Johannesburg - South Africa's public service has been broadly transformed to reflect the racial demography of the country's economically active population, a study by the Solidarity Research Institute (SRI) found.
Senior researcher Piet le Roux said in a statement on Tuesday the study was based on data taken from the 2012/2013 annual reports of 38 national government departments, covering 400 000 public servants.
“According to the analysis 74.8 percent of national government employees are black; 10.8 percent are coloured; 2.2 percent are Indian; and 12.2 percent are white.
“This is virtually identical to the racial composition of the economically active population.”
The research indicated that the constitutional objective of broad transformation in the public service, as well as the objective of “fair” representation in terms of section 2(b) of the Employment Equity Act had been achieved.
Le Roux said: “This means that, even by the government's obsession with racial counts, broad race representivity has already been attained in the public service.”
Sapa