Not only the mining industry but also the JSE is going all out on BEE [black economic empowerment] — a good general principle. The concern is exactly how investors’ racial profiles are to be established. The Nats struggled with pencil tests and such things. Are we going back to that and where will this information be stored? I don’t think POPI [Protection of Personal Information] will allow it. For a brief period I worked analysing share registers to establish racial profiles for company annual reports. This was difficult because in the new SA we have no official racial classification. Individuals are not required to nominate or state their genetic backgrounds when buying shares or making investments and names don’t help. Just by way of example, how by using the available data in a share register would one classify the name Lynne Brown, Karl Cloete, Trevor Noah, or the various offspring of ANC politicians such as Tokyo Sexwale and others. There are many examples, particularly among ...
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