BEE progress – depends on how you look at it

[Eugene]

Two progress reports on BEE in the past week appear to come to startlingly different conclusions. Recently, Business Report quoted the Presidential Black Business Working Group, which met President Thabo Mbeki last Friday, as finding established companies’ BEE performance wanting, notes a Mail & Guardian Online column.

The group called for punitive measures to give BEE ‘teeth’. On the other hand, KPMG South Africa partner Sandile Hlophe released KPMG’s 2007 BEE Survey, which found that while corporate SA still had some way to go to implement BEE, it had at least embraced the idea and had begun to implement and monitor BEE progress in a meaningful way. The Black Business Working Group, reportedly chaired by BEE pioneer Peter Vundla, bases its call for penalties for non-compliance. However, notes the column, it is not surprising that, overall, companies have not complied with the scorecards, since the whole broad-based strategy was unveiled only in 2003 and the codes only gazetted and thus finalised this year.

It is also clear that the baseline study focused narrowly on quantitative compliance: the KPMG survey asked qualitative questions as well. The KPMG survey report remarks: ‘Only a few industries have BEE strategies that focus on compliance. The common trend across all industries is for the BEE strategy to form part of the organisation’s growth strategy.’ If this is true, says the column, then BEE is not being viewed as another tax or simply as a regulatory burden – at least by those companies that responded to the survey questionnaire.

Mail and Guardian: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx...nomy__business

To download KPMG's report: http://www.kpmg.co.za/images/naledi/...vey%202007.pdf

[Dave A]

The KPMG survey report remarks: ‘Only a few industries have BEE strategies that focus on compliance. The common trend across all industries is for the BEE strategy to form part of the organisation’s growth strategy.’

Frankly, that sounds like a pretty healthy attitude in line with the stated objective - not redistribution, but targeted growth. Now all we need is a healthy growth environment.