While telecommunications group Telkom’s spending on black economic empowerment (BEE) entities rose to R4,6-billion rand in 2004 — more than five times the R838-million spent on empowerment suppliers in 1998, Telkom CEO Sizwe Nxasana said the group wants to spend more on BEE firms in the future.
Although 540 empowered companies benefited in 2004 — money spent on affirmative procurement represented a decrease from that spent in 2003 when the fixed-line monopoly’s BEE spending exceeded R5-billion.
Nxasana said on Monday that given the group’s transformation strides, expecting its suppliers to be transformed became “second nature”. In this way, he added, the empowerment policy has a ripple effect across the sectors of the economy.
He argued that driving BEE in isolation to transformation — across the board — was not possible and it remained vital that companies started transforming within and this would mean “empowerment was well- placed, internally”.
“It’s not a problem that is going to be resolved overnight, particularly as ours is the country that is still developing its skill base, but also with reference to the area of ICT. We can’t talk about meaningful BEE without looking at the skills base, we need to have black engineers,” he said. – I-Net Bridge