period on the recently announced race and sex quotas, deliberately labelled as “targets” to avoid legal challenges, starts on 1 September 2025, meaning that intensified staff identity audits of affected entities are set to start over the coming weeks.

Says Hermann Pretorius, IRR head of Strategic Communications: “These cynical quotas-in-all-but-name mean that South African companies will soon have to expend even more resources on classifying their personnel by race and sex – simply because of the racial and sexual prejudices of those in power. At a time of economic stagnation locally, and turbulence globally, the Minister of Employment and Labour, Nomakhosazana Meth, has cynically seen fit to add more pressure on the remaining productive parts of the economy.

“Having to jump through racial administrative hoops to audit staff contingents numbering in up to thousands is not a cost-free exercise. Every Rand spent on these pencil tests and the subsequent job-destroying process of trying to meet the new toxic quotas will ultimately register as a cost to be paid by South African consumers.

“Let there be no doubt about this: these policies make all South Africans poorer – except perhaps for an elite few who benefit from the shameless commodification of race and sex. At a time when hard-working South Africans cannot afford it, the Minister is insisting on adding unnecessary and unproductive costs to goods and services ordinary consumers rely on.”

The racial categories contained in the employment equity quotas perfectly mirror those of the Population Registration Act, the cornerstone law of the entire apartheid system. Far from providing a route away from the injustices and failures of apartheid, race-based employment equity targets are blatantly regressive, ignoring the repeal of the Act in 1991.

Says Pretorius: “It is crucial that the costs to ordinary people of the government’s rejuvenated pencil tests and box-ticking are quantified. As such, the IRR will request prominent South African companies to confirm the necessity of annual budgeting for employment equity purposes. Crucially, we will also seek clarity from leading corporations on how much more affordable common goods and services they provide would be without their being forced to classify employees along apartheid-era lines.”

Pretorius adds: “The fact that we have politicians in power propping up the corpse of the Population Registration Act at the blatant cost of hard-working consumers is appalling. Instead of clinging to the divisions of the past in a desperate attempt to re-racialise South African society for ideological and political ends, the government should be considering the IRR’s #NoMoreRaceLaws Bill that would finally close the chapter of coercive racial discrimination by the state. Just as the massive bureaucracy of apartheid came at the cost of ordinary people, the sustained post-1994 obsession with race continues to impose costs that make life in South Africa unnecessarily expensive. Every product and service delivered to every South African consumer is being made more expensive by the racial fantasies of those in power. It is obscene. And it must be called out, exposed, and ended.”

The content of the IRR’s correspondence with these leading companies will be made public over the coming weeks.

Media contact: Hermann Pretorius IRR Head of Strategic Communications Tel: 079 875 4290 Email: hermann@irr.org.za

Media enquiries: Michael Morris Tel: 066 302 1968 Email: michael@irr.org.za