Читать книгу New South African Review 1 - Anthony Butler - Страница 11

BEE has increasingly come to have a bad name, reflecting what Business Report (5 February 2010) records as ‘the country’s deep disenchantment with the empowerment process, which has come to be seen as a means of instant wealth for people with political connections and influence, while ordinary people have largely continued to live in poverty. Generally speaking, BEE is taken as having created a small group of ‘BEE-llionaires’ without having had a significant impact on the white domination of industry. This story is variously presented, but notably as white capital having sought self protection by forging deals with the incoming ANC elite, of the politically connected gaining preferential access to state tenders, and of blacks ‘fronting’ for white companies to obtain contracts from government (Bassett 2008). Meanwhile, despite heavy emphasis on the expansion of a black middle class, there is widespread suspicion voiced by the more assertive BEE protagonists that the empowerment process continues to be undermined by white resistance to black upward mobility throughout much of industry and the professions.

The reality is that the progress (or otherwise) of BEE in industry is highly complicated and multidimensional, its interpretation rendered difficult by a paucity of reliable data. On the one hand, too little is made of some of the achievements of BEE. For a start, for all the limitations of the process, black inroads have been made into ownership and management of industry despite a general lack of black capital and of education and training. There are today a small number of black majority-owned major companies (for instance, Shanduka and Mvelaphanda), more smaller such companies (of which we know rather little), and overall – depending upon broader market conditions – considerable upward momentum in the number of BEE deals. Likewise, although white faces continue to predominate in the boardroom and management, the number of blacks in senior corporate positions is steadily increasing.

According to the Presidency, ‘the total value of BEE transactions as a percentage of total mergers declined between 1996 and 2002 and rose sharply from 5.1 per cent in 2002 to 31.1 per cent in 2004. However, lower growth rates have been achieved since then, averaging 19.5 per cent in 2008. This indicates progress in embracing and responding to the principles of the Broad Based Economic Empowerment Bill No. 53 of 2003’ (RSA 2009a: 17). Similarly, the Presidency reports that the number of black senior and top managers in private industry increased from 18.5 per cent in 2000 to 32.5 per cent in 2008. Notwithstanding that different data sets vary considerably, the broad thrust of these figures is that the demographic profile of the private sector in South Africa has changed considerably since 1994. This was both a political necessity if the transition was to be underpinned by visible ‘transformation’ and a demographic one given the limited supply of white skills and the wastage of black talent under apartheid.

Nonetheless, there are substantial grounds for fearing that many BEE gains are hollow.

For a start, the commitment of business has been questionable, the government having systematically appeased large-scale capital by making major concessions over BEE targets and compliance in pursuit of economic growth (Tangri and Southall 2008). Second, even leaving aside the suspicion that (an unknown) proportion of deals are the product of politically connected ‘tenderpreneurship’ rather than of Weberian-style enterprise and risk taking, BEE deals have overwhelmingly been funded by debt. This, of course, is far from unusual in merger and acquisitions activity but it has consistently meant that BEE firms have been particularly exposed when they have encountered difficult market conditions, as occurred most notoriously in 1997 (when many black investors fell foul of that year’s plunge in share prices) but more pertinently as a result of the current global crisis, with empowerment analysts reporting that black investors in BEE deals have been left with a huge debt burden, and that the deals are having to be restructured by the banks in order to save them from collapse (Business Report, 6 January 2010). Meanwhile, although criticism of established firms doing major deals only with a small number of ‘usual suspects’ has moved them towards more broadly based shareholdings, the large majority of BEE deals involve South African companies only, with multinational investors holding back: thus in 2009, only four out of twenty BEE deals in the mining sector were initiated by foreign investors (ibid). Two (albeit tentative) conclusions would seem to follow: first, given the perils for black investors of investment on the open market, the advantages of seeking deals with the state which offer political protection from market fluctuations are likely to be enhanced. Second, given the increasing dependence of South Africa upon foreign investment and the increased weight of foreign firms on the JSE, the government may find it necessary to relax further the conditions and implementation of BEE.

Meanwhile, pursuit of black empowerment has exacerbated a growing crisis within the parastatals. For the ANC, the state owned enterprises (SOEs) have a vital role to play in promoting growth and are viewed as key instruments of a ‘developmental state’. Formally, they are governed by boards which, although appointed by the government as the ‘shareholder’, operate at arm’s length and are relatively autonomous from political authority. In practice, the balance between the government setting broad parameters versus intervention for political reasons has proved difficult to achieve. The most notable instance has been the government’s ignoring of advice in the late 1990s that the country needed more power stations, which culminated in a major power crisis in 2008, widespread power shortages and the mining industry having to cut production to work with rationed supply. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the welcome upward mobility of blacks within the parastatals has been unduly politicised through the penetration of political influences into what should more properly be internal human resources processes, the suspicion being that who obtains senior positions may influence the allocation of tenders to external actors (Williams 2010).

The outcome has been a parastatal sector which is constantly having to be bailed out with unbudgeted public funding, has earned an unenviable reputation for inefficiency, and is often held hostage to political fortune. Recent indicators have been major controversies around suspensions, dismissals and resignations of CEOs and aspirants to their jobs from most major parastatals, and ferocious battles around their leadership as different factions within the ANC have lobbied hard for the appointment of their favoured candidates to top positions,⁶ this apparently linked to networks of ‘tenderpreneurship’ geared to securing contracts from state bodies. By early 2010, Transnet, SAA, Eskom, Armscor and a key section of Denel and Saab Aerostructures, were all being led by acting CEOs, with the authority of the new minister of public enterprises, Barbara Hogan, undermined by ANC infighting (Ensor 2010). Such political contestation has inevitably intruded upon long-term strategic planning, with Eskom, for instance, apparently wedded to a business model which, inter alia, is tied to reckless expansion of dirty and dangerous (coal-fired and nuclear) technologies at the cost of engagement with more environmentally friendly alternatives; dangerously compromised by its relationship with Chancellor House (an ANC owned company) which together with Hitachi is contracted to supply generation systems for new coal-fuelled power stations; and has secured approval for price increases to overcome capital shortages which may make South Africa’s electricity among the most expensive in the world (Ashton 2010; Pillay, this volume).

Some parastatals’ functioning may be more performance oriented than is presented by screaming headlines in the media (for example, Wells 2010) but even so, the image of a public enterprise sector that is simultaneously inefficient and expensive makes a nonsense of the government’s commitment to the pursuit of a developmental state and contradicts its own desire to attract foreign investment, promote growth and create jobs.