Ramaphosa draws fire for his ‘boere’ comments
ANC deputy president and billionaire businessman Cyril Ramaphosa has had to do some serious political and linguistic backpedalling over the past 24 hours. The ANC’s media machine issued a statement yesterday afternoon after AgriSA president Johannes Moller said the politicisation of “boere” (farmers in Afrikaans) must end. This was after Ramaphosa had used the pejorative term while on a visit to Seshego, Limpopo, this week. Moller said the diverse political connotations attached to the term “boer” were detrimental to the agricultural industry.
“To equate ‘boer’ to Afrikaner people or a minority group or government creates a generalised view that actual farmers represent a particular political profile.”
Most role-players in the industry, he said, did not identify with this and had concerns about the perceptions it created “and the polarisation it encourages”.
“An increasing number of farmers from different racial and political beliefs are participating in the industry and they want to be acknowledged as proudly South African farmers… without concern that their professional identity is abused for political gain.”
It was quite a put-down of Ramaphosa. Moller said that in light of next year’s election, politicians and others should use the term “boer” with circumspection.
Ramaphosa said it was unfortunate that his comments “offended some people. They were never intended to be derogatory.” He said he had warned of the country going backwards “and used a term that has commonly been used by black South Africans to refer to the erstwhile apartheid regime. It is a term that continues to be understood in that way”.
His comments were “not meant to refer to a particular section of our population and it is unfortunate if such an impression was created”. Well, one supposes, that is sort of a half apology. GEPF Especially before a general election, the government doesn’t need the 1.5 million members and pensioners in the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) to realise how the imbroglio over the suspension of principal executive officer John Oliphant can affect them. This is how:
The GEPF is a defined-contribution fund. It means that the government, as the employer, must make good any shortfall in the pension promise to its members. This
To equate boer to Afrikaner people or a minority group or government creates a generalised view that actual farmers represent a particular political profile.
shortfall would arise in the event that GEPF investment performance falls short of its liabilities. So the make-good promise is therefore guaranteed.
But the government’s obligation applies only to the minimum benefit. There is also a discretion, exercised by the GEPF trustees, on annual inflation-adjusted benefit increases. So sub-standard investment performance – arising, for example, from the GEPF making investments likely to earn sub-standard returns in line with government interventions – would cause immediate deprivation to fund members and pensioners in the size of their annual benefit increases.
It opens a broader issue on whether the GEPF should continue as a defined benefit fund, operating under its own law and outside the Pension Funds Act.
In the 1980s, largely under pressure from organised labour, there was a huge switch from defined benefit to defined contribution pension funds. Today, the overwhelming majority of funds are defined contribution funds. They fall under the Pension Funds Act and are regulated by the Financial Services Board.
There is no obvious reason that the GEPF should be any different. Construction sector It is not in doubt that the collusion and bidrigging by construction companies has caused reputational damage to the sector.
However, many of the major listed construction groups have been guarded in their comments about if and how those responsible will be held to account and appear reticent about being fully transparent about what happened within their companies and the industry.
In this regard, the stance taken by Murray & Roberts (M&R) was a breath of fresh air. Group chief executive Henry Laas has openly and publicly described what happened as an embarrassment “for me as a person and as an executive of M&R”.
Unlike virtually all the other listed construction companies, M&R has committed itself to full transparency. In this regard, M&R has: committed itself to pursuing legal action against former executives and employees implicated in anti-competitive behaviour and recouping damages from them; identified for the first time the prescribed projects it had disclosed to the Competition Commission; and committed itself to disclosing the five non-prescribed projects for which it was granted conditional leniency once the commission had completed its investigation and the group was no longer subject to confidentiality on these projects.
Laas also said the group would engage on a case-by-case basis with any of its clients who felt they had been prejudiced and suffered damage and could prove it.
The only possible blot on M&R’s actions is that the group could have been more proactive in engaging with clients on affected projects rather than waiting to be approached by clients.
Most of the other construction groups have almost been scared to comment on specific offences in case it leads to a civil claim against them and seem rather embarrassingly eager to try and draw a line under the matter to allow them to get on with their normal business.
However, as was the case with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they might just find that it is the incidents that were not disclosed or were not fully disclosed that linger on and ultimately prevent a line being drawn under them and possibly continue to have a negative impact on their future business.