Business

BEE: 75% room for improvement

8 April 2010

While most South African companies are not complying with the country's black economic empowerment laws, this does not mean they are making no effort to do so, and the government is looking at better ways of tackling the country's BEE challenges, says Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.

"More than 75 percent of companies in the private sector are not BEE-compliant," Davies said during a press briefing on the sidelines of the orientation session of the BEE Advisory Council in Pretoria on Tuesday.

He said the level of compliance was even worse when it came to the indirect elements of empowerment, such as skills development and enterprise development procurement.

Davies said this was according to a baseline study conducted by the council in 2008/09. South Africa's BEE laws empower the council to conduct its own research, monitoring and evaluation of BEE implementation.

"The research conducted in July 2008 shows the overall impact of BEE remains modest. Less than 5 percent of Johannesburg Stock Exchange is owned by black people."

However, Davies said the figure did not mean that companies had not made any effort in an attempt to comply with BEE.

He said government was looking at getting the advice of the BEE Advisory Council on how to address the challenges highlighted by the research.

"We are all of the view that empowerment has got to play a significant role in the transformation of this country. In particular, we need to ensure that those elements that link empowerment to enterprise development are actually more effective than they appear to have been up to now."

"As we proceed we will be able to consider what information we need to have on regular basis in order to chart the progress of empowerment, and what it is that we need to be doing to ensure that empowerment has a more substantial effect, and that this effect is linked to the broader objectives of economic development and enterprise creation," he said.

Sapa



	The owner-manager of a centre for distributing SA Breweries products that he and his colleagues have built up and made successful in the Johannesburg region (Photo: SABMiller - One Red Eye/Philip Meech)