MKHWANAZI NOT HAPPY WITH BEE PROGRESS

IN HIS interview with the Sowetan, hours before he died, Donald Dawort Bongani Mkhwanazi bemoaned how the country was struggling to implement black economic empowerment .

Mkhwanazi, fondly known as Bra Don and widely considered the godfather of BEE, spoke to Sowetan at the 60th birthday celebration of engineering and consulting firm Gibb on Thursday night.

Mkhwanazi, who was the founding president of the Black Management Forum, said BEE would only succeed if ministers of trade and industry and labour understood it.

“If a minister is positive and understands BEE, it happens, if he is not it does not happen. BEE should be a mindset and a way of life. It is not about scoring points,” he said.

“You cannot have few blacks who are haves and think things are going to be normal.

“It is about equitable society ownership spread among the SA citizens, not just about Don Mkhwanazi or [Black Business Council deputy vice president] Sandile Zungu, because that would be replacing white faces with black faces.”

He said having black entrepreneurs create wealth would result in economic emancipation for many.

“Not these empowerment deals where you buy 25% of a company but you are not creating any new jobs. Instead there is attrition in new jobs because you have to maintain the price level of the shares.

If the value of the shares goes down then you retrench people, and that is disempowerment,” he said.

“I’m not happy with the current state of BEE because the policy has lost its real meaning and purpose. BEE to many people means “tick a box”, affirmative action, tick; social investment, tick.

“BEE is no longer about the management and control of companies, like in our company Gibb, the control, ownership and management is in the hands of our people,” he said.

He said the tick-a-box exercise was responsible for failing to change the economic power relations of SA.

“BEE is about the redefinition of economic power relations between the haves and the have nots. We have lost that,” he said.

“When you are talking about BEE, we’re talking about ownership and control of productive assets of our nation,” he said.

He served on a number of boards, including those of the Central Energy Fund, Strategic Fuel Fund, Durban Investment Promotions Agency and SA Freight.

“The policy has lost its real meaning