Perhaps it’s because of our history of division and suspicion. Or even pent-up anger about the unfulfilled promise of a better life in the new SA. But I’m often struck by how, in what passes for debate on matters of national importance, we tend to so glibly talk past each other.
In the process we even mislead one another as to what the central issues confronting us are. Consider the recent ruckus about transformation, sparked by comments by Eskom board member Mteto Nyati in this newspaper. Essentially, Nyati questioned whether BEE and affirmative action at the power utility were hindering its ability to deliver on its mandate.
Unsurprisingly, Nyati’s views elicited strong reactions (as well as much froth) on both sides of his position. But whatever we may think of it, his argument, the detail of which has been ventilated elsewhere, touched on what is a sensitive, and in some circles taboo, subject – the linking of BEE and AA to productive outcomes in society.
Inversely, the stealthy usage of “standards” and performance to block transformation.
It also polarised opinion, apparently between those who support transformation and those who don’t. By extension, some sought to equate transformation with incompetence and even corruption, while their antagonists stood ready to tar anyone broaching the subject of performance and value-addition as either a racist or a stooge.
As this column has argued before, the pursuit of a transformation programme to undo the results of centuries of discrimination against the country’s black citizens is a precondition for the creation of a more just and economically equitable South Africa. But we have to accept that, while transformation is acknowledged in our statutes and supported by fair-minded South Africans, it is by no means universally accepted.
The above notwithstanding, we must resist being diverted from the key transformational question facing us as a nation – of deracialising the economy and other aspects of public life, while simultaneously pursuing the economic development of our country.
Taking Eskom, the country’s lifeblood, as a case study, we should be as one in demanding that those who are employed there must have the ability to do the job, and to do it excellently. At the same time, we should ask what value black companies that serve merely as middlemen bring to Eskom. Do they help make Eskom more efficient in meeting its mandate, or the opposite?
This is an issue that must be confronted not only at Eskom but elsewhere in the economy. The question is, should those of us who are beneficiaries of empowerment be happy to bring to the table only our blackness, irrespective of where we sit in society?
All this does not absolve the government from properly enforcing its constitutionally mandated laws and regulations, aimed at making a traditionally white-dominated economy (and society) more equitable and inclusive. Transformation must be about growing our economy and making it globally competitive; about us being innovative and excelling in everything we do. Also about graduating from being an extractive economy that exports jobs to one that makes things of benefit to humanity; ultimately about an economy that provides opportunities for all. To present transformation as inimical to excellence, performance and value-addition is clearly a false dichotomy.
But in a sense, the Eskom debate represents a tussle between elites – those who have traditionally enjoyed the status of economic insiders (and who opportunistically climb on the anti-transformation bandwagon), against those who have been historically excluded, now clamouring for a greater share. BEE and affirmative action in their current iterations have stayed on top of national debate primarily because the black elite, with a powerful voice, has a vested interest in them. Only this week finance minister Enoch Godongwana had to publicly defend himself and the National Treasury after his amendments to state’s BEE procurement rules were challenged by, among others, the Black Business Council.
To truly live up to the constitutional promise of a better life for all South Africans, it may be time that we to revisit the conceptualisation and implementation of economic transformation
Absent from the equation are the millions who constitute the country’s economically excluded underclass, trapped in townships and villages and living on meagre social welfare grants. They include the youth, nearly half of whom are jobless and in many cases unemployable. On top of that, they live in one of the most unequal countries on the planet. To them broad-based black economic empowerment is broad-based in name only.
To truly live up to the constitutional promise of a better life for all South Africans, it may be time to revisit the conceptualisation and implementation of economic transformation, to more effectively eliminate the yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots. We speak all the time about the “time bomb” of high unemployment, running at more than 30%, but have not shown the necessary will or creative thinking (as government, business, labour and other stakeholders) to meaningfully address it.
Perhaps if our elites devoted even half the passion they have for their own interests to seeking solutions to the plight of society’s marginalised, we might begin to move the needle in providing all citizens with the oft-promised better life for all. It should be clear even to the haves - and the aspirant haves - that our current situation of inequality carries within it the seeds of endemic social and political instability – which is not conducive to business or growing the economy. It is not rocket science to see the unsustainability of having so many of the population having nothing to lose or to defend.
In the end, the fire unleashed by the deep-seated social discontent will not distinguish the possessions of the black rich from those of the white rich. It is a classical case of the privileged fiddling while Rome burns.
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