The department of Trade and Industry (dti) intends to toughen the law to prevent fronting, which is a dodgy exercise by business to get juicy state contracts that it wouldn’t otherwise get if it didn’t put a number of black faces in management and ownership.
In the apartheid days, the reverse happened. Black people could not own land in the commercial centres, let alone in the white residential areas. On occasion, they set up “white fronts” to buy property. It certainly had its risks, as does today’s “black fronting”, that advocate Paul Hoffman describes as giving the gardener, who still drinks out of a tin cup, a place on the company board without the attendant benefits.
That is a crude example and the most likely to be discovered. More complicated ruses are complex ownership systems that hide the fact that the current-day Hoggenheimers remain the bosses and derive all the benefits. The chief director for black economic empowerment (BEE) at the dti, Nomonde Msatywa, has a full-time job driving the attack on this front. She says draft legislation envisages fines of up to R10 million or 10 years in jail.
Nedlac is reviewing the labour law and equity provisions that promote affirmative action. Every year the Employment Equity Commission declares itself frustrated that “transformation” in the workplace is slow. Businesses are bogged down with the “black” tape of equity reports and adherence to the absurd BEE codes of conduct.
The late Anthony Holiday, an eccentric character who taught philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government, wrote a column, headlined “Clearing the air about racism and affirmative action”, on March 18, 2000. He said it was high time some clarity on the interwoven concepts of race and affirmative action was achieved.
“The issue has become urgent. It is bedevilling the proper functioning of… independent statutory bodies… which are crucial to the working of the constitution. It is interfering with the news media’s ability to keep the information arteries of our society open, so that the lifeblood of facts and analysis can feed our capacity to take sane political and economic decisions.”
On the matter of race it seemed to him it was “a biological”, not a social notion. “We belong to such races as we do – and a large number of South Africans belong to more than one – by virtue of our genetic, not our societal, inheritance. Race, like gravity, is a brute natural fact about our condition, something that… we can do precious little about.” No one ought to be advantaged – or disadvantaged – as a consequence of their race. Most people who had suffered because of their race were victims not of their racial origins, but of racialism. “They have been prey, not of biological, but of social and ideological forces.” This applied to Nazism, apartheid and Mussolini’s fascism.
There was a mistaken view that affirmative action corrected “historic imbalances” and empowered black people by giving them jobs and educational opportunities that they would not aspire to if ability was the only selective criterion. Those who saw affirmative action in this light had set themselves the impossible task of making adequate recompense to millions who suffered. There was tokenism at universities, newsrooms, boardrooms and factories. The consequence was that appointees were often sneered at because they couldn’t perform.
Holiday suggested an affirmation of life skills, identifying job opportunities for people down the socio-economic ladder. I don’t think he spelt out this argument, but it sounds better than reams of black tape.