Over the last decade, the debate on Black Economic Empowerment has been
receiving heightened attention in respect of its impact, value, and
contribution to the transformation and/or otherwise of the South African
economy. Most analyses of BEE examine the interests and behaviour of the ‘power
holders’, ‘the empowering agents’, and ‘the empowerment beneficiaries’. In this
vortex of analyses, little to no attention is being paid to the concept of BEE
in respect of ‘what it is’, ‘does it have a thesis’, ‘what is its
epistemology’, and ‘whether it can develop into a theory of doing business’
that can be teachable. It is in its ‘empowerment security’ realm where BEE as
an economic transformation construct procures for interrogation of its
episteme, particularly in order to not only ground it in theoretical terms but
to condition the possibility of its overall objects. This article examines BEE
in relation to its definition and/or redefinition of non-white entrepreneurship
post its regulatory formalization and how this has recreated a ‘genesis’ of
non-white participation in the economy.
INTRODUCTION
The South African democratic experiment got a breakthrough in 1994 with the
formal enfranchization of non-whites. This led to the establishment of a
multi-racial government created on the basis of a one-person-one-vote system.
Pyramidal to the enfranchization process has been the adoption of a non-racial,
non-sexist and democratic constitution that declared South Africa to be
belonging to all who live in it. The constitution, notwithstanding its veiled
pronouncement on the need to transform the commanding heights of the economy,
is bold in recognizing the existence of past injustices and thus commits the
nation to establish a society based on social justice as well as improving the
quality of life of all citizens. The Constitution is, therefore, a ‘mandate for
the radical transformation of both society and the economy’. Despite what the
constitution provides, South Africa remains an epistemic site where inequality
has not yet been made history; where economic access is still defined along
racial lines; where the legacies of state-sponsored racial privileging still
define private sector business value chains; and the dark side of poverty and
systemic economic exclusion still define the economic character of the African
majority.
The economy is thus an area that requires attention to shift the frontiers
of inequality and put in their stead an
equitable economic system that would undergird the social justice intents of
the Constitution. The demand by a democratic system such as that of South Africa for the recalibration of the now
watermarked structural power of the apartheid state in the form of economic,
bureaucratic, securocratic, media, and professional resources to be woven into
a new non-racial reality is a natural path going forward. In its quest to
effect such a recalibration, the post-1994 non-racial government, albeit still
operating in a racialized economic context, introduced Black Economic
Empowerment (BEE) as a ‘programmatic intervention’ to be driven by the state.
BEE, in its various renditions, has had challenges that this article ascribes to
‘what it is’, ‘whether it has a thesis’, ‘what is its epistemology’, and
‘whether it can developed into a theory of doing business’ that can be
teachable. Critical to this interrogation is the extent to which it has defined
post-1994 non-white entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on ‘Africans in particular’.
ABOUT ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
The transformation and/or reformation of the South African economic
landscape, a condition for the creation of economic justice, is inconceivable
outside a process that targets its ontologically racism-centric character. Such
targeting should have as its permanent outcome a condition that negates an
economic system that is incapable of solving the chronic inequalities defining the
current South Africanness because economic power is
the ultimate determinant for human development. It implies the ability to
extend the influence of the economically powerful; to defend the interests of those
who control the commanding heights in an economy; to impose the socio-cultural,
political and hegemonic will of the economically dominant; and to determine the
maneuverability in bargaining the extent to which one can be physically and/or
culturally self-determined. The management of this power from one center to the
other requires empowerment interventions. The notion of empowerment presupposes
a preparedness by those with economic power to voluntarily relinquish the
implications of economic power. Economic empowerment is thus a concept that
derives its episteme from its ontological locus, power.
Page and Czuba
(1999) submit that ‘at the core of
the concept of empowerment is the idea of power’. They argue that:
‘the possibility of empowerment depends on two
things. First, empowerment requires
that power can change. If power cannot change, if it is inherent…, then
empowerment is not possible, nor is empowerment conceivable in any meaningful
way. In other words, if power can change, then empowerment is possible. Second, the concept of empowerment
depends upon the idea that power can expand. This second point reflects our
common experiences of power rather than how we think about power.’
