Cape Town - A Cape Town waiter who was at the centre of a racial profiling till slip debacle at a top restaurant has since returned to work after management re-evaluated their decision to suspend him.
Mike Dzange was suspended from the upmarket Bungalow Restaurant in Clifton earlier this week after a customer Masibulele Scott Maqethuka posted a picture of his bill on social media with the words "two blacks" to describe a table where he and his partner sat.
The incident sparked outrage on social media with users calling the restaurant racist.
A tweet by Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, which was later deleted which said: "Why is it OK to racially classify people for jobs but not to identify people at a table by their race", added fuel to the fire.
Dzange who has since apologised for the incident was suspended with management at the restaurant promising to fully investigate the matter, stating it was against company policy to discriminate.
On Friday Paul Kovensky and his partner Chris Courtoulis, owners of the restaurant, hosted a press briefing following a meeting with youth league leaders in the Dullah Omar Region.
This follows a meeting with the ANC Youth League earlier this week who promised to occupy the popular restaurant and make it very painful for the owners over their busiest time.
Unathi Tshotwana says, after speaking to management, that they were satisfied with the agreements reached in order to prevent such incidents from ever happening again.
These included reversing the Dzanga’s suspension as well as the removing the part on their billing system that allows for the description of patrons.
“It goes against our company policy that our staff would be tagging tables in any way, we have a firm policy on table numbers,” explains Kovensky.
“When our bar gets busy unfortunately it has been recently brought to our attention that in order for waiters to keep track of customers they use their own shorthand, the kind of tagging that has been done before has been a very simple using one clothing garments and obviously on this occasion that was not the case.
“And we have spoken to our point of sale company and we will be shutting down that facility and they will no longer be filling in that information on the till slips.”
The bill that was given to Masibulele Maqetuka by one of the waiters at The Bungalow in Clifton. Photo: Twitter Maqethuka says although he is grateful that the waiter gets to keep his job he is disappointed that the restaurant still won’t accept responsibility.
“I am happy that he is reinstated and I feel that it is unfortunate that he took the fall for Bungalow’s management who, I got the sense, have known about this system for a long time and saw nothing wrong with it until I pointed it out.
“It’s good that they will be changing the system but I want them to take responsibility for once and not pass the buck,” he adds.
Tshotwana described 2016 as a year of racism and said they supported calls for legislation that will tackle racism. He added that they will continue to fight against acts of racism especially in the Western Cape where it’s "bred".
“This year has been a year of racism at its worst in South Africa, we are in full support for the call for legislation to deal with racism, we will engage government to have harsh legislation against people who are racist and want to take our people back to apartheid years,” he adds.
“But we need to make sure that this legislation is fast tracked so much so that come next year people who commit such crimes will be penalised and get harsh sentences, it is a working process but many young people are supporting this call.”