Shed colonial mentality to realise BEE
THE BLACK Business Council (BBC) has every right to be celebrating after President Jacob Zuma confirmed last Tuesday night that the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (PPPFA) is on its way to the policy scrap heap and a new act is being discussed.
Zuma made this announcement at a BBC dinner, after two days of intense discussions on black economic empowerment (BEE). Both days saw emotional and heated discussions on how BEE is failing as various parts of our policy infrastructure simply militated against BEE.
Now that the PPPFA is out, attention must be focused on the civil service and the black intelligentsia itself.
I will talk about this later. The new procurement act will include the 30 percent set-asides regulation for small and black business, setting the scene for exciting times ahead in terms of integrating black people into the belly of the economy.
The most critical initiative in terms of getting into the economy is enterprise development and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship drives economic growth and development. As stated previously, South Africa is dead serious about small business development. There is good reason.
The SA Revenue Service (Sars) report on the 2015 tax season reported breaking through the R1 trillion ceiling.
Further disaggregation of this into categories of tax payments revealed that 18 000 new small businesses registered as taxpayers. Collectively the contribution of small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) to PAYE, the Skills Development Levy and Corporate Income Tax (CIT), was greater than that of larger companies. For example, corporate income collected from SMMEs constituted 65 percent of CIT collected from the business sector.
Thus, the Ministry of Small Business Development is now in discussions with Sars to at least identify the sectors from which the 18 000 come from. South Africa will then mine these sectors in terms of enterprise development.
To deviate a little, and in terms of the transformation of society, the “Fees Must Fall” issue is now the limit. Are parents aware that every end of the year towards examinations, there are disruptions in many universities? This even happened when we were at university; and students not ready for the examinations or who did not have their DPs were at the forefront.
Makes one understand the current obstinacy on the part of the students, to the extent that they even want the “haves” not to pay fees. Yet this negates the transformation agenda that must follow the collapse of apartheid discrimination.
These students want to repudiate one of the tenets of the struggle against apartheid, that of equality in society. They want to entrench the current Gini coefficient of 0.67, the highest in the world, which makes South Africa the most unequal country in the world. This means social stratification will continue to be based on race, with black people at the bottom.
Outbid
Back to the significance of the BBC victory. For the last 10 years the BBC has tenaciously fought for the scrapping of the PPPFA. After all, when bidding for government business, BEE accounted for only 10 percent, or 20 percent, of the points depending on the size of the contract.
The 90 percent, or 80 percent, was for functionality. This meant that white companies that did not want to transform could ignore the 10 percent, or 20 percent, and still win tenders as they could outbid their black competitors on price.
Some would even reduce their margins close to zero knowing that their black competitors could not match them.
As the PPPFA is now being scrapped, and the 30 percent set-aside for black and small businesses will soon be real, we will be well on the way to having a truly representative economy.
Now for the civil service and black intelligentsia. Firstly, argued in my previous column, there was a 100 percent commitment from the Afrikaner community on Afrikaner empowerment.
Not only did parastatals make sure they gave business to Afrikaners’ companies, but every Afrikaner made it his duty to support one another. Sanlam and Volkskas (now Absa) grew out of the savings of ordinary Afrikaners, not out of getting a slice of institutions owned by the English.
There is nothing wrong in getting a slice of Anglo American, but it does not give us control of the economy. It instead makes us beholden, and not necessarily in an individual sense as people differ.
Now to make my point; many in our intelligentsia and civil service must shed the colonial mentality they have. As Steve Biko stated: “The most potent weapon the oppressor has is the mind of the oppressed.”
Black people have internalised decades of colonialism that told them they are inferior. Black adjudication committees keep asking themselves when assessing a project from a Dlamini: “Can this black company really do the job?”
The project is then given to the historic and trusted white supplier. At times, we black people will not go to a black legal, engineering or accounting firm as using the big legal and accounting names sort of gives us that feeling we have arrived.
Yes, we so want white affirmation that we go the extra mile; even if it means dumping a better black firm or person, for it. Truth is there is as much excellent service in some black suppliers as there is lousy service in some white suppliers.
Dr Thami Mazwai is special adviser to the Minister of Small Business Development but writes in his personal capacity