1994’S REVOLUTION IS HERE
AT 35, the oldest of the young black entrepreneurs featuring in today’s Top 100 Young Bosses started their primary school on the eve of two of the world’s remarkable revolutions.
The first was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that marked the spectacular death of the idea of communism around which most of Eastern European states organised their economies.
This idea could not be sustained because it deprived human beings of the incentive to be creative and criminalised competition.
It placed the state as the ultimate controller rather than an enabler of what was to be produced, when, how and for whom.
Its demise allowed the market, with all its faults and crises inherent in it, to be the principal force that decided on what is produced and for whom.
The market economy, with all its variations in different countries – from China in the East to the United States in the West – is yet to find a convincing rival.
It is this idea of the market economy which is the central driving force of wealth creation.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in part contributed to the second revolution: the fall of apartheid.
At its heart, apartheid was meant to consign black people to the subhuman sphere in terms of which they could not take any decisions for themselves – be it in politics or commerce.
Some of the entrepreneurs who feature in this Top 100 supplement are in their early and mid-20s.
They were still babies when apartheid was thrown into to the dustbin of history and replaced by a democratic system in 1994.
The two revolutions laid the foundation for black South Africans to enter the world of modern commerce much more aggressively than before.
The democratic government, through its many empowerment policies, provided a conducive environment for this to happen.
Affirmative action is paving the way for many black professionals to rise through the ranks of the private sector and state enterprises.
Preferential procurement that is part of the broad-based black economic empowerment codes compels businesses to procure goods and services from black-owned businesses.
The government has in the past 21 years provided billions of rand to support those who wanted to start businesses. Some of the money has gone to waste. Some of it proved useful.
The biggest empowerment deals, which remain controversial because of the political undertones, were those that gave black people shares in previously whiteowned companies, where they have no say.
But the government, with all its weaknesses, including failure to enforce compliance, could only do so much. A great deal has to come from aspirant black people themselves.
No government, however clever its leaders might think themselves, can ever mechanically manipulate an individual ’ s creativity.
The Soviet Union tried and failed dismally to stifle creativity. The so-called second economy has its origins in the communist Soviet Union where people traded privately in dark corners where the eyes of the Big Brother government could not see.
Similarly, no government can legislate and enforce creativity. But a government can legislate for opportunities that allow for those with the right attitude of hard work to excel.
It is in this context that today we celebrate a sample of some of the most hard-working and creative young black South Africans.
The list is not at all exhaustive. The criteria, in addition to age, included having an active business that the entrepreneurs started on their own. It also included things like businesses developing links as suppliers to state entities and also to big private sector companies.
The economic sectors surveyed are limited. There is big scope for improvement on our part in the next edition in 2016.
Save to say that the intention of those surveyed here and those who we didn ’ t feature but are doing equally well in setting up businesses is obviously not to seek fame.
The ultimate goal of any businessperson is to create wealth for themselves and their families. In so doing they generate wealth for the country and create jobs.
In an enduring observation, the 18th centurty Scottish philosopher Adam Smith once remarked: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. ”
But for black South Africans, success – or failure – carries with it loaded meaning.
If you are young and black and succeeding or have just started making some successes in your business, you are inadvertently making a political statement. You are helping a transforming society to challenge the idea that only a few exceptional black people can run successful businesses.
You are making a statement that you are not wasting the political freedoms fought for by the youth of 1976, who compromised their education to make the 1994 revolution happen.
You are making a statement to those who might be hesitating to venture into the seemingly challenging world – to stand up and dust off hopelessness.
And you are also saying you can, in your own way, become an industrialist. It might take long before many of our young entrepreneurs become billionaires who own multinational companies. But the seed has germinated.