Johannesburg, April 29: Quotas are for cricket, not for empowering people.

That’s the message coming out of South Africa at a time wise men in India are grappling with education quotas for backward classes and a 50 per cent cap on job quotas and the like.

The African nation, striving to set in place an egalitarian social order minus racism and sexism, has not taken the quota route to empower its historically underprivileged.

It has, instead, “set targets” across various sectors for the empowerment of its majority Blacks. “But targets are not quotas,” said Essop Pahad, a minister in the Thabo Mbeki government.

The way to achieve these “targets” was EEO — education, employment and ownership, the cornerstone of the Blacks’ Economic Empowerment programme.

Kader Asmal, a scholar-politician involved with the writing of the post-apartheid Constitution, said building minds and changing mindsets were the key to uplifting the Blacks, not quotas.

Nicknamed South Africa’s Ambedkar, he explained that the idea was not to reserve jobs and education berths for the underprivileged based on pre-determined criteria. “But it is a long and arduous process of preparing people to take up positions of responsibility.”

A witty and straight-spoken lawyer, Asmal added: “Even in a few areas where quotas are insisted upon, as in the selection of the South African cricket team, they should go.”

He said the empowerment programme was a long and complex one requiring all social stratas to contribute to the education, training and uplift of the Blacks, long shut out of any meaningful engagement with society.

“The programme, for instance, requires that 25 per cent of the land in South Africa should be owned by Africans by 2025,” he said.

Apart from changing racial laws, it was crucial to ring in other reforms too, he said. “Till 1985, our schools did not teach science and math. Africans could not set up a factory if they wanted to,” he said.

Management positions in organisations were “reserved only for White males” till the eighties, added minister Pahad, who has his roots in Gujarat. “But things are now slowly changing.”

Earlier, small and medium enterprises would procure stock only from White-owned firms. Under the new law, Blacks would have to be given priority if any company wanted to do business with the government.

An official said some big companies like Sasol Ltd and Vodacom had given stock options to Black employees, but it “still takes time for the management structure to change”.

To remove gender bias, the government has laid down that 50 per cent of senior management positions in public sector organisations would have to be occupied by women by 2010.