Throwing money at a flop

Albert Einstein’s alleged dictum that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results could be applied to the recent jobs summit and specifically to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement that the financial sector, as part of its transformation code, will invest R100bn in “black-owned” companies.

Ramaphosa and his decisionmakers still cannot accept that black empowerment is the major cause of SA’s flat-lining and job-shedding economy. It hasn’t worked, and throwing yet more money at it won’t make it work any better.

Elon Musk is an SA innovator of note who started major business enterprises in the US. There are thousands more like him. I have just returned from Australia where I met a number of former South Africans who created successful businesses. They did not create them in SA, because black empowerment made them feel so unwelcome that they emigrated.

In SA’s state-owned enterprises black empowerment was given full rein. The result has been, especially at Eskom, to take a world-class organisation and destroy it through incompetence and corruption to the extent that it now hangs from the country’s neck like an albatross.

By maintaining social differences based on the idiocy of colour, black empowerment has aggravated racial divisions rather than diminishing them, creating an even more polarised society rather than a “rainbow nation”.

Ramaphosa has said that creating jobs will require revolutionary action. Demolishing black empowerment would be a good start and will cost nothing. SA’s democracy was established nearly 25 years ago. Surely time can now be called on correcting previous injustices?

James Cunningham Camps Bay