ANC obsession with leadership battles sabotages transformation – BMF

Black Management Forum (BMF) president Mthunzi Mncane says his business lobby group could use harsh adjectives to describe the current status of transformation of the corporate sector in the country.

“Yes the situation makes us angry although we have never said that, we are polite”, he said.

And for that he sees the lowest common denominator as being the ruling party, economic cluster departments and agencies, which ANC cadres are in charge of. He said they were simply dropping the ball and addressing corporate transformation as an afterthought.

Mncane, together with his fellow board members and BMF management, told the media during a round-table in preparation of their corporate update dinner this Friday that other factors that aggravated the transformation problems were fragmentation of interventions and rhetoric that obfuscated the debate.

“For example, the ANC is now talking about radical economic transformation, and nobody knows what that means. Transformation in itself is radical,” he said, and argued that this confusion was partly an offshoot of political unwillingness by ruling party to tackle the challenges head-on.

“They [ANC NEC] meet for the entire weekend and worry only about who will become their next leader.”

He said when leaders were elected, they implemented cadre deployment instead, which was not working.

Mncane said there was incontrovertible evidence that cadre deployment had dismally failed. He said if it did, “we would have the best people running state-owned entities at both managerial and board level”.

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He lamented: “Some of these people are not known to us or our sister organisations. We don’t know them, they have never been associated with any progressive forces in the country.”

And for that, his organisation had approached the ANC with a “transformation masterplan”, because “we cannot be a country in transformation forever”.

The five key areas the lobby group has identified as pillars of transformation are inclusive economic growth and diversification, reduction of spatial imbalance, wealth redistribution, beneficiation and localisation as well as “the fourth industrial revolution”.

The departments of economic development, trade and industry and labour, BMF believes, are not taking BEE seriously enough to use it as a catalyst for transformation. “BEE lacks a champion, and the legislation has loopholes with the [employment equity] commission lacking independence.”

And National Treasury, which a few years ago introduced a chief procurement office, is urged to “leverage fiscus to expedite transformation. BMF is also worried about the focus of SMME development being on macro-enterprises”.

Their ‘master-plan’ also addresses township economies and revitalisation of de-industrialised ‘ghost towns’. “Poverty eradication should not just be about dumping money into townships and villages, there must be creation of light industries,” BMF office-bearers said.

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