While the ANC Youth League’s (ANCYL) political opponents and detractors in the commentariat can afford to easily dismiss Collen Malatji’s call for a Capitec boycott, the bank would do well to use this as a moment for self-introspection.
The youth league president recently stirred the hornet’s nest when he called for black South Africans to boycott Capitec bank. At the heart of his gripe with the bank used by 21-million South Africans, mainly black people, is his assertion that the bank is a major funder of the DA and therefore an opponent of the country’s economic transformation and empowerment policies.
Instead of saying the founder of Capitec Michiel Le Roux, through his other companies Fynbos Ekweteit and Fynbos Kapital, is a major funder of the DA, Malatji casts it as the bank being the bankroller of the official opposition. Malatji is a politician, and “rounding-off-to-the-nearest” of the facts to make his political point is the trading stock he shares with his peers across the aisle.
The range of responses to Malatji’s call for the company’s boycott has included the league’s supporters and the ANCYL’s detractors rubbishing it as a quest for relevance.
Can the bank afford to shrug off the call for a boycott, and ignore the issues Malatji is raising? I submit it cannot.
The starting point must be the clarity the bank has been quick to advance – that it is not the bank but its founder and now board member Michiel Le Roux who donates to the DA. This can’t be faulted.
The relevant political party funding reports from the IEC reveal Le Roux’s other companies Fynbos Ekweteit and Fynbos Kapital as the donors who gave the DA R15-million last year. It requires no stating that donating to a political party is not a crime.
The influence Le Roux has exercised in the past two decades, in shaping the bank and the values it espouse, initially as founder and CEO, later as chairperson, and now as a board member, cannot be denied.
How does the company measure up on questions of transformation, affirmative action and broad-based black economic empowerment?
And how does the company measure up on this score? The composition of its top leadership, which as of April this year consisted of a board of 10 directors (excluding CEO and CFO), that was dominated by seven, mostly white men and three women (two of whom are black, and one white).
The bank acknowledges its failure on this score, stating in its 2023 annual report that against its target of 40% board racial diversity, it only managed 30%. Why does diversity of leadership matter, especially for a company that recently introduced a commendable employee share ownership scheme that has at least 10 500 employees becoming shareholders?
Professor Stephen Friedman in his rebuttal of the DA’s “colour-blind” policy stance said: “When one group has occupied all the top positions in business and the professions for more than a century, people assume that only that group has the abilities those positions need. And so “merit” becomes another word for belonging to the dominant group.
“If race or gender are ignored, the people who decide who is appointed are likely to assume that only people like them have “merit”. And so, the individuals appointed to top positions will always be those who look like the person making the appointments,” he said.
“The CEO is a white Afrikaner male, and when the white male Afrikaner CFO resigned, he was immediately replaced by a white English male.”
- Seema is a businessman and a political commentator.
