President Cyril Ramaphosa launched a vigorous defence of the government’s broad-based BEE (BBBEE) legislation, saying it is meant to broaden participation in the country’s economy to include the previously disadvantaged.
The two decades-long policy is meant to redress white dominance of the economy and increase black participation. The legislation also lays down the generic code requirements and scorecard for ownership, management control, supplier and enterprise development, skills development and socioeconomic development.
Economic sectors have promulgated their specific sectoral codes implementation of which are monitored by sector councils.
“A few years ago, the World Bank and the IMF came up with a report that one of the things that holds SA’s economy back from growth is the level of concentration, because they said the ownership of the economy is in far too few hands,” Ramaphosa said on Tuesday.
The president was responding to a parliamentary question from Freedom Front Plus leader and MP Corné Mulder, who questioned whether the government would consider revising its BBBEE requirements for private firms as part of a wider economic growth strategy.
“We continue to have this notion that BEE is the one that’s holding our economy back. It is the partial and exclusive ownership of the means of production in our country that is holding this economy from growing,” Ramaphosa said.
“If we accept that the ownership of our economy is imbalanced, the cross on equality in our constitution seeks to undo that, to redress that.”
Ramaphosa comments come as the government prepares to tighten BBBEE legislation to enable stricter compliance from firms.
Only a third of JSE-listed companies and 95 of SA’s hundreds of public entities submit reports on their BBBEE performance to the Broad-based BEE Commission as required, making it difficult to measure progress.
Two decades after SA’s BEE legislation was enacted in 2003, the commission estimates black people own about 30% of the economy, with black women owning 14%.
But empowerment numbers tend to be contested, with different metrics and targets used in the public and private sectors to measure it.
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