The Congress of the People's newest leadership recruit, Allan Boesak, has charged that the ANC government's interpretation of affirmative action was putting "narrow ethnic considerations" before South Africa's skills needs.
The way in which affirmative action was applied in the Western Cape, for instance, was "totally inexcusable", he said.
"All of a sudden, coloured people are told that if they are not an ethnic African, they can't get certain jobs," Boesak said in an interview about the current implementation of black empowerment policies and affirmative action along strict racial lines.
"At such moments you can see that the narrow racist ethnic (concerns) are considerably far more important than the needs of the country."
The controversial cleric said a problem was arising of affirmative action being "used to exert feelings of racial justification".
Boesak's comments feed into a heated debate stirred up by COPE president Mosiuoa Lekota's suggestion at the party's founding congress last week that empowerment programmes should be opened up to deserving candidates from all races.
Lekota later compared the current implementation of the constitutionally mandated redress policies to apartheid racial segregation.
"If you have 100 poor people and three of them are white and you give the programmes to the 97 people, leaving the three whites. What is this? What is the difference between us and BJ Vorster?" he asked.
The Black Lawyers' Association and Advocates for Transformation dismissed Lekota's as "a ploy to win white votes".
The Association for the Advancement of Black Chartered Accountants of Southern Africa also expressed concern.
It comes as the Afrikanerbond again implored ANC president Jacob Zuma on Friday to address their alarm over thousands of skilled South Africans leaving the country due to a perceived lack of opportunities in the face of affirmative action.
Whether or not the empowerment policies should be reviewed has also seen sharp differences of opinion in ANC circles.
Boesak was at pains to say that a debate on how the corrective action should be applied "has to be dealt with with a great deal of sensitivity".
"I have never said the time for affirmative action is over, but have said it is time to take a look at how we employ this concept in dealing with all these matters and create a situation so that skills we do not have are jettisoned for the skills we hope to have," he said.
The government should rather depart from the point that the level of skills and opportunities should be raised for those "who never had them and could not acquire them".