Black Industrial Empowerment

President Zuma has espoused a new project.  He is pushing to invest huge amounts of money to support the move of Black people into the ownership of industries, in a bid to ensure that White will not continue to dominate the ownership of industry.  The objective of supporting Black ownership of industry is good, but Zuma admitted, in a sideways manner, that the plan to support Blacks alone is racist.  He denies that the plan has racist objectives, but, as we have seen, when Zuma denies something, with many small coughs and pushing of his spectacles, the denial is a simple prevarication. 

The simple fact of business is that experience gathered over many years of exposure to the real world is an essential element in the building of a competent businessman or woman.  The experience builds on a good education and a good understanding of how the world works.  Experience can only be gained over time.  It cannot be legislated into existence, and it cannot be replaced by State support, or even by mentoring, which, in any event, can only be based on that same experience.

The urgent problem faced by South Africa is the lack of sustainable jobs.  That problem has been caused by Government in many ways.  The high level of regulation, and the time consumption in complying with the regulations added to the multiplicity of fees is a strong dampener on the creation of jobs.  The duplicity of SARS in its dealings, using its draconian powers, in many cases illicitly to support the objectives of the ANC, including the promotion of the personal wealth of ANC members, has driven many industrialists from the shores, and prevented many potential investors from coming to South Africa.  The imposition of unrealistic and expensive Black Empowerment rules has increased the cost of doing business to the extent that many investors, including numerous companies which were South African icons, to establish themselves abroad.  The rampant corruption has been a major factor in reducing employment opportunities, as well as in increasing the costs of doing business in South Africa.  And, to top it all, the insistence of Government that cadres be handed directorships and senior management positions in all major corporations and bodies has ensured that the management of those bodies remains mediocre or even catastrophic.

Is this racism?  No, it is realism.  One need only look at the bodies managed or supervised by ANC nominees to see how abjectly poor even the best (in ANC terms) cadres are.  Eskom is a continuing disaster, after having been a star performer in its field at a world level under White (for ‘White’, read ‘experienced’) management, SARS used to be a competent and honest organisation and is now an instrument to assist ANC cadres to acquire huge wealth, the SABC has been directed and managed by liars, the NPA is engaged in infighting while its incompetence to conduct an effective prosecution was highlighted to the world in the Diwani case, the SAPS has demonstrated a total lack of competence in controlling and prosecuting crime, the Department of Public Works has admitted to having wasted R38 billion, the Department of Defence wasted over R600 billion on arms that were not required and are now no longer capable of use, SANRAL has lost the fight to maintain the roads, allowing them to degrade to the point where they will have to be rebuilt while concentrating instead on the conversion of public roads to toll roads, and refusing to divulge the details of the contracts (leading to apparently well-founded beliefs that the true beneficiaries are ANC-connected cadres), the Department of Education has demonstrated convincingly that it has no capability to provide the sort of education that will equip young people with the knowledge and skills they will need in life, the liquidation of Aurora is a clear statement of the desire of certain Blacks to enrich themselves at the expense of others, in the same way as the liquidation of Johannesburg Consolidated Investments, a venerable company that had existed for over a century, after less than two years of ownership by a Black ‘entrepreneur’.  One does not need to look far to find convincing examples of how bad the performance is of Black people forced into the top levels of management.  The reason is glaringly obvious:  a black skin is not a good replacement for thirty or forty years of experience, gained at the workface, with gains made slowly and carefully over time as they build on a good education.  This does not mean that Blacks are not capable.  Examples abound of Black people performing adequately or well once they have accumulated the experience required to do the job.  To accumulate that experience, the easiest way is to work in a formal organisation with the required competence, to learn how to do the job, what to watch out for, how to apply intelligence to understand the challenges and to develop ways to overcome them.  The fact is that in South Africa the knowledge and experience resides in the hands of Whites, and the efforts of Government have been directed at displacing those Whites, rather than using what they have to offer in order to support the development of skills and abilities throughout the population.  Those efforts have succeeded to a large extent, with most competent Whites in Government organisations being removed, often with large retrenchment packages in order to make way for the Blacks who do not have any of that experience.  The Government has spurned the willingness of the Whites to help make the country succeed, preferring instead to hand the lucrative jobs to incompetent and inexperienced Black, on purely racist grounds. 

The result is clear to see.  South Africa has slipped from being the leader of industry in Africa to become one of the worst-performing economies on the continent.  It has slipped from being the light of democracy under Mandela to being an Apartheid nation once again, one that is bent on implementing communism, in the face of all the evidence that that system of government has, as its main objective, the exploitation of the people for the benefit of the rulers.

The downgrading of the Eskom bonds on the international financial markets is just the first sign of the world’s judgement of the incompetence of the Black management of the country’s institutions and bodies.  Further downgrading will come, inevitably, pushing the country further down the slope of collapse that the ANC has chosen, rather than the enlightened path that recognises that the development of a non-racial development-oriented society requires the skills and experience of the Whites to help the best of the population, Blacks and Whites, to achieve their potential. 

A job is a job, whether the employer is Black or White.  A Dollar of foreign exchange has the same value, whether it is earned by a Black or a White.  And the way to achieve those jobs and earn those dollars is to encourage the development of industries, not of Black-owned industries, not to intensify the job-destroying, economy-devastating racist policies that have become the foundation of Jacob Zuma’s desperate campaign to cling to power.