Progress on implementing the Financial Sector Charter (FSC) has been “dismal”, black business organisations said on Wednesday.
“We have made dismal progress,” Edwin Mashego of the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nafcoc) said in Johannesburg at a briefing on the charter.
The FSC was first introduced by Nedlac in 2002 and brought into effect in 2004 with the aim of addressing ownership imbalances in the financial sector, among other things.
It was revised in 2008. In November 2010 Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies gazetted the first phase of the FSC in terms of the BBBEE Act, and invited comments.
“Almost seven years later very little noticeable progress been made,” said Mashego.
Tsakani Matshazi, vice president of the Confederation of Black Business Organisations (CBBO), agreed.
“We have in place a framework... that tends to be a delaying tactic... ,” she said “This wait and see attitude… has a tendency to protect the interests of the incumbent.”
Mashego said leaders were failing black business by “trusting the benevolence” of financial institutions to deliver on the charter's mandate of true transformation, which they had not.
“Incumbent owners will not relinquish control just because it is good to do so... but they are doing it because it's to their advantage.
“Institutions that have done things a certain way need to change... up to now they have been dictating things for themselves... We need to take control.”
For this reason, Nafcoc planned to establish its own black empowered bank.
“Nafcoc has taken a resolution that the dreams of its founding fathers to establish its own black empowered bank are going to resuscitated, because we know that we cannot rely on the current incumbents to do that,” Mashego said. - Sapa