OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday
CYRIL Ramaphosa, chairman of the Black Economic Empowerment Commission is to suggest that an Act be promulgated for the economic empowerment of blacks, which will force companies to invest 10% of their assets in areas of national priority, Sake Beeld reports.
Beeld said that according to an article on the failure of black empowerment in Thursdays London Times, the money raised from the Act must be invested in a government programme for job creation, education and promotion of black entrepreneurship.
The view of the report in The Times is that black empowerment in South Africa has failed. Even though the country produced many more multimillionaires during the past five years than ever before, many of them black, and the inequality is no longer only between black and white, there is a lack of the distribution of wealth on a wider basis.
According to the paper, Nafcoc (National African Chamber of Commerce) head Salebo Macingwane said white businesses must come up with solutions or run the risk of “chaos as in Zimbabwe”.
In addition, said Beeld, white businessmen are coming to dislike black empowerment more and more. They hold that only a few well-placed black businessmen benefit unfairly from it.
“Black” shares on the Johannesburg stock exchange are also becoming fewer and fewer. Black businesses now possess less than 5% of all stock exchange investments, as against the high of 10% three years ago.
The Times, quoting BusinessMap, a strategic South African investment group, says the value of transactions by black- controlled companies on the Johannesburg stock exchange fell from about R20bn in 1998 to R2.5bn in 2000.
A third of the black-controlled companies on the Johannesburg stock exchange have experienced price declines of more than 50%.
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