Extract from speech delivered by DA Shadow Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Geordin Hill-Lewis MP during today's debate on the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Amendment Bill in Parliament"
B-BBEE must be exactly that: broad-based
For all intents and purposes, I consider myself a child of the new South Africa. I was seven years old in 1994, and one of my earliest conscious memories is of watching President Mandela's inauguration on TV with my grandmother.
I have no personal experience of living under apartheid, and I can only try to imagine and empathise with the pain of those who did. But growing up in democratic South Africa, the continued devastating legacy of apartheid was plain to see.
That is why the Democratic Alliance supports genuine efforts to redress the skewed and exclusive structure of our economy, and expand economic freedom and opportunity to millions more people. That is why the DA supports Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, and this Bill.
This Bill is a significant step in the right direction because it outlaws BEE fronting and commits state companies to complying with the codes of good practice uniformly. This Bill is, I believe, a frank admission on the part of the ANC that their efforts at redress have thus far failed, because the system has been captured by the super wealthy who keep on benefitting again and again, and by fraudsters.
Under the ANC, economic empowerment has turned into a scheme for making a few well connected individuals extremely rich. This has created a small, super wealthy, super elite, with little or no benefit for those South Africans, and no fundamental change to the structural inequities that still persist.
Speaker, apartheid was undergirded by the idea that people were members of racial groups before they were people in their own right. It is, for the record, lamentable that this Bill perpetuates those group definitions, and that the governing party insisted on these provisions in the Bill.
We believe that it is possible to achieve truly broad-based empowerment through redress measures which expand opportunities for the many, not reserve them for the few. That is why we support amendments to the Codes of Good Practice which reward job creation, which incentivises investment and education, and which allows people who have not yet benefited from BEE to benefit.
Issued by the DA, June 20 2013
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