Exclusion of black business at corona feeding table shameful
Vetting seen as a ruse to protect white interests
At the dawn of democracy, the dimensions of disadvantage and deprivation were clear. A white, Afrikaner regime subjugated a whole black nation. Economic exclusion of black people was apartheid’s raison d’etre.
Liberation was from white, racist rule. The democratic dividend, therefore, isn’t merely a right to vote – but meaningful participation in the economy. Put differently, freedom ought to have spawned the dawn of opportunity, of social and economic inclusion. In 1994, the oppressed believed that fruits of liberation were within reach. Not so for black business.
The type of racism that was defeated in 1994 at the ballot box was more crude and brutish. For social control, apartheid racists relied on violence. Today, though, the exclusion suffered is subtle. It is clothed in sophistry, documented in highfalutin language. If you’re not careful, you might think the racism is meant to benefit you – even when you’re its victim. Some of it is done with the active participation of those who must shield and protect historical victims of separate development. We learnt from Steve Biko, that doyen of black consciousness, how the oppressed can be complicit in their own oppression.
Sunday World’s front page report last week about “War over corona billions” goes to the heart of the economic disadvantage faced, still, by black business.
The charge was clear: the exclusion of black business from coronavirus tenders was rooted in the racist idea that black people must worry more about the distribution of food parcels and petty thievery by some councillors while white business raked in multimillion-rand tenders, a lot of which are funded through public donations by ordinary South Africans.
While many of us worried about the onset of coronavirus and whether President Cyril Ramaphosa and his administration were ticking the right boxes, others had their eyes firmly fixed on what business opportunities this crisis would unleash in its wake. The nerve.
The National Treasury then took the extraordinary decision to farm out procurement – which has now clocked over half a billion rand – to an entity styled Business 4 South Africa (B4SA). The effect of government procurement being done outside government was that the laws necessary to undo apartheid economic exclusion and encourage good governance (Public Finance Management Act [PFMA] and Municipal Finance Management Act) were no longer applicable. If you’re not part of the inner circle, there are hoops you must jump through before you’re allowed at the coronavirus feeding table.
Black businessmen cried foul, as we reported last week, claiming that a coterie of white businesses were given carte blanche to decide how to use the funds for the benefit of our country. Black businesses who applied to partake were told they first needed to be vetted – something they saw as a ruse to keep them off the feeding frenzy monopolised by white capital.
“The vetting felt like we are being iced while the allocations were happening somewhere in the dark, where normal procurement rules were not followed. By the time the vetting is completed, major contracts would be in place for preferred people of the right colour,” noted a frustrated businessman.
The words National Treasury uses to explain its complicity, which riled black business, was that procurement needed to be centralised outside of government as part of “an initial response to the outbreak of the pandemic, and [this] was to allow for urgent procurement of critical health products at a time of great global shortages”. There. You see how this racism is meant to benefit everybody?
The critical detail is that black business had to make noise a and issue threats before the criteria for economic participation is broadened. The procurement is urgent, we are told, and black business must sit down.
National Treasury has now opened the door for black business following “various representations that have raised concerns about the procurement process, that the approach adopted has excluded a number of domestic suppliers and that it covered too wide an array of goods, especially goods that can be manufactured locally”. And, of course, “domestic suppliers” are mostly black suppliers. To identify them as black would be to racialise the exclusion. Just how did National Treasury not see that black business was going to be excluded? We would be naïve to believe it did not see this. If anything, this arrangement was meant to ensure the government doesn’t have to follow its usually long procurement processes while people died of Covid-19 – but this did not have to exclude black business.
Sello Rasethaba, the chairman of South African United Business Conferedation, says “the B4SA outsourcing fell afoul of the PFMA and allowed for the relaxation, to a radical extent, of supply chain management requirements”. The fact that it is black business that is reminding the government to implement its own supply chain measures must worry us all.
Rasethaba continued: “B4SA developed a national PPE [personal protective equipment] demand and supplier dashboard, and was driving the procurement, transport and logistics of PPE supply.” This is almost the entire government coronavirus procurement handed over to white business. How is this different to what Onpoint Engineering was accused of several years ago?
But don’t wait for the arrest of people involved in this mess. Even more sadly, don’t wait for other black business leaders to speak as courageously as Rasethaba and his colleagues did because they too need the crumbs from the coronavirus feeding trough.