IT companies ‘can no longer avoid empowerment targets’

More Black Elite Enrichment, as if all the ministers with very profitable Telkom shares werent enough... bleh....

What they gonna do ? Close us down ? Bwaaaahahahahaha.

stoke said:

What they gonna do ? Close us down ? Bwaaaahahahahaha.

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Hehe, well that's one good thing in having a slack government. They take their time in seeing if companies are complying with the code.

A stupid person might have thought that the arrival of 'democracy' and non-racism' meant it was the end of any laws mentioning 'race' and any ethnic groups trying to tell other ethnic groups what they could or should do.

This current neo-fascist ANC government is still flying under the false flag of being a democracy - and worse - trying to persuade an entire society and the economic parts of the society, that they should all be social workers. That they (we) should all 'care' about some or another ethnic group, and bring this ethnic group into positions of power and authority.
That's not democracy. Or a working State.
That's a whiney little social worker department that's been given an entire country to play with, and has been renamed
a 'Government'.

This racist 'empowerment' rubbish should be challenged in the Courts - which will force the State to either back off with its blatant disguised new racism, or come out of the closet and show its actual anti-democratic face, and clamp down on the Law itself.

Then the citizens will know where they really stand.

LoneGunman said:

A stupid person might have thought that the arrival of 'democracy' and non-racism' meant it was the end of any laws mentioning 'race' and any ethnic groups trying to tell other ethnic groups what they could or should do.

This current neo-fascist ANC government is still flying under the false flag of being a democracy - and worse - trying to persuade an entire society and the economic parts of the society, that they should all be social workers. That they (we) should all 'care' about some or another ethnic group, and bring this ethnic group into positions of power and authority.
That's not democracy. Or a working State.
That's a whiney little social worker department that's been given an entire country to play with, and has been renamed
a 'Government'.

This racist 'empowerment' rubbish should be challenged in the Courts - which will force the State to either back off with its blatant disguised new racism, or come out of the closet and show its actual anti-democratic face, and clamp down on the Law itself.

Then the citizens will know where they really stand.

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So there shouldnt be empowerment?

The problem with the issues of AI and BEE is that they are essentially racist pollicies. As a result when people see them failing in some way, or at least not working as they should, they are automatically attacked on the basis of their inherent racism.
The fact is their is a definite bias towards whites in the present labour force, because of far worse forms of racism that were enforced by the apartheid government. Given time this bias would naturally rectify its self if people were all given the same oppertunities. If the people in the job market were rerpresentive of the demographic (i.e 10% of candidates for a position where white, 70 % black the case maybe) then we can assume that the eventually as jobs became open because of retirement or because the economy was growing then the chances are that, given time, those jobs would be filled in a way that repressented the demographic.

The thing is though, that this would take a long effing time. Can we seriously expect black people to sit back and wait for fifty years before they see a country that truelly looks as though it had a black majority?
White people benefitted for years from apartheids racist pollicies and to a degree we still do. I for one can tolerate the far more benign and well intentioned forms of racism that AI and BEE are.

The fact is that they are flawed and are being abused, why not address those problems before we use them as an excuse to blow them out of the water entirely.

My feeling is that BEE and AI are there only for one reason.

>> To give government an excuse to enrich themselves <<

Lets be honest, none of these benefits are reaching the people they were intended to. The gap between the eletist black community and the absolutely poor is widening every day. This has been proven over and over.

Two words come to mind that further prove this theory: Gautrain Project

"Another target for 2015 is to procure 80% of goods and services from black suppliers, while the government favours a far lower procurement target of 50%."

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so now government is gonna tell us where to buy our goods from, i cant wait until government says 80% of all goods in my house must have been bought from a black owned company...

just for the record, im not white

Gladiator said:

so now government is gonna tell us where to buy our goods from, i cant wait until government says 80% of all goods in my house must have been bought from a black owned company...

just for the record, im not white

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Um no. The trade and industry department is suggesting that government buys 80% of the goods and services they require from black business as far as I can make out.

native said:

So there shouldnt be empowerment?

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Empowerment should be there, of course. But it should be more in the form of proper infrastructure and skills development (and encouragement of entrepreneurship) at grassroots level. There is way too little of this happening. It seems fine in principle to say government should aim for 80% procurement from "black" firms, but it's pretty much an open secret what that usually means in practice: Basically mostly white firms with a small number of politically well-connected black shareholders with equity, or BEE "partner" firms, or black firms that simply 'outsource' the work to "white" firms again or structured as subsidiaries. This is not helping the previously disadvantaged. AA quotas do go some way, but do not focus nearly enough on skills development and promotion of a productive work ethic.

Another problem is government departments who will rather procure nothing if something is only available from white firms. Then important things literally go undone, which usually harms the previously disadvantaged more than anyone else (just one example is Ivy, who in effect implied that she would rather poor people have no phone than use a phone from a "white" telecomms company, but there are plenty of other examples if you look around). Further, some of those "white" firms eventually go under as a result (or move overseas), and then local (black and white) jobs are lost. Or in some cases government departments would rather purchase something from an (anyway white) European firm than from a white South African firm. This just creates more jobs overseas, promotes development and retention of foreign skills, and keeps Rands flowing out of SA. Again this does more harm than good to the previously disadvantaged. Supporting a local "white" company (if no black firm was in that market) would go further to creating local (white and black) jobs, and to developing and retaining local skills. These things in turn would increase the tax base, increase domestic and foreign investment, and increase exports --- all of which would result in more money for the government to spend on e.g. better schooling or policing for the masses (creating an 'upward spiral' of growth and upliftment). But some of these people would seemingly rather harm their own people than spend any money on a local "white" firm (at least, that is my perception).

"Empowerment" needn't be about lowering some people in order to raise others, and in fact the latter cannot really work, Apartheid showed us that. It should be (and can be) about raising everyone up to the same level. Economics is not a zero-sum game. Generally the evidence suggests that the more productive people are, the more an economy tends to create additional jobs. Work begets work. This can be seen on a microeconomic level too. Deliberately excluding some people from productive participation is (and was) sheer macroeconomic idiocy as unproductive people become a burden on the productive (that applies in both direction w.r.t. blacks and whites).

Has anybody noticed how BEE just increases prices to the detriment of service. The company I work for wanted to outsource its first aid department and company doctor. The doctor selected (black of course as 91% of the employees are black) quoted a rate of R600 per hour for 4 hours per week. The company accepted this as it was comparable to the rate quoted previously by white doctors. However, the doctor retracted his quotation as it was not done through the BEE forum and submitted a new quotation of R1500 per hour through the auspices of the BEE forum. There was no way that the company would accept such an outrageous quotation and rather accepted a quotation from a white doctor. The black doctor then ran bleatingly to the NUMSA (recognised by our company) complaining about the company's racism and "refusal to accept the country's reality". What reality? Being ripped off by a BEE forum?