A VIEW OF THE WEEK: Don’t give BEE bully Musk your lunch money

I had a knife pulled on me at school when I was 12. At 15, it was a gun.

In both instances, my nonchalant attitude towards the assault threw my young attackers off, and the situation was diffused.

While I would never encourage resisting a weaponed-assault, there are times when not adding to the hysteria of the moment will help you more than fighting back.

SA President Cyril Ramaphosa often adopts this tactic, even if it paints him as unresponsive and passive. It is one he and his government should have remembered when confronted with the issue of Starlink.

SA-born billionaire Elon Musk has been trying to get his satellite service in South Africa for some time, but is not a fan of having to play by SA’s employment equity rules.

He repeated his hatred for the policies during an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum this week, calling them “utterly wrong and improper”.

Musk gets his way

Musk joined US President Donald Trump in grilling South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House this week.

Just hours before that meeting, Bloomberg reported that the SA government was relooking at the rules around black ownership, citing the Starlink fiasco as a catalyst. It said a “workaround” to allow the service to operate in SA would be offered to ease tensions between Pretoria and Washington.

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Musk stuttered and tried to deflect a question about his influence on the decision, before pulling the victim card.

“I am in this absurd situation where I was born in South Africa but cannot get a licence to operate Starlink because I am not black. Does that seem right to you?” he asked at the forum.

Musk’s argument was not meant to bring about a policy revolution in South Africa any more than Trump loves models because he admires their views on world peace.

It was meant to undermine sovereignty and create a fiasco, so the only way to avoid a heated conflict was to give him his way.

This is bully behaviour.

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BEE is failing

A recent progress report shows that SA’s equity laws are still failing, and when they work, they work too slowly. But policy changes should be made based on rational evidence, internal pressure, and consultation, not because of a billionaire’s whining.

External pressure may have helped to overthrow Apartheid in the name of equality, but that is not the case here. It must be seen for what it is: simply an attempt to influence South African laws for selfish gain.

If the laws are changed on the whim of a businessman, they can be changed for the next one too. Soon, SA policy will be tied to trade agreements and changed by the loudest voice.

It will be South Africans — who have to battle real, not imagined, inequality every day — who suffer the most.

We will continue to be the most unequal country in the world, and race will remain the biggest obstacle to our goal of “national unity”.

Ramaphosa may be seeing his political sunset in the distance, but let’s hope he doesn’t sell the country on the way down.

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