The Sandown resident and CEO of SekelaXabiso, an auditing and advisory firm, addressed these challenges at a talk on normalising black entrepreneurship at the Regenesys Business School.
Dhlamini said while on the outside, strides have been made towards improving the landscape for black entrepreneurs, some intangible challenges still remained.
“We are still faced with challenges such as that of goodwill, meaning that as black entrepreneurs, we have to keep proving ourselves all these years later while our white counterparts are always trusted from the onset to deliver,” she said.
“We live in an abnormal society but the assumption is that things will change and the belief is that the landscape will become a normal one for black entrepreneurs to succeed just as well as their white counterparts.”
Dhlamini added that it was not all doom and gloom referring to policies such as the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment and the role it played in uplifting black entrepreneurs.
She also stressed the key role legislation had played in the inclusion of black entrepreneurs and the transformation of the economy. “This legislation has been embraced as a necessary tool to transform our economy and address the imbalances of the past, where the majority of the population was excluded from meaningful participation in the economy and it has been a success,” she said.
Dhlamini also touched on the issue of empowering more black people to enter the accounting profession, especially women, saying that they were shockingly underrepresented. with only 3 300 out of the 37 900 chartered accountants in the country being black.
She stressed that a key way to achieve this would be to fix the education system, so that pupils were able to make better choices when it came to selecting subjects.
“Mentorship is also essential for pupils; give them career guidance at a school level,” she said.
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