PREMIER'S ADDRESS
Master of Ceremonies
President of the MCCI Mr Muller
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to be with you this morning. If nothing else, this gives us the possibility to wish the Conference success and genuinely to say that I would be most interested to hear the outcome of your discussions.
In this morning's Business Report there is an article that claims that one of the vehicles created to redistribute wealth to black South Africans missed an opportunity earlier this year to do just that.
They were of course referring to New Africa Investment Limited's sale of its 52 percent stake in Intec Telecom Systems.
At the time of the sale Intec was valued at about 80 US dollars. It leapt to 916 US dollars after listing on the London Stock Exchange last month and is now worth more than NAIL itself. The article argues that Nail failed to realise the value of Intec when it decided to focus on its insurance business. I am not going to go into the merits or otherwise of the argument.
This news might have somewhat dampened your spirits as you prepared to start this Conference. You may be raising questions about whither Black Empowerment. On the other hand, this news could, and probably has, served sharply to focus our attention on the challenges that face all of us as we struggle to achieve black economic empowerment.
From your documentation I can see that, correctly, you approach this empowerment in its widest possible meaning. My own remarks this morning will not be as wide ranging. And will not be about black empowerment as such.
MEC Mabena has touched on the matter. And believe me he is an authority on that matter. Otherwise we would not have entrusted him with running and positioning the economy of the province.
Our province is faced with a unique challenge: to grow our economy while consolidating our democracy within the context of an ever more open, more competitive world economy, while creating jobs, meeting the basic needs of our people and empowering those who have been historically excluded from the economy.
I believe I am correct when I say we all see involvement in manufacturing and mining as a strategic imperative in the transformation of the South African economy. It is therefore argued that if black business is to be an integral part of the economy, it must get involved in the actual business of making things.
On the whole, black holding companies are gaining ownership and sometimes control of established corporations. However black business is not gaining capacity at the operational level of corporate activity and particular hard core business such as manufacturing. This has to be addressed.
In instances where black businesses have bought into productive corporations, their involvement tends be passive and the value they are expected to add is seen as external to the operations of the business itself. For an example, sectors which rely heavily on government tender, black partners are important to boost tender bids.
I am certain that many of us present here would be aware of a least some instances when black business people have been quite happy to lend their faces to white owners of Capital so that the latter can appear to satisfy black empowerment requirements in government tenders.
We would also know of instances where black business people have behaved in a manner which clearly says that they believe that the first charge on the corporate revenues is not the expansion of the business therefore the economy, but the acquisition of more personal wealth such as a grand house, a grand car and a grand salary.
Indeed, it is to meet this objective that some are ready to rent themselves out to white business people to win government tenders. I am certain that all of us would agree that we would exclude such people from among those we would describe as activists for black economic empowerment.
For a while now debates about black economic empowerment and affirmative action have been placed in the public domain instead of being confined to boardrooms.
As President Thabo Mbeki said we must redefine the terms of the debate and of our participation in the mainstream of our economy. This must be at the centre of our agenda for transformation.
Together we must disarm those who seek to portray all black economic empowerment as a cosmetic attempt to dress up old apartheid structures of power and privilege by co-opting selected individuals.
We should join hands and ensure that it is viewed as a programme to genuinely empower millions who have previously been disempowered.
Some have sought to project involvement of black business as relevant only in small business. We are aware of the fact that in the recent past we have witnessed a spate of take-overs, deals and launches of new companies by black entrepreneurs.
To the extent that this represents a challenge to the existing white monopolies, and a move into the direction of socially responsible business, the government is fully committed to such ventures.
We welcome it because we think it represents a move away from the traditional image and stereotype of black business being equated with only sectors like the taxi industry, shebeens, spaza shops and so on.
While these sectors remain important to our economy, I want to emphasise it unequivocally that I have no doubt that we are going to earn our respect in the mainstream economy by walking tall, by taking initiatives in ventures previously monopolised for the purposes of keeping all of us away from the means of production.
It is us who have begun to challenge such boardroom conspiracies. It is us who will introduce into the economy a culture of shared wealth and equity. It will not happen by chance or some goodwill from those who have had a firm grip on the structures of economic control.
It is at this conference that deliberations on some of the challenges must be
handled with great precision. This conference must be able to tackle issues of
skills development, training and capacity building.
This matter must become the a subject of this conference together with issues like procurement and market access.
There MUST be great debate and concern about women and the disabled in business. We must be very clear that the problems of economic empowerment have to do with an economic agenda; they have to do with what investments serve to attain.
The challenge for all of us is how to translate our profits into meaningful economic empowerment for the majority of people.
While it is wrong to say that only black business should engage in social responsibility, I think that what should distinguish us from the rest of business, is our social duty to the historically disempowered.
Together we must take initiatives to empower all sections of our communities to start their business ventures. It is us who must show even those already established in the economic mainstream that we are committed to labour standards and basic rights of working people.
We must become the pioneers of new relationships in the workplace. Our responsibility lies with the full understanding that we have urban and rural poverty and that such social problems should be tackled by all of us as a patriotic partnership against socio-economic maladies.
We therefore have a responsibility to create a viable social sector, a sector that is the engine of our economic transformation agenda, genuine manifestation of the longed-for dream of economic independence.
Together we can make such objectives a reality. For as long as there is abject poverty and the majority of people still eke a living in the dumps of our province, our ventures will always be relevant. For as long as the means of robust economic performance remain in the hands of a few that have always had them, our task remains more relevant than ever. It is us who must give economic growth a developmental meaning.
A meaning that says, there is no growth if the fruits of a blossoming economy are enjoyed by a few and the rest become slaves to the advancement of the already wealthy.
It is us who have known poverty who can give economy such a moral culture; a culture of people-centredness; a culture that says we are not empowered if the majority still worry about just getting a job.
As President Mbeki said, we will always have sleepless nights if the majority are still bondage to humiliating poverty and their existence has been reduced to television images of hungry children in the hands of their famished and lifeless mothers.
I hope this gathering will be able to engage with some of these challenges not just as part of fashionable sloganeering, but will be able to pay particular attention to detail and then come up with innovative ways of truly liberating ourselves.
You should raise issues with the government on issues where you feel we become an impediment. We will do the same to you where we feel your programmes reinforce the wrong notion that ours is only to reproduce elitism and greed.
May I take this opportunity to wish your conference well.
I thank you.