eBusiness Weekly
Black Business Council president Sandile Zungu says the B-BBEE targets are not ambitious enough.
He says all they do is “accommodate” black people through corporate restructures, whereas the country needs economic restructuring.
He says SA needs a plan to transfer 70 percent ownership and management control of the economy into the black majority’s hands by 2030.
Sandile Zungu, says economic transformation in South Africa has been set back a few years and something drastic must happen before the next decade to move ownership to the hands of more black people.
Speaking at the BBC’s annual summit on Wednesday, Zungu said the critical sectors of the economy – banks, mines, agriculture and factories – were still largely in the hands of the minority, and black people were simply accommodated to own about 30 percent at best.
“In fact, what has happened since 1993 – a year before the elections – has been a corporate restructuring or an exercise by shareholders of large, mainly white-owned companies to accommodate a few black Africans as co-owners,” he said.
Zungu said until Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) legislation came into effect, most of the companies who “accommodated [a] few blacks” did this out of self-interest.
But when the B-BBEE Act came into effect in 2003, most big companies only carried out corporate restructuring, which has to date not ushered any meaningful change in the skin colour of people who truly control the South African economy, according to Zungu.
“The B-BBEE Act was not ambitious. As with the democratic project, it merely sought to accommodate black Africans instead of making them the real owners,” he said.
Over and above the targets not being ambitious enough, there are people hell-bent on frustrating the government’s efforts to transform the economy, he said. He pointed out AfriForum’s and Solidarity’s decision to challenge the Tourism Equity Fund as one example.
Tourism Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane said her department is determined to defend the Tourism Equality Fund. She said AfriForum’s and Solidarity’s challenge has frustrated many black entrepreneurs who don’t have the alternatives that their white peers have, since the court interdicted any stimulus payments from the fund in April.
Zungu said if this resistance to transformation is left unchallenged, South Africa should be prepared for the impending social inferno to explode. So, he proposed that in the next nine years, South Africa should get cracking with “economic restructuring, not corporate restructuring”.
“We need a plan to transfer 70 percent ownership and management control of the economy into black majority hands by 2030,” he said.
Kubayi-Ngubane said that if stakeholders don’t work together to bridge the increasing gap between the haves and the have nots, the stability of the country’s democracy will increasingly be under threat. — news24.com
