There has been positive excitement among many people who received confirmation that they are now shareholders of the massive petrochemical group, Sasol, through its empowerment scheme.
The ownership might be small and inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things, but it has generated positive feeling, judging by the queues at the post office when the shares were sold.
It must be good to say “I am getting this because I am black” and “this” is a good thing. The process also has an educational value among the public because it generates an interest in the stock exchange and what companies do.
This can make companies accountable to a wider diversity of stakeholders, which in turn can have positive spin-offs.
In the confirmation letter received from Sasol there is an interesting line that reads: “—we have a long-standing tradition of giving back to the community through, among others, artisan-training programmes—”
My understanding of the “long standing tradition” equates with heritage and legacy. This is often a puzzling and unbalanced portrayal of the past by many organisations. It often shows a callous disregard of our painful history of racial and gender exclusion and this is done under the guise of the rainbow nation.
Trumpeting the minor positives of the past has negative implications for the transformation process in a number of ways:
- The intensity of the process is undermined because those in positions to drive it do not comprehend the depth of feeling about the “past”. They see it as a transient corporate social responsibility project.
- People who perpetrated the process of exclusion remain in place and use every opportunity to question the merits of transformation. They use obstructionist tactics such as “it takes time to develop people”. Their retention in the “new era” — without having to undergo any change — only reaffirms them. Time passes and we get the same report from the Employment Equity Commission.
- People pay cursory attention to new values because there is no clear break with the past and deviant behaviour remains unchallenged.
- New African executives provide no inspiration to young upcoming ones because they have no sense of what has changed from when they were “outsiders”. Where is the break from the past to the now? The measure for successful executives remains unchanged because transformation is peripheral.
- The tendency is to see B-BBEE as part of the arena to compete in rather than as part of an introspective process to reconstruct a country recovering from previous afflictions.
Thus the recent renaming of the student union building at Rhodes University to Steven Bantu Biko is significant. The vice-chancellor, Dr Saleem Badat, described his reason for doing this as “instructive”.
Although he emphasised “pride and institutional loyalty” in the university, he is quoted as saying: “— it is important not to deny the historical truth in which we take no pride … the past was shameful and inexcusable”.
Transformation should be beyond public relations and gimmicks. It should be about acknowledging the past and our role in it.
Mamphele Ramphele talks about transcendence and writes: “It is about making oneself vulnerable by abandoning known ways of seeing the world and engaging with others to explore different approaches.
“As long as institutions and individuals in them see themselves as masters of the universe, our transformation will remain shallow and unsustainable.”
Changes in government, ideology, policy or Act of Parliament are not going to achieve sustainable transformation.
Individuals and institutions have to table responsibility and act to abolish the pain of the past and carve a new way.