The programme of black economic empowerment in South Africa will go a long way to ensuring that South Africa doesn’t see a revolution like that in the US in 1775, France in 1789, and Russia in 1917 or an upheaval like that currently taking place in Zimbabwe, Cyril Ramaphosa, chairman of empowerment company Millennium Consolidated Investments, said on Tuesday.
These comments come in the context of the government’s recently finalised mining empowerment charter and the government’s move to pilot a broad based black empowerment bill through parliament later this year.
The mining charter requires South African mining companies to meet a number
of requirements with the key one being that 26% of the industry is transferred
to empowerment concerns within 10 years of the charter’s promulgation.
Ramaphosa, speaking at the International Chromium Development Association
international conference in Sandton, north of Johannesburg, said that when he
thought of economic empowerment, he thought of the US, France and Russia and the revolutions that took place in those countries.
“The French Revolution changed the course of French history. The people agitated for liberty and blood flowed in the streets of Paris and other French cities,” he said.
“During the US Revolution blood flowed in US cities and put the country on a different course. It also changed relations with Britain. In Russia in 1917, again the course of history was changed and many people died,” Ramaphosa said. South Africa’s “negotiated revolution” of 1994 was led by Nelson Mandela and has transformed the country.
“It is a negotiated revolution, as people agreed to the rules of the new system. South Africa’s revolution is different from the other three countries and South Africans are a fortunate lot because of that,” he added.
“South Africa resolved an intractable problem and negotiated a political settlement. The revolution in South Africa continues on a negotiated basis,” Ramaphosa said.
However, while a political settlement was achieved, South Africa remains in need of an economic settlement, he said.
Ramaphosa said the South African government remained the catalyst for black economic empowerment. He then related a story about a Zimbabwean government official who addressed Zimbabwe’s Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) in 1995.
“In that speech, the official said that the land question in Zimbabwe wasn’t just Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s problem but a collective problem,” Ramaphosa said.
“In South Africa, we need to secure the future for all of us. We wouldn’t want to have a situation where people say that had all of us done something more then it would have been a very, very different situation.”
Ramaphosa also told the audience of about 175 South African and international chrome industry delegates, that in the past black people in South Africa had been forbidden from participating in the economic life of South Africa and in the mining industry other than as labourers.
“There is a need to redress the imbalances of the past,” he added.
Ramaphosa said there was a need for change to the ownership, control and management of the South African economy so that there wasn’t just a ‘small white minority’ running the economy.
“South African business needs to embrace economic empowerment. In so doing the economy will be better. Empowerment will also unlock the incredible intellectual capital of South Africa. Empowerment will also make South Africa’s economy more competitive,” he added.
Ramaphosa said that black economic empowerment would only take root if the white people of South Africa supported it. – I-Net Bridge