We can choose to ignore his words, and pretend we did not hear them, or we could, if we are cynical, choose to scoff at them, but when men and women of demonstrable integrity sound a word of warning, we must look up, take heed and search our consciences, and seek to find a solution to pull ourselves out of the deepening economic rut by our own bootstraps.
It would be naïve to think our difficulties as a country will be addressed by others, and not by ourselves.
We, as black people, will have to learn the hard way. We must step up. We are at crossroads and need to prevent unpleasant economic outcomes – an implosion of one kind or another. This is possible only if we move towards a real empowerment project to benefit the many and not the few, to borrow from the UK’s Labour Party mantra, geared at securing for the working class “by hand or by brain the full fruits of their labour”.
But it is all in our hands, to paraphrase Madiba’s words: “the answer lies within us, and nowhere else”. Black empowerment must benefit all, and not “the few”.
Racism has scarred us, damaged our collective personality. The vestiges of colonialism and apartheid and inequality remain, nearly 30 years after we defeated the injustices of apartheid in 1994.
“Black man, you are on your own.” These words hogged newspaper headlines more than five decades ago.
The words were attributed to Steve Bantu Biko/Barney Pityana. Last week they reverberated in a different form.
Businessman Ruel Khoza, in his address to the Black Management Forum (BMF) seminar last week, called on black people to grasp the nettle – to use the black economic empowerment to benefit the many and not the few.
Khoza, like Biko and Pityana, is an exponent of Black Consciousness philosophy. In his words of profound wisdom and relevance, he echoed the Biko/Pityana words: “Black man, you are on your own.”
We run the country. Like the Afrikaners of the Broederbond era who empowered their own, we too, as black South Africans, should not be afraid to do the same – empower our own, not in a trickle, but in their millions.
The empowerment project is not only about producing billionaires; it is also about creating wealth for the many, and not the few, so that every black child never ever again has to experience having to wake up in the morning without a wholesome nourishing meal.
This is a shorthand for empowering black people through a broad-based black economic empowerment vehicle. Primarily, this means the empowerment of all black people.
Giving power and opportunity to black entrepreneurs is to enable economic growth, and not to stunt it. An omnibus, all-encompassing vehicle, to include everyone in the empowerment project.
At the BMF imbizo, what was laid bare was that the black empowerment project as we know it today has been a great flop, and in the words of Eric Mafuna, the founding father of the BMF, it worked “for the guys at the top” – in other words, for the few, and not the many.
“They open the door for you to come in” and order those already inside to “lock the door”, so that millions of other black people are kept out of the empowerment project.
The name Stellenbosch conjures up derision and utmost hatred to those described as “Stellenbosch mafia” – the filthy rich businesspersons who
never think of spreading the wealth to the many.
But Khoza gives Stellenbosch a different twist: “We probably have the densest concentration of billionaires in Stellenbosch; it is not by accident; it is by absolute design. The Afrikaners laid the foundation legislatively in a manner that was not open to misinterpretation; they meant business.”
If Afrikaners meant business, why are we not doing the same.
Why are black people abusing the system meant to use our own bootstraps to uplift ourselves from the scourge of poverty? Why do we close doors as soon as we are in and shut the door to new entrants?
The words of Mafuna are instructive – the black economic empowerment works for “the guys at the top” – this despite the fact we ought “to be on our own” in all
aspects of our endeavours to give as many black people as possible a place on the table of black empowerment.
- Mdhlela is a freelance journalist, an Anglican priest, an ex-trade unionist and former editor of SA Human Rights Commission journals
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