EMPOWERMENT
Mbeki speaks out about BEE
Posted Wed, 07 Dec 2005
The government's black economic empowerment policies were not
responsible for the enrichment of a few individuals in the private
sector, President Thabo Mbeki said on Tuesday night.
"All the big names that you know, who are cited [as] the big
black economic empowerment actors, none of them have got to that
position as a result of government intervention," he said in an
interview on Metro FM.
"These are private arrangements."
A lot of the discussion around BEE was not based on a proper
assessment of what was happening, he said.
"Government is very much involved in this matter of BEE, and
that BEE is predicated on empowerment that has to expand the
economy, empowerment that has to increase wealth.
"And so you would see in the government interventions that we
are supporting this notion of broad-based empowerment."
The discussion, however, tended to focus on people who had taken
private initiatives, Mbeki pointed out.
If one looked at
what the government had been trying to do,
there was no such thing as enrichment of the few. "What's happening in the private sector is what's happening in the private sector," he said.
Sapa
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