Corruption in BEE is too often treated as a bug. It is more accurately a predictable outcome of a system that rewards actors for exploiting its incentives.
When the "incentive" is based on racial identity it is (simply put) a racist ideology. When that racist ideology goes further to demand that "every lever of power be in the hands of the ruling party's comrades" it becomes both criminal and racist. Merit, experience education and training are all subjugated to race and/or party membership. The commonwealth is ignored and collapse of governance in ALL its forms collapses. We have seen this scenario play itself out many times historically and appear not to learn from these examples of state failure.
I think no one has really focused on why companies choose politically-connected black people. I suspect that if you're bidding for a state contract, you want people who make it more likely you will be chosen for the contract, even if you removed the race element from BEE and just said you must contract with poor people, you would likely still have this dynamic, if I am correct.
The other issue that is not focused on is that we have seen preferential procurement work under apartheid and before 1948, of course there were inefficiencies as you would expect in all such centralised government schemes, still those governments were able to reach their desired outcomes. Yet, now it is not producing the desired results. We need to have an honest conversation about culture so we can reach the people who only care about uplifting black people.
If you look at BEE post-1994, it mostly ignored existing black-owned business formed during apartheid and focused on the politically connected and incompetent. The reason why this is should inform our reform proposals. Incentives interact with a person's operating system and that OS is formed by culture, we need policies that work for the people we have not the people we wish we had.
When the "incentive" is based on racial identity it is (simply put) a racist ideology. When that racist ideology goes further to demand that "every lever of power be in the hands of the ruling party's comrades" it becomes both criminal and racist. Merit, experience education and training are all subjugated to race and/or party membership. The commonwealth is ignored and collapse of governance in ALL its forms collapses. We have seen this scenario play itself out many times historically and appear not to learn from these examples of state failure.
This was not the central point of my article, but I guess you have a fair point.
I think no one has really focused on why companies choose politically-connected black people. I suspect that if you're bidding for a state contract, you want people who make it more likely you will be chosen for the contract, even if you removed the race element from BEE and just said you must contract with poor people, you would likely still have this dynamic, if I am correct.
The other issue that is not focused on is that we have seen preferential procurement work under apartheid and before 1948, of course there were inefficiencies as you would expect in all such centralised government schemes, still those governments were able to reach their desired outcomes. Yet, now it is not producing the desired results. We need to have an honest conversation about culture so we can reach the people who only care about uplifting black people.
If you look at BEE post-1994, it mostly ignored existing black-owned business formed during apartheid and focused on the politically connected and incompetent. The reason why this is should inform our reform proposals. Incentives interact with a person's operating system and that OS is formed by culture, we need policies that work for the people we have not the people we wish we had.