In clarifying
more on what then is power, they contend that:
‘Power is often related to an ability to make
others do what you want, regardless of their own wishes or interests.
Traditional social science emphasizes power as influence and control, often
treating power as a commodity or structure divorced from human action.
Conceived in this way, power can be viewed as unchanging or unchangeable.
In Weberian parlance (1946), power exists within the context of a
relationship between people or things; it does not exist in isolation, nor is it
inherent in individuals. By implication, since power is created in
relationships, power and power relationships can change. Empowerment as a
process of change, then, becomes a meaningful concept (Page and Czuba). The
characteristic of power being unchanging or unchangeable at the fulcrum whence it pivots suggests that as it is shared, it is actually growing relative
to the pivot it is attached. From a social and economic science perspective, ‘power will remain in the hands of the powerful unless they give it
up’. The natural laws of power dictate that it will be transmitted to its
distribution centres for as long as there is its constant generation. In the
event that the generation of power is compromised, its distribution becomes the
first point of call in limiting its supply dynamics and thus inducing a
capacity to save whilst load shedding according to a selected and/or defined
criterion. The capacity, therefore, of those empowered will always be a function of the limits set by those that
generate the power.
For instance, in
electricity power management complexes, the capacity of an economy and/or
society to industrialize on a massive scale is directly related to the
availability of electricity power required by industry types. Viewed from other
vintage points, the flow of power, even at the household level, is regulated by the
capacity of the … installed. Should a
household require additional power, it needs to apply to those that distribute
power to the point of use. The increase
in capacity will thus attract additional costs to the household. Worse still, appliances also have regulators
of the amount of electricity required to make them work. Some appliances have mini transformers that
calibrate power according to the needs of the appliance. In respect of economic power, these roles are
played in the main by those that control the financial services sector, the
engine room that determines participation in any economy. They operate in a maze of self-created regulations which has been developed over a set historical period and thus engineered the
entire contracting system underpinning the economic system. In this maze, the
power, culture and ideology of the political economy are omnipresent. The
interplay of capital, capital formation and inherent supremacies to be
protected creates a background of permanence dependent on the dominant for its disentanglement.
It is thus prudent to declare that in South Africa, the Apartheid political
economy is not only an omnipresent firmament but an ideological coordinate
that still needs untangling.
In the economic empowerment realm, financing and market access
constitute the power that needs to be volunteered to those that need to be
empowered. Financing is, unfortunately dependent on the mandates given by those
who own the financial resources; power. Their natural limitation to review
and/or change the mandates instructing to how their resources should finance
activities in an economy has always been how the new activity risks areas from
which ‘financial resources generation’ originates. It is thus important for
anyone conceptualising economic empowerment in a country such as South Africa
to have an understanding of the history of both its economic and political
power. It is, in fact, a requirement for
the economic policy and/or otherwise community to be alive to the Depelchinian
instruct that ‘a radical transformation in South Africa will depend more on how
the past is remembered than how the future is plotted[1]’.
The history of economic power domination and its adjunct land dispossession is, in South Africa a fundamental determinant for any empowerment experiment and/or
endeavour. From this history, gnosis
of the nature of political power and
authority that undergird the pre-1994 economic outlook; the nature of socio-economic power as it
relates to the legal and moral definitions of how production factors could be
acquired; and the nature of the
ideological power that legitimised the then power constellations[2],
should be instructed to the radicality required in the configuration of the empowerment
process.
The stubbornness of power to volunteer itself out of the hands of the
powerful has made the concept of empowerment to be more explainable by
‘defining its absence …and not in its action or how
aspects, as it takes on different forms in different people and contexts’. The
relationship of the concept with power as a social construct lends it to the
cacophony of human relations and interests as conditions of opinions. The criminalization of economic participation
by opportunity-seeking Africans in the urban areas of South Africa during the
advanced stages of apartheid governance as a base template to establish a
social order that problematizes the native as an economic participant did not
only disrupt the potential growth trajectory of South Africa but in its quest to address this matter the
post-1994 South African government promulgated a set of legislative instruments
to recalibrate the economic participation landscape. One of the central pieces
of legislation promulgated in order to facilitate the recalibration is the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, Act NO. 53 of 2003.
TO BE CONTINUED
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