I have been thinking about how to write this column without doing what I promised myself I would not do, and that is to comment publicly about the choices of an editor. As a former editor of Business Day, I know what it’s like to have your choices second-guessed by people who believe the job is easy and pretend they were in the editorial meeting when a decision was taken on how best to present a story.
It’s annoying most of the time. The rest of the time it is embarrassing as the public outcry can make you see perspectives that you did not see in the short period it took to decide about the front-page lead story. At least I take comfort in knowing that Sunday Times editor S’thembiso Msomi takes pride in his work and goes about it with a calm demeanour that belies the pressures of the job.
The story in question relates to the comment of Eskom board member Mteto Nyati, an accomplished business executive who turned around the fortunes of listed company, Altron. When I saw his name on the list of new Eskom board members I was delighted. For a company in as much trouble as Eskom is, the management team needs the guidance of a board whose members have seen their way through a disaster or two.
In an interview with this publication, Nyati bemoaned the impact that “BEE” has had on the operations and effectiveness of Eskom. I read his comments many times and understood him to mean that too rigid an application of local or BEE procurement can have a negative impact on cost management and effectiveness. Of course, he’s right in the narrow path he appeared to be charting on the issue.
Since the story came out, I have read many contributions on the matter, so I will not regurgitate what has been said and instead make a different point about the dilemmas of South Africa’s transformation. I am particularly concerned by the impact of historical and continuing economic racism, where black people must work double hard to prove themselves because they are always doubted. In more cases than we should tolerate, these experiences also cause us black people to move to defend the indefensible — often in good faith.
Too often the blackness card is played by people who specialise in victimising black people, and when their sins catch up with them, they expect their black skin to immunise them.
For instance, in 2015 I had a heated live radio confrontation with Brian Molefe, then of Eskom. In an arrogant tone, he was arguing for the Jacob Zuma government’s unwise and expensive foray into larger-than-required procurement of nuclear plants from Russia. I lost count on the number of times I was insulted on social media and elsewhere for attempting to “embarrass” the darling of the black professional class, who often used his role as PIC CEO to challenge listed companies on their poor transformation track record.
Molefe is now facing what is likely to only be the first batch of corruption charges. He is no hero and did not deserve to be protected then. He does not deserve to be protected now.
Of course, it is not just in South Africa where such occurs.
In 1992, then US president George Bush (the elder) nominated Clarence Thomas to replace the revered Thurgood Marshall on the US Supreme Court. An accomplished black woman, Anita Hill objected on account of Thomas having sexually harassed her when they worked together. She was roundly condemned, often on the basis that she was on the take of some white freemasonry that wanted to destroy a successful black man.
Thomas went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He is now the most right-wing, reactionary and corrupt justice on the Supreme Court. In almost every case, he takes the most right-wing line on matters of racial justice, including voting rights for which icons such as Martin Luther King Jr and the very Thurgood Marshall he replaced, fought for.
African American scholar Dr Cornell West calls this “a failure of nerve” among black leadership that they could not bring themselves to call out Thomas for what he has always been, a mediocre reactionary who rode on the coat tails of blackness, while there were many eminent black judges who could have filled the post.
And so back to Mteto Nyati and the now famous “BEE interview”. This teaches us that as black people we must be able to establish very solid moral and ethical lines on matters of public policy and racial justice. This is so a black skin never automatically entitles anyone to the support of other black people if they have no moral leg to stand on. Too often the blackness card is played by people who specialise in victimising black people, and when their sins catch up with them, they expect their black skin to immunise them.
The same must be true of those who have plundered public coffers, selling goods to the government at inflated prices under the guise of BEE. Just a few years ago we watched the Zondo commission as former SAA technical board member and senior officials were asked to explain how it was “black empowerment” for a company that had no experience whatsoever, to acquire equipment from SAA on the cheap, then sell it to another company the very next day for thrice the price without lifting a finger? In any language, that is theft, and we must call it what it is even if the owners are black.
No, it is ethically disingenuous for people to bring up another of the many white, white-collar crooks whenever a black person must account for their own sins. We must be able to multitask by condemning the corrupt whatever their race. If we fail to do this, we will continue to create an ethical wasteland in which thieves slide between cracks as wide as the Pacific Ocean under the umbrella of black victimhood, while their most frequent victims are black.
State companies must pursue BEE where it makes sense and use their procurement power to enable black and women development and ownership of economically productive assets. What cannot be tolerated is a cottage industry of connected middlemen who hide behind BEE while price gouging and securing those very goods from white suppliers.
That is not transformation. It is self-destruction.
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