The DA’s new Economic Inclusion for All Bill aims to replace race-based empowerment with job creation and poverty reduction incentives.
No doubt the ANC will push back – vociferously, we would guess – against the DA’s detailed proposal to scrap broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE).
And there are probably two main reasons it would fight to the death to keep the policy in place. B-BBEE is the key to the ANC’s whole programme to transform South Africa and create “a better life for all” for the country’s disadvantaged citizens.
Without that policy, the party can no longer claim to be the champion of the poor and the oppressed. Without B-BBEE –which is easily manipulated by the politically well-connected – the top cadres would not have access to the trough of taxpayer money on which they have been gorging themselves for the past 31 years.
Few South Africans can be unaware by now that the “revolution” has been singularly good to the ANC’s chiefs and their hangers-on.
Government contracts are the means to fabulous wealth. Multiple Lamborghinis seized by the Special Investigating Unit are mute testimony about how the privileged allegedly lived on money meant for patients at Tembisa Hospital.
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Against this background, the DA’s Economic Inclusion for All Bill, unveiled yesterday, has some interesting ideas.
It seeks to address poverty and inequality through “offering incentives for tangible developmental outcomes such as job creation, poverty reduction, skills enhancement and environmentally sustainable practices”, according to the party.
All state organs would have to “contract for goods and services in a system that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective”.
And, if you’re a dodgy tenderpreneur, you won’t get the deals.
However, it’s going to be an uphill struggle for the DA to push this through parliament against what we predict will be a barrage of accusations by the ANC – and others – that this will take the country “back to apartheid”.
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