FW de Klerk, the president who led South Africa out of apartheid, said excessive positive discrimination towards black students applying for university was in danger of depriving the country of the talent it needed to prosper

In remarks likely to antagonize elements in the ruling African National Congress, de Klerk warned that “there is too much prescriptiveness on admissions policy” and that “universities are under great pressure to discriminate on the basis of race and color”. de Klerk, 76, said that he supported affirmative action “in all walks of life in order to rectify the wrongs of the past”, but he should not be carried but by clearly defined quotas. The “previously disadvantaged” concept that guides affirmative action policy was irrelevant, he said, to children of middle class black families “who have grown up in a well to do home”. “It is not only black south Africans who are disadvantaged now. There are disadvantaged people in all racial groups,” de Klerk said. de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela for ending apartheid has previously accused the ANC under President Jacob Zuma of exacerbating racial tensions by blaming the country’s whites for continuing poverty and inequality. He said that the country was now at a “tipping point on unbalanced affirmative action” and could go the wrong way if Zuma’s brand of populism prevailed.