Interview: Thami Mazwai about black economic empowerment in South Africa - reporter

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• published: 22 Jul 2013
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Thami Mazwai is a Resident Executive at Wits Business School in Johannesburg, South Africa. A... euronews, the most watched news channel in Europe Subscribe for your daily dose of international news, curated and explained:http://eurone.ws/10ZCK4a Euronews is available in 13 other languages: http://eurone.ws/17moBCU http://www.euronews.com/2013/07/19/bonus-interview-thami-mazwai Thami Mazwai is a Resident Executive at Wits Business School in Johannesburg, South Africa. A former journalist and political activist, he is an expert in black economic empowerment. In this interview, he assesses the way policies to improve the situation of the black community in the economy has worked since the end of apartheid. INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: Question: The black economic empowerment programme was one of the big ambitions of the post apartheid years. It seems the goals have not quite been reached. can you tell us what the results have been so far ? Answer: If you look at what has happened in the rest of the world, when there's been change. South Africa decided to go there, negociate that settlement route. whilst in other parts of the worldt here was a complete change in government, in which case the old order was displaced, and the new order took over. So in such situations the new order then immediately implements its programmes. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't work. More often times they don't work. This has been the experience, whether in South America, sub-saharan Africa, and even in transition economies, the former communist countries. You go through those hurdles. South Africa decided to go through the negociated pattern, the whole question of transformation. Then they had to be a special programme for it to integrate blacks into the economy. that's why you had black economic empowerment But like all new programmes, it had not been tried anywhere else, we had our fits and stunts. So we are now into the second phase of the programme, where the codes of good practice have been reviewed, have been reduced from 7 to 5. And the lessons we learned from the first phase are not perhaps going to result in a much more visible or in a way in which the outcomes are going to be much more to expectations that has been in the past. Question: What are the options, what has been missing and what is this second phase ? Answer: What we wanted was obviously to integrate blacks in the economy. Now..to integrate people in the economy in which you change the patterns of ownership, the patterns of management, is not an easy process. You set targets. and the people who must meet the targets are doing so on a voluntary basis. There was no specific legislation that said, if you don't..there were no penalties, so to speak. And because there were no penalties it then became optional. And organisations do not really want to change to anything new, when the one they have is waiting for them. Therefore the uptake has not been what it should have been now with effect that there are now compulsory targets that have been set. The transformation is going to be much more faster than it has been. Question: Has this had an impact on the white owned firms on the other hand..has it affected them in any way ? Answer: "I'm not sure by impact what do we mean. But what I do know is that the white firms are now realising that tranformation, black economic empowerment has got a benefit for them. In that they get into new markets and they get new consumers. and they get to get to understand the south african environment in a much more better way than they used to in the past.And that affects both the white, both the local companies and the multinationals.So there is now greater enthusiasm on black economic empowerment that is more entreprise supplier... to the question of suppliers, than there has been in the past. In the past the idea was jut to put blacks, give them shares. And some of the shares were dummy shares, some of them were special vehicles and so on... And there was a lot of dishonesty in the process. Now that there are clear tangibles in terms of transformation that we made like entreprise and skills development, where clear targets have been set, i think its going to be much better. Question: Who would you say has gained most and lost most from the post apartheid years ? Answer: Find us on: Youtube http://bit.ly/zr3upY Facebook http://www.facebook.com/euronews.fans Twitter http://twitter.com/euronews