June 2013 \ Final Word \ 25
www.GatewayToAfrica.com
FINAL WORD:
ANC Premier of troubled province defends BEE GTA speaks to the woman in charge of South Africa’s platinum province about BBBEE and ‘that’ Bill
by Jeremy Kuper and Medha Prakasam
GTA: I notice that your ‘extracurricular’ activities are more cultural and social, you seem to be less interested in business, why? TM: I think that if the government pays you a good salary, gives you good perks, it protects the poor and the vulnerable, it is a caring state, it wants to develop responsible citizens – [if it does all that, then] you owe it to that government to tread the straight and narrow. In my province, I lead the call to stop corruption within government and in corporate society. Therefore it would be difficult for me to be involved in anything that is going to come into conflict with what I stand up on this platform and say.
Image by Christine van der Merwe
GTA: The perception remains of BEE that it is to the benefit of an often small [and highly interconnected] elite. Should it be changed, perhaps become more broad-based, to achieve what was intended? TM: Let me start off by an affirmation. Your system in SA was such that a big majority of people were deliberately disempowered, they lost their land, their education was degraded, they were taken off and divided as people, they were pushed against one another. Socially, economically, politically, the Africans lost out. If you look at the other races, the women were just [discriminated against to] a little degree…Amongst the whites, the coloureds, the Indians, the women were just a little degree better. You need to be very deliberate, and that is
why affirmative action is a policy that I think I will go to [the] death defending. You have in the rural provinces, a big percentage of people who are not equal. Now, if you want Africans to participate in the economy of their country, you definitely have to look at different mechanisms and BEE was one. And I think within a year or two we came to the conclusion that it was open to abuse. It was open to abuse because many people used [black] Africans [as fronts] and they would not really benefit. So, that is why we moved from BEE into broad-based economic empowerment. I come from a province which believes in sharing. We believe that if you are empowering people, you must take turns: this one got [a leg up] today, somebody must get that opportunity tomorrow. The fact is, that for broad based economic empowerment to take place, you must have the support that will ensure that any young person, any woman, any African man, any Indian, any coloured man, who wants to participate in this has some [support system]. You did not have African people as managers and we actually came to hate managers. So management becomes an issue here. You will find that the policies today are tweaked so there is an element of empowerment of people who are getting into business. There will be an outcry amongst the communities if they see that the same person is benefitting over and over, which is the reason why we are looking at changing the whole system. Is the system bad? It is only bad because of the way it is structured. Is it wrong to benefit people who were deliberately left out of the economic level? I don’t think so.