Veteran politician Peter Marais says he is fighting for the rights of coloured people because it’s what Madiba would have done.
|||Cape Town - Veteran politician and former Western Cape premier Peter Marais says he is fighting for the rights of coloured people because it’s what Madiba would have done.
“Nelson Mandela told me that if the ANC does to me what the apartheid government did, then I should fight them the same way I fought apartheid,” Marais told the Cape Argus on Thursday.
The vice-president of the Bruin Bemagtigingsbeweging (Brown Empowerment Movement) jumped back into the news recently as a vocal supporter of Solidarity and 10 Correctional Services Department employees who went to the Labour Court over the department’s employment equity plan which they said used national and not provincial demographics to determine Western Cape equity targets.
Marais said since the case first made headlines in 2011, he had been approached by unions, churches, ex-military servicemen and coloured people from across the country who pleaded with him to intervene.
“I was happy to disappear off the political scene, but then people came to me and said ‘Peter we need you’. That’s when I called on human rights commissioner, Dr Danny Titus, and others for assistance and we established the Bruin Bemagtigingsbeweging.”
The movement is organising a historical unity conference at Goudini Spa in Worcester on June 17, which might lead to the establishment of a political party. Marais likened the conference to the Kliptown meeting on June 26, 1955, when the Freedom Charter was signed.
“Fifty-eight years after we signed that document, and now the ANC has chosen to renege on that agreement,” he said.
“The Freedom Charter says that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black, coloured, white and Indian; and that everyone shall enjoy equal rights. It does not say that 80 percent of jobs should go to blacks, 8 percent to coloureds and so on.
“The ANC has introduced this through labour laws and we have to unite and fight it.”
Marais said he was not fighting the country’s labour laws for recognition or a cosy job in Parliament, but for the 54 percent of economically active coloured people in the Western Cape, most of whom were not being promoted to senior positions in the government.
“If the government continues to implement this policy, a million economically active coloured people would have to find jobs in other provinces,” he said.
“The coloureds will become this country’s migrant labourers.”
Marais said a new political entity might emerge from the conference.
He became mayor of Cape Town in 2000 as a member of the DA. He resigned six months later over allegations that he and members of staff had rigged public votes in a street renaming poll.
Marais became premier in 2001, but in 2002 he resigned after allegations of sexual harassment.
clayton.barnes@inl.co.za
Cape Argus
