Illustrative image: (Sources generated with Google Gemini Flash Image 2.5.) As an interested spectator, I’ve found the ebb and flow of our debates around race and business fascinating.
I know these issues tend to lead to a busy email inbox (and thank you to everyone who mailed about the Beyers vs Woolies fight… and how interesting that some of you have come across the same Woolworths negotiator that Kees Beyers did… with similar results), but I think they’re important.
To be less than gentle, I always think a young child landing in South Africa from China for the first time would know before their car left the highway that this is a society marked by racial inequality.
But I wish our debates were more nuanced and would bring insight rather than just heat.
So often they end up in some kind of slanging match that has to be decided by the courts.
Another of these cases started today, as four law firms (Webber Wentzel, Bowmans, Werksmans and Deneys) started their legal challenge against the Legal Sector Charter Council.
I’m no expert on the law of all of this, but I can tell you that anyone who has followed our recent history would be able to tell you the council’s chair, Christine Qunta, was never going to back down. She has been nothing but consistent on issues around race and transformation over the years.
I also can’t help but feel that once something like this goes to court it’s always about “my side is right” and no one ever tries to find the legal ground.
At the same time, News24’s Carol Paton reported that National Treasury is now keen to implement new rules that would run to more than 200 pages of laws and regulations.
During the arguments over the Transformation Fund, Krutham’s Stuart Theobald coined the phrase “inputitus” to describe what the government was doing. His point was that the focus is only on the input, not the output.
I’m not sure anyone has fully thought through what will really happen with this policy.
Which would surely include another lesson in The Law of Unintended Consequences.
For a start, when you get to laws and regulations of that length, you’re automatically keeping the smaller players out. Instead, firms big enough to have rooms of compliance experts suddenly have a huge advantage.
And the companies that really need the opportunity – your one-, two- and three-person operations – will never be able to tender for procurement contracts.
It seems to demand very specific quotas for contracts, down to the race and gender of the ownership of companies that win government business.
It was the preferential procurement policy, which included set-asides for businesses in the area around the construction site, that legitimised the construction mafia (it seems armed groups would demand 30% of the business at a site, based on government policy that 30% of suppliers of services on a site had to be “local”... “local” was never properly defined).
One can imagine some of the unintended consequences of a policy that is so detailed and intricate. Just ensuring compliance will be a nightmare.
We’ve seen other muddled policy from the government about these issues lately.
In December it emerged that Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa was going ahead with a plan that would allow foreign-owned companies to pair up with any firm that is BEE-qualified for the R400-billion grid construction programme.
This was despite the fact it’s obviously better to tell those firms to use local companies that are experienced in building a grid.
It seemed to literally open the doors to some kind of corruption; so long as you were BEE-compliant you could win a major part of one of these contracts.
I’m not sure those who support BEE really understand the damage this kind of proposal does to the concept as a whole.
If you really believe in BEE, in promoting black-owned business (and surely we all must), then you would draw up policy that will actually help those firms. You would want to enable, to empower, not to tie up in regulation.
You would also make sure that the entire business community is with you.
When draft laws and regulations like the grid-build programme and this latest edition emerge, all it does is strengthen the idea that this is about corruption. Because in any rational argument it’s quite hard to justify 200 pages of laws and regulations for any company to comply with for any government project.
There is also a huge amount of misinformation about BEE. William Gumede’s claim that BEE has seen R1-trillion given to just 100 individuals has been highly contested. I personally find it hard to believe.
But when you see policy like this, all of the disinformation, that “it is just BEE that is holding us back”, becomes a lot easier to swallow.
I know the argument about this new proposal will ebb and flow too. I just worry that all that will come from it will be anger and frustration, and very little insight and illumination. DM