Time to get over the blind idiocy of BEE, and rope in the good whiteys

Remember the days of going out to that club that used to give out free drinks? Everybody went, even the folk who didn’t drink. You remember?

The music sucked, the aircon was broken, but you still went because your friends told you it was cool. Of course you remember!

It was that club everybody would go to, get a free drink, take a sip, change their mind, put it down, get a different free drink, take a sip then decide to go party at the expensive club next door, because at least half the speakers weren’t blown.

You really don’t remember? Well, that’s probably because it never happened, since it’s such a stupid business proposition.

How is this related to Black Economic Empowerment? Take a look around you. Nearly every bit of your development has had some sort of state co-sponsorship. Your bread, the talk shows you listen to, most, if not all of your education; it’s all invested in by the same people who make the BEE rules.

Now I can understand redress. Redress is certainly important. Does one drive redress by putting black people in positions by means of policy? Absolutely. Does one drive redress by actively excluding white people from the market? Errr.

This week, we learned of Richard Lawrence, an acting magistrate, being denied shortlisting for a permanent position because he ticked about every possible box save for being the right race. Having been through the legal profession myself, I’m aware of how much state sponsorship actively and passively goes into grooming legal minds.

It’s not just the subsidy of the LLB programme, but every case he heard while acting. Those cases add to his experience and instead of capitalizing on that, he’s left as a half sipped free drink. What a waste.

Were it an isolated incident, sure. Let me not allow this to be confused for white arrogance as the fighters love to taunt

It just simply isn’t. The need to apply BEE continues as ever, yet with apparently no consideration for the sunk and economics costs.

And yes, one should expect a lot of economic cost when trying to redress imbalance. Why we should accept the avoidable costs though is beyond me.

But it’s not the economic costs and lost investment in people that upsets me the most. It’s the blind idiocy that transformation is a front-end thing that is achieved by putting black people in spaces where there were once white people.

Yeah if you wiped out the white population, it may work. It just doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.

Surely, if you know that despite BEE, white people are going to exist, getting them on your side should be part of the transformation agenda. For that, one would need to get influential white people in positions of influence, not to isolate them and incentivise them towards resentment.

BEE’s implementation is a poor solution to a rich problem and frankly, will have little, if any, impact on the vast majority of the black population. How do we fix this? It’s not that easy, but a start would be admitting that transformation is not just about the people we put in power but the values of those people.

One of my legal heroes is a dude called Adv Peter Fischer SC. The man used every creative tool in his arsenal to engage with passive racism in the legal fraternity.

Having fought racism myself before, I know the costs it may come with. Sunday lunch can get pretty awkward. Anyway, when he came before the JSC to interview for a position on the bench, he was grilled by Juju. His sin? Not learning to speak SeSotho.

An entire career of progressiveness was reduced to a single criteria that wasn’t met, despite Peter doing more than most of his peers at the time to engage in serious issues in the legal fraternity. That kinda thinking isn’t progressive and it’s hardly transformation.

If anything, looking at that, I wouldn’t fault anybody for being less inclined to fight racism. After all, if the progressives want to isolate me because of a skin colour I can’t change, but the racists would accept me if I just share their views, I’ll be put in a desperate situation.

Transformation must start to look at the good whiteys and confront any incentives that push them to the other side. It should not be the thing that pushes them there.