Cosatu has always supported the principle of BEE. Our national democratic revolution cannot be completed without reversing the massive racial imbalance in the distribution of wealth we inherited from our racist past.
Interestingly, the RDP does not mention the term “black economic empowerment”, though it does make several mentions of affirmative action, which embraces the same principle.
“Affirmative action measures,” it says, “must be used to end discrimination on the grounds of race and gender, and to address the disparity of power between workers and management, and between urban and rural areas.” Those measures (among others) must:
- empower not only individuals, but communities and groups, under conditions that promote the collective rights and capacity of workers and their representatives to negotiate workplace issues;
- establish principles for the hiring and the promotion of workers with similar skills/jobs that will prevent discrimination against people previously disadvantaged by apartheid or gender; and
- accelerate, through collective bargaining programmes, the eradication of discrimination in the workplace.
BEE emerged as an instrument supposedly to implement the racial aspects of affirmative action of the RDP. But has BEE in practice realised the RDP’s aims? Is it really changing South Africa into a non-racial society where all South Africans have equal opportunities and wealth is fairly distributed?
The answer has to be no. The verdict of SACP general secretary, Blade Nzimande, in 2005 still applies: “What has passed for ‘black economic empowerment’ over the past decade has been essentially the accommodation of an elite. There has been nothing broad-based about it. And there has been little that is transformational about it. It has been about changing some of the leading agents of the existing system, leaving intact the entire system itself, a system that generates and reproduces inequality in our country. Racialised capitalism persists.”
New BEE research for the Black Business Executive Circle reveals how far we have failed to transform ownership.
In the top 200 companies, only 90 black people are executive directors — 4,3% of the total number of directors. There are 337 black non-executive directors out of a total of 2 099 (20%), and a mere 96 (4,6%) are black women.
Only five of the top 200 companies have more than 51% black ownership, just 0,2% of the market capitalisation, and only 22 have black ownership of between 25% and 50%, amounting to R18-billion, or 0,78%. And 83,8% of the executive positions held by females are by whites.
While Africans make up 76% of the population, their share of income amounts to only 29% of the total. Whites, who make up less than 13% of the population, take 58,5% of total income.
These statistics prove that even the most modest aims of the RDP have not been achieved. Some of its objectives for empowering communities and groups, ending discrimination in the workplace and bridging the urban/rural divide have been totally ignored in the BEE process.
BEE has become concerned exclusively with promoting a tiny black elite on boards of directors and making them fabulously rich, while the vast majority of black people remain trapped in unemployment and poverty and the pattern of wealth distribution remains basically unchanged.
The process has fallen prey to the insidious new culture of self-enrichment at everybody else’s expense. Inequality has actually widened — a crushing indictment of our failure to live up to the RDP’s vision.
In the recent Reunert empowerment deal, four of the country’s richest women each stand to get shares worth between R70-million and R130-million. “It is a worrying development,” said Numsa, “that workers who contributed so much with their blood, sweat and toil to the prosperity of Reunert stand to gain nothing in the gratuitous transfer of shares to a selected few.”
We cannot tolerate a BEE that enriches a few, while the overwhelming majority gain nothing, or become even poorer. If empowerment is to mean anything, it must improve the lives of all black people, as the RDP clearly intended, not simply replace the old white elite with a new black one. The new BEE Codes of Good Practice will be judged by how far they meet this goal.
First of all, BEE must create jobs. There is nothing more disempowering than unemployment. Then it must end the still widespread racial discrimination in workplaces. It must also promote worker and community cooperatives, especially those that can improve the lives of employees and communities by extending access to affordable electricity, housing, transport and telecommunications.
The new codes must ensure that BEE is genuinely broad-based, for all the people, not just a lucky few.
Bheki Ntshalintshali is the deputy general secretary of Cosatu