Published in the Sunday Times on 01 May 2024 and the Business Day 01 May 2024
As our country is in the last laps of selecting leaders from what is on offer, we are saddened to learn of the passing of Ntate Sam Motsuenyane. A thoroughbred from a cohort of leaders that sought to model business leadership, South Africa yearns to see remastered into the present. A rare breed as strange breeds continue to ravage our concept of leadership, Dr Motsuenyane's ilk has modelled for us. In every waking hour, on behalf of the people whose business destiny Dr Motsuenyane sought to determine, he provided the object for their curiosity and gaze. He became the native, plural, baNtu, and an African-in-particular amongst several variants of the human race we all are. He was the business leader who was eloquent in foresight -the genius that apartheid bondage and colonialism could not destroy and -the embodiment of an African story that kept unfolding until his last days.
An advocate of a Black-owned bank, a believer in the recalibration of the templates of economic domination through a change in the ownership structure of the financial services sector. The banking system, he opined, stood somewhere
between African people’s intractable strivings to gain access to economic
opportunity and RSA's economic establishment's stubborn and belligerent
refusal to grant it. A mission he worked on to ultimately establish the African
Bank, albeit with rubber teeth to the extent that Black businesses could leverage
it.
To paraphrase his friend, Nelson Mandela, out of Dr Motsuenyane’s pursuit for the financial services sector’s obligation to be the main catalyst of economic freedom, “the truth is that we are not yet (economically) free -we merely achieved the freedom to be free, and the right not to be economically dominated. Our political freedom is not the final step but the first step on a longer and more difficult road -the struggle for a right to live. His cohort never wanted to do violence on the nature of economics, no model it (economics) in conformity to any blindly formed or followed chimaera. To Dr Motsuenyane, significant revolutions are not always political; it is also the new economic ideas that effectively, powerfully, and lastingly alter the lives of humanity.
As
the post-1994 premium of Blackness started to bottom up following the political
economy value of the Black cognitive elite and political class, a new kind of
African-in-particular network and software began to take shape. The grand
handshake between the economic establishment and Blackness, inoffensively
called Black economic empowerment, disrupted the epistemic economic
freedom the Motsuenyane generation of business leaders were threading with the
new political elites in the ANC. To his generation, the Mayibuye cohort, economic freedom started with correcting the ownership of real estate injustice. It was only completed when Black Businesses could be funded to thrive without chauvinist encumbrances.
With
the formation of the National African Chamber of Commerce during apartheid's
golden decade, 1948 to 1958, wherein it was legally expressed, together with
luminaries such as Dr Richard Maponya, Bigvai Masekela, and others established
an institution they believed would be the voice of African business interests.
As an organised white business, at the behest of government policy, set South
Africa's founding principles of apartheid, or rather white supremacy, loose to
run amok through the new templates of economic dominance they designed and
built, NAFCOC sought to be a black response to such marginalisations.
The
rise of separate development a softened version of apartheid -a substrate of
colonialism of a special type, began the long-standing process of turning
African businesses – businesses with the largest market and true African
experiences, hopes and interests, aspirations and legitimate grievances against
their economic dominance – into abstract establishments destined for
invisibility as part of the mainstream economic data. The criminalisation of Blackness in spaces declared exclusively white was systemically rolled out in the regulation of Black business in a way that the extractive feature of apartheid's philosophy of business creates institutionalised value chains that would take generations to change or fracture. Licensing of enterprises,
allocation of business rights, business loan granting criteria, African debt
characterisation, and the general limitations that came with the invisibility
of African business in the political economy of South Africa condemned African
entrepreneurship to appendage status in one of the continent's economic
behemoths.
Evolutionarily, crossing the proverbial river by feeling the stones and framing the organized business context for growth within its limited and constrained spaces, the Motsuenyane generation entered into several scrums with the apartheid state, which resulted in trading licenses being opened in Black townships and manufacturing permits given in self-governing territories. As the continental export market in the sub-region-imposed
trade restrictions which demanded Black intermediaries to conclude contracts,
as well as the demands for c-suite representation by black professional organisations,
the Motsuenyane generation became an interested catalyst and federated Black
business interests to move several needles for the advancement of black
entrepreneurship.
He was a model political economy activist who grew in stature as the African Business struggle icon. Comparable in politics to the iconic generation of
Nelson Mandela and in liberation theology that of Desmond Tutu. Dr Motsuenyane's
moral integrity, economic diplomacy skills, and conciliatory image masked the
beating heart of a political economy radical who believed in social democracy.
He privately railed against economic injustice and viewed collaboration with
the softer of the apartheid business system as a coercive tactic with
comprehensive value chain changing potential. The little that was left of
African entrepreneurial dignity was conceived by his generation as a kind of
citizenship based on a daring combination of the ... and economic
self-determination.
The parallel visions of his generation of business leaders and that of their political counterparts, which found expression in the economic clauses of the broader liberation movement's monumental documents, was a shared, although rarely celebrated as such, political symmetry between these generations. Dr Motsuenyane, through his focused demand for a significantly African-owned, operated, and socio-culturally grounded financial services sector, leaves a legacy of revolutionary business politics that should attention-paying generations beyond his to recalibrate the true meaning of economic transformation or empowerment.
Passing
on in a season wherein what it means to be a leader in our collective
consciousness has become conflated with what it means to be South African, his
life should spur us to be honest in our choices about who deserves to lead us.
The genius of our current economic caste system, which most distinguishes it
from its politically liquidated predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. We are
its new architects. The filth in the system is that jurisprudence might have
given license to the powerful to continue with the current status quo.
Recognising the economic injustices of the past is not the problem.
Institutionally refusing to fracture the templates of dominance is the
problem.
As
his generation ascended the podiums that required their institutions as
persons, they brought into our South Africanness and other podiums themselves
in a manner that makes us, the served and led, greater than them.
As we mourn Ntate Motsuenyane, the grandfather of organised African Business, we should understand that every tear shed waters the tree of the leadership institution he was. Leadership in Africa is abundant; we must just shift when we have served to allow the new to emerge. This Dr
Motsuenyane did. He did not want to be an ancestor but was physically
alive.
In
the Cornel West parlance, ‘he had to sit at the helm of organised African
business, for African leadership excellence to stand up in South Africa,
Africa, and the World.’ Like the ancient Kings and thinkers of the Mapunguwe
that shaped the civilizations of the sub-continent, he towered for Africanness
a leadership model many dared to venture.
Like
a flag, his leadership is a polyvalent symbol of its various meanings. He represented in himself the many facets of being African.
Robala
ka kgotso. Mokwena-wa-Modimosana. Mokgethi ya kgethileng sechaba go ikwadisa
pelong tsa batho.
Comments
Post a Comment