Two new bills test Ramaphosa’s leadership as calls grow to replace race-based BEE.
By Paddi Clay
Key topics:
Ramaphosa faces pressure to abandon race-based BEE for inclusive new bills.
DA and IRR propose policies aiming to repair apartheid damage without using race.
President urged to act decisively and define his legacy before his term ends.
Cyril Ramaphosa has a great opportunity to stop being ‘dof’ and create a positive legacy for himself as well as a brighter future for all in South Africa. But will he take it?
At school we used to call each other dof when others didn’t know obvious things that everyone else knew, not by dint of study, but from some kind of osmosis process with surrounding reality.
Dof is the Afrikaans equivalent of dim, slow to understand, not the brightest bulb in the room. It’s far softer than dom or stupid because it implies it is a temporary state that can be rectified after others point it out to you.
I bring up this old schoolyard jibe because recently the President of South Africa has been presenting as terrifyingly dof.
I mean, who goes walking in their suburb and is not curious about a mansion worthy of a full-blown oligarch, and doesn’t want to know who lives in it, and how they obtained their wealth?
Being a kind and generous soul (my own assessment, which remains uncorroborated), I am loath to condemn our President as stupid or evilly complicit or tragically ignorant of what is going on until I’ve seen his response to the great opportunity that is in front of him and his party. This is in the form of two bills heading for Parliament: one from the Democratic Alliance and one from the Institute of Race Relations. Both ignore race in trying to repair the damage done by apartheid and the past three decades of the ANC’s dominance in government.
I do wonder if Cyril Ramaphosa has even read Jeff Wicks’s The Shadow State, now that he knows who lives in that mansion, knows he is distantly related to him, and is under investigation for corruption? He seems so disconnected to what’s going on in his own country.
Does he know that eight out of ten South Africans now believe South Africa is on the wrong track, following the uptick in mood after the GNU formation? This is not information from a news organisation’s X poll, this is according to the latest Ipsos What Worries the World Study.
Is he prompted into some self-reflection when he is told that hundreds of children are suffering from malnutrition and thousands go to bed hungry under his watch, after so many years of his party’s dedication to Broad-based (really?) Black Economic Empowerment?
In his ‘Making Sense’ podcast, political analyst and commentator Frans Cronje recently described BEE as the ANC’s foundational policy for dealing with the legacy of apartheid.
But it’s proving to be very rocky and unfit for purpose.
The CEO of the National Employers’ Association of South Africa, Gerhard Papenfus, said in a media statement this week that ‘every South African knows that B-BBEE has been abused by a very small group of politically connected cadres and tenderpreneurs for ridiculous self-enrichment, to the absolute detriment of the Act’s intended beneficiaries.’
