The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) on Thursday released a scathing report on the government's failure to address inequality and poverty.

The organisation’s Equality Report for 2017-2018 evaluated the government’s programme of radical socio-economic transformation from a rights-based perspective.

It found that the government’s increase of VAT to 15% earlier this year “seriously threatens the human rights of the poor and is not constitutionally justifiable.”

One of the key findings was that the Employment Equity Act’s definition of “designated groups” and the country’s system of data disaggregation is not in compliance with constitutional or international law obligations.

“The implementation of special measures in the employment equity sphere is currently misaligned to the constitutional objective of achieving substantive equality - to the extent that implementation may amount to rigid quotas and absolute barriers‚ as opposed to flexible targets‚” the report states.