As the mediating bodies through which a new political agenda would have to be translated into practical reality, they are crucially important to realising the vision of the 'new South Africa'. Inequities based on our colonial heritage and associated systems of race privilege, class exploitation and gender oppression are all fairly obvious and visible in this context. The political struggle succeeded in transforming the representation of political party representatives in parliament which is now majority black, with one of the highest percentages of women in the world. Boards of directors have been and are being changed, senior managers, executive officers and directors who are not white men, are being hired. Affirmative action is high on the agenda.
Numbers are most certainly important.
Government has gone a long way in developing various policy documents to guide its practice in the direction of greater social equity. However, changing people's values and ways of behaving and changing entrenched institutional culture is not so easy. Often it is easier to accept these constraints and work within their limitations than to challenge them. Despite the four years of serious attention to large-scale institutional transformation agendas, very little of the local experience has been written about in a formal sense. Practitioners have little that is local to read and most teachers of the subject rely on non-South African material.