Give black lawyers a fair share

Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng has been linked with an initiative to raise awareness about the need for the state to give more of its cases to black advocates, particularly black women.

It is well known that the chief justice is passionate about transformation in the legal sector.

There are a number of legislative provisions towards realising the goal of transforming the South African society and making all sectors more reflective of the country’s demographics.

Among these are affirmative action, which ensures that qualified people from designated groups (black, coloured, Indian, women and people with disabilities) are preferred for jobs.

In the same vein, broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) is aimed at ensuring that these same groups are represented in businesses, especially those that do business with the state.

And indeed, the BBBEE scorecard is designed to ensure that only those companies that are most inclusive and have in their shareholding and management people from these designated groups substantively represented, win state contracts.

As part of this, government is also supposed to promote and speed up transformation in the economy through preferential procurement. State departments, parastatals and other state institutions ought to source goods and services from businesses that practice affirmative action and implement BBBEE meaningfully.

A lot of emphasis is placed on this fact when it comes to the promotion of and support of small businesses. This is good, but should the state and society not be equally zealous about transformation in professional sectors, including the legal fraternity.

Is Mogoeng not correct to ask why the state continues to rely on white male advocates in the main to represent them?

We have seen this trend even in high-profile cases involving the executive, the very bunch that claims to champion radical black economic empowerment.

Why though is it the state’s responsibility to brief black advocates, some may ask. Shouldn’t black advocates get business on the basis of their performance? Is this kind of campaign not going to reinforce a sense of entitlement among black lawyers ?

These may be valid questions but that is the least of the problems when it comes to transformation.

The executive and the government have to take the lead in transformation.

If they don’t take the lead on this matter, then who will? The private sector will only begin to take transformation seriously when it sees that the state means business.