BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

Equal Opportunity was to be relegated to the history textbooks in 1990 when suddenly and without warning, the National Party government announced the unbanning of previously proscribed political parties and the release of its political opponents from the incarceration and exile. This bold statement by the government of the day sent a strong message that black political and economic aspirations were back firmly on the agenda. Then the even bolder term, affirmative action resurfaced.

It becomes necessary at this stage to point out that there is an ill-fated term that _occupied the short interval between Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, namely Managing Employee Diversity. It can be argued that had it not been for the dramatic announcements in Parliament by FW de Klerk on 2 February 1990, Managing Employee Diversity would have been the new term in vogue. Naturally, its origins can be traced back to the United States of America, more specifically an African- American management consultant by the name of Roosevelt Thomas Jnr who was arguing that this new term was more appropriate to the 1990s than the other terms `whose time had passed’. Managing Employee Diversity was to have the shortest shelf life in this arena.

Affirmative Action, the term of the post 2 February 1990 era, seems to be dying a slow death. It is now being substituted by the term ‘Empowerment,’ without the prefix ‘Black‘. A number of business and political leaders have indicated to me that a preference for this term emanates from the following considerations:

1. The prefix ‘Black‘ is seen to be too Africanist in its tone, thereby risking the alienation of Asian and coloured people who were also victims of past discrimination.
2. Furthermore, the prefix ‘Black‘ is seen to be excluding other categories of previously disadvantaged people like women of all colours, the disabled, the homosexual et cetera.

It is my contention that empowerment deals do not constitute affirmative action programmes and that the use of these terms as synonyms is likely to create a legacy that will come back to haunt the business and political leaders of this country.

Nevertheless it becomes important to acknowledge that the process of integrating blacks and other disadvantaged peoples into the economic mainstream of this country can broadly be divided into the following three levels. These three levels are beginning to be reflected, for instance, in tender document criteria that government departments or parastatals use in determining an organisation’s ‘empowerment‘ track record.

As alluded to earlier, the traditional South African view has been to concentrate on the recruitment and advancement of blacks and women up the ranks of an organisation, as well as their appointment, usually as non-executive directors at board level. The new view regards these initiatives as important parts but not all of what is now referred to as ‘empowerment‘.

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