Will Jesus save us from poverty and BEE?

David Bullard

The air is full of feathers and the sound of confused squawking. The ANC chickens are finally coming home to roost. They bragged in the past about a 1000 year rule and being in power until Jesus comes but I reckon some of the smugness has disappeared now that the newspapers are carrying front page photos of the rank and file tearing up their precious ANC membership cards. The head honchos of the ANC are finally coming to realise that they are nowhere near as popular as they thought. The renegades are already drawing decent sized crowds and we will know for sure in mid December whether there will be another political party to contest next year’s election.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that there will be at least one new party to come out of the old ANC and possibly two. The one thing that could muck up next years election would be the appearance of Jesus. Jacob Zuma has already conceded defeat to "Him" but how would the breakaway parties take it? Would they really have anything to offer the voters? My guess is that any party leader who can turn water into wine and feed five thousand hungry people with a few loaves and fishes will romp to victory. We live in interesting times.

One of the great dilemmas to come from the recent party split as far as big business is concerned is which rear end to stay close to now. Big business in this country has adopted a shameless policy of ass kissing in the past and it has worked well for them. Politicians are rarely qualified to do anything very useful in society and love it when wealthy businessmen representing large companies drop to their knees and make slurping noises.

Johann Rupert delivered the Anton Rupert memorial lecture recently and it seems that he is as cynical as I am about business organizations that claim to be able to talk to government on our behalf. He refers to the past meetings as “Powerpoint exchanges” and goes on to say that “whenever any of us wanted to speak out our fellow businessmen, or should I say, lobbyists, made sure that we were kept quiet”.

This unwillingness to “rock the boat” hasn’t done the country much good. One understands the need on the part of business for a certain amount of pragmatism when dealing with government but the “roll over and kick me in the ribs again baas” posture adopted by many businessmen is quite nauseating. Wouldn’t it have been kinder and more honest to have told the government where to stick their ludicrous affirmative action and BEE policies? Surely if you have a non racial society (as the brochure promised in 1994) and then you reserve jobs for people of a particular race you’re simply back to the days of apartheid with a change of cast?

I would have much preferred a tax incentivised system of mentoring because if that had happened we would now have a large pool of black management. It’s quite obvious that we don’t have that large pool of talent and that many black managers are way out of their depth in their current jobs. The important thing though is that they now believe they are executives and entitled to live like executives. Well if they want to play pretend that’s their business but the new world economic order isn’t going to have the capacity to carry passengers for much longer. The boom times are over and pinched margins will eventually weed out the slackers irrespective of race.

Black Economic Empowerment has been the biggest con of all. Essentially it’s an extra tax on business because shareholders are expected to hand over a large portion of their shares for free based on the premise that the recipients are previously disadavantaged. A lovely idea if you happen to be the lucky recipient of tens of millions of rands but I don’t think there’s been too much trickle down effect. Once again, the idea of handing over a large chunk of a company to carefully selected individuals for free only really works when share prices keep going up and when there is a buoyant economy.

Now things are not looking quite so rosy on the economic front and rather confusing on the political front, big business is going to have to decide which political rear ends to stay close to. Or maybe they will take note of what Johann Rupert said and finally stand up for what they really believe in.