During his first presidency from 2017 to 2021, US President Donald Trump had no interest in what he referred to as “s***hole countries”, which presumably included SA. Yet since he became president again in January Trump has had much to say about our “s***hole” country.
The only thing that has changed is that Elon Musk, the world’s most annoying person, contributed $290m towards Trump’s 2024 election campaign. It appears that Musk lit the match that resulted in fake news about white genocide, expropriation without compensation and so-called race-based laws reaching the White House.
But if Musk is so opposed to SA’s broad-based BEE laws, why has he decided to enter the Zimbabwean market with a local partner? Now communications minister Solly Malatsi wants to reward Musk for his hateful campaign against SA.
It could cost thousands of jobs by breaking our country’s laws to create a loophole for Musk’s company Starlink to enter the country without achieving “a minimum 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups”, as required by the Electoral Communications Act.
Leaving aside that Musk could have used his “historically disadvantaged” white sister to qualify under this idiotically drafted act, SA is a sovereign nation, a constitutional democracy that should never bend its rules to suit one individual.
Realising how hated Musk is and that he is a “politically toxic” electoral liability, Trump and many Republicans have now blue-ticked Musk, according to an investigation by Politico, a US publication. “In February and March Trump posted about the Tesla CEO an average of about four times per week; since the beginning of April the president hasn’t mentioned Musk once on Truth Social.”
SA should give him the same treatment and start investigating other options to deliver satellite internet, including French state-owned company Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper (Jeff Bezos is not as annoying as Musk) and even China, which is developing a digital silk road initiative.
The debate is occurring while fake news about BEE is on steroids in SA and some are calling for it to be scrapped. There is now a court case for any policy that has the words “transformation” or “BEE”.
But SA’s economy is still white-owned and managed and must be transformed. From 1996 to 2022 there were 1, 045 BEE transactions on the JSE that were worth R668bn. South Africans must ignore the voodoo statistics on black ownership and follow mine.
At end-2022 there was black ownership of 1.2% on the JSE. After excluding the value of the foreign assets of listed companies — an astonishing 78% of the JSE’s market capitalisation — black ownership was 5.8% of the value of SA assets. Whites account for 65% of people in top management in the private sector.
The biggest myth is that BEE transactions havebenefited only a politically connected minority. Yes, politicians such as Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale benefited from earlier waves of BEE transactions, but it is no longer true. The overwhelming majority of shares owned by black people on JSE are broad-based ownership schemes.
However, whites have probably been the biggest beneficiaries of transformation policies. This includes the financiers who structured the BEE transactions and the companies that continued to get high BEE ratings and access to state procurement despite not transferring ownership to black people in most cases.
The government is to blame for this situation because it has developed a voodoo system of accounting for BEE that allows white companies to have high levels of black-ownership long after their black shareholders have exited.
• Gqubule is an adviser on economic development and transformation.
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