Cops, Roux rue press meddling

What sort of offices do you get for a R1.1-billion rental these days?

One imagines that glass-sided elevators must come as standard. The staff canteen would have to be a revolving rooftop restaurant with a cigar lounge and panoramic views across the city, plus, no doubt, a sundowner deck with outside Jacuzzi and bar area, perfect for watching helicopters taking off from the revolving helipad upstairs.

At that price there would have to be a fully-equipped gymnasium, a health spa and squash court, Olympic-sized swimming pool in the basement and a complimentary sushi bar in the reception. The bathrooms would all be equipped with three taps: hot and cold and Johnny Walker. The corridors on the executive levels would have deep-pile carpeting leading to sumptuous oak-panelled temperature-controlled suites with every electronic modcon known to man.

The sum of R1.1-billion surely buys you a splendid palace of an office. Sadly, the press probing the Roux Shabangu/SAPS head office story has conspicuously failed to describe the wondrous high-rise Shangri-la in which our top Durban cops had been hoping to disport themselves until the meddlesome media got involved.

The only local police precinct with which I am in any way acquainted is the Yeoville police station's charge office, but I don't want to go into that. Suffice to say it was a shabby, rather rundown environment in which tough cops locked up and charged bad guys, but it at least had the merit of not costing taxpayers R1.1-billion.

It seems they don't make cops like they used to. Reading between the lines, one has to deduce that today's policeman above the rank of constable wouldn't be seen dead gunning down Cape Flats mandrax smugglers without having been for a government-subsidised manicure in the previous week. This is the sort of pampering that would no doubt have been simply part of the package at the Shabangu Towers in central Durban.

Personally, I would be sceptical about just how black a black man named "Roux" could really be but, I suppose, the "Shabangu" bit is the clincher. One imagines that R Shabangu never had to prove his blackness and that, if he was challenged on this score, he could list on the references sections of whatever paperwork he filled in one J Zuma and one G Mahlangu-Nkabinde.

I mention this because until now preferential procurement policy looked only at the ownership of the entities supplying goods and services to national government. The policy didn't give two hoots about management of the companies, how they were investing in previously disadvantaged staff development or whether they had a locked underground garage full of Somali garment workers, shipped in by a Triad syndicate of human traffickers, who were savagely flogged and denied their daily ounce of bread if they fell asleep at the knitting machines to which they were chained night and day. Nope, as long as you were black enough (like R Shabangu) you were good enough to supply goods and services to our government.

On the other hand, we had broad-based black economic empowerment which I've always held to be a necessary, important, even laudable piece of affirmative action.

We desperately need to change this economy, to spread the golden eggs without killing the goose. BBBEE was a good start and it will get better as corporates grow up and realise their responsibilities and as government tinkers with and improves the codes (a process now under way).

Supply a corporate and you had to prove your BBBEE status to satisfy the procurement bit of the corporate's scorecard. But supply national government directly and all you needed was for the owner to be black enough. Somewhere, something was wrong.

Now that is about to change, with government announcing that preferential procurement will look at the real broad-based credentials of those it does business with. (The phrases "practising what you preach" and "about time" spring to mind.) Whatever snide asides we of the grumbling classes might make, this is potentially great news for enterprise development, for small-business creation, for real, broad-based transformation.

Hopefully it will put some dodgy tenderpreneurs on the spot and go some way towards addressing fronting. It's a long overdue step in the right direction, one that one can only hope will help buttress the development of small business. What, one wonders, would R Shabangu score for enterprise development?