Tshepo Matjila, News24 User
Should poor whites benefit from BEE? What really constitutes an empowered organisation? Is it an organisation that ensures that they follow the DTI BBBEE Codes of Good Practice? Or is it an organisation which ensures that the communities from which it operates mutually benefit, with no one excluded due to his race, colour or creed?
I am asking all this questions because on Thursday, the trade union Solidarity challenged Vodacom, SA leading cellular network, to allow and make provision for poor whites to participate in its Yebo Yethu public share offering that is has made exclusively to black South African.
Some R7.5bn worth of share is on offer here, hailed as the largest BEE transaction in the telecoms industry - significantly more than that offered by Telkom a few years back to the Elephant consortium.
At first glance this supposition looks inconceivable that legislation that has come to pass solely to empower the previously disadvantaged should now profit the previously advantaged. What a huge paradox!
I believe we will be doing ourselves a huge disservice and injustice if we fail to look into the reasons and merits provided by Dr Dirk Hermann, Solidarity chairperson. The reasoning behind his arguments are logical and are worth looking into, but then how do you strike the balance?
Slippery slope?
How do you know and measure how poor a white person vis-à-vis a black person who has always been poor? Besides, what white people call poor whites still pales to the scale of what black people term "poor blacks".
A friend of mine countered that if a white person can afford to buy shares, how poor are they really? Dr. Hermann argues that "If Vodacom was driven by a real belief in empowerment, they would not exclude anyone. The company's reaction is serious, because they have admitted it's only about the scorecard."
Exclusion of any kind is unacceptable but how about redress and balancing of the scales for the previously disenfranchised? Even pressing is how do we continue to build a racially divided and resource allocation based on colour at the expense of national reconciliation and reconstruction?
We cannot continue to use such economic exclusions if we advocate that we are all equal under the sun with each of us being our brothers' and sisters' keepers, but where do we draw the line? We need to debate this topic relevantly without the emotions if we hoping to come up with a comprehensive and inclusive empowerment codes that we might term as "Good Practice"!
How do we strike this balance?
Tell me how...
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Disclaimer: All articles and letters published on MyNews24 have been independently written by members of News24's community. The views of users published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24. News24 editors also reserve the right to edit or delete any and all comments received.