LETTER: BEE is non-negotiable

BEE is increasingly coming under attack. Peter Bruce asks in his last column what its investment case may be (“Waiting in vain for BEE boffins to make investment case”, June 19)

Investors weigh up the risks and rewards of a particular ecosystem and make a call accordingly. The greater and longer-term risks are to continue with a racialised economy born from our history, where people’s race determines where they belong in the economic hierarchy. 

How do you correct and redress an intergenerational race-based policy with its longer-term intergenerational effects? Through race-based redress and intervention for the victims of that policy. 

It is disingenuous at best to say it is either BEE or the economy — a false dilemma fallacy. Perhaps BEE failures and challenges are simply symptomatic of state misgovernance or ineptitude, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s rather deal with the underlying problem.

Criticising aspects of the policy, such as its oligarchic features or insufficient emphasis on skills for the previously disadvantaged, is one thing. By all means let’s correct this, but in principle BEE is simply non-negotiable.

It is not only a moral imperative, it is also a practical and business one — with more people participating at all levels of the economy everyone wins, especially investors.

Tlhware Monageng
Johannesburg

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