Baas-and-boy relationship buried in these BEE deals

Pinky Khoabane : If you are a regular reader of this column, you will know that I have continually poured scorn on those who use their positions of power to advance a narrow agenda rooted in self-interest and supremacy.

These are people who are guided by greed, and who will trample on anything and everyone, including the vulnerable, to attain their goal of personal promotion.

And if you've read this column often enough, you will definitely know that I have no sacred cows - whether it is the "mother" at the traffic light who abuses her child to gain sympathy from motorists for money; the public servant who loots public coffers; the clergyman who can't seem to keep his pants up and sexually molests our children at will; or racist groupings, such as Afriforum, which masquerade as cultural entities to promote the interests of white people.

You will also know that I'm seriously irked by the double standards with which some issues and some people are handled in this country. In the same way that I have demanded that the deputy president and chief accounting officer of the Congress of the People, Mbhazima Shilowa, be held accountable for the R20-million from the public purse which was given to COPE by the Independent Electoral Commission after last year's elections, so too have I demanded that the chief financial officer of Cipro, Pieter van Vuuren, or his department, be held accountable for the R153-million tender debacle.

It should therefore come as no surprise that I loathe the likes of Johan du Toit. This is the man who allegedly rented Meshack Mabalane's skin colour in order to ensure that his company raked in World Cup contracts worth millions of rands.

According to Mabalane, du Toit offered him a 20% share in his company in order to gain BEE status - which would, in turn, pave the way for government-related contracts, which included the construction of World Cup stadiums.

And although Du Toit denied that his company won contracts based on its BEE status or through Mabalane's involvement, his company got the contracts to build the facades of World Cup stadiums in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, at an estimated R16.7-million.

You see, Du Toit is not only hungry, but appears to be possessed by greed. He pays his "partner" between R4000 and R8000 a month, while he lives in opulence from the money amassed through contracts he got with the assistance of Mabalane's skin colour.

It seems to be his belief - and that of many like him - that Mabalane has brought nothing to the table because he didn't pay for his shares, hence he (Du Toit) has the audacity to flaunt his flashy lifestyle in front of Mabalane on a daily basis.

His warped view of black economic empowerment is apparently that you rent a darkie, have them tag along to meetings while you do all the talking and clinch the deal, and reward them with disdain.

But he is not alone. His case not only exposes the flaws in the government's tender systems, it also reveals the mockery that is the policy of black economic empowerment.

There we were, in the '90s, being given the claptrap about this wonderful scheme that would hand over billions of rands worth of assets, sitting in the hands of white people, to black hands, through a system that would avoid a Zimbabwe-style land grab and nationalisation.

But over the years we have seen this wealth being shared between white hands and a few black ones that used their struggle credentials and connections to politicians to get the tenders.

Suddenly, we had those who had amassed wealth on the backs of blacks, sharing boardrooms with struggle stalwarts and the likes of Mabalane.

Employers suddenly offered shares to their "tea girls" and "garden boys", which the latter didn't even know about. And, with the exception of a few BEE bigwigs, the bulk of the money remained in white hands.

In the case of the World Cup, companies whose BEE credentials were supposedly scrutinised had sub-contracted to companies whose empowerment credentials were either not verified or were as shoddy as those of Du Toit's.

We cannot, therefore, take seriously reports by the City of Johannesburg, for example, that about R426.8-million of the R3.4-billion spent was paid to contractors with "empowered equity status".

In their analysis, they would have looked at the 20% stake that Mabalane holds in Du Toit's company and would have given it the status of an empowered company, when in reality it was a master-and-servant relationship, with the bulk of the taxpayers' money funding a system which all these empowerment policies were meant to redress.