It's annual empowerment feature time. The April 4 (2008) issue of the FM had a special empowerment supplement. A JV between the FM and Empowerdex, the supplement stands out as the best one so far. The cynic in me is desperately trying to find fault with this issue - but I can only find small typo and editing problems that aren't worth mentioning. The full list of the top 188 companies is here.
I should mention however that much of this information is NOT verified. A source told me that they had been interviewed over the phone and submitted what they believed they had achieved. Effectively a self-rating. (The methodology is discussed in the introduction).
I am going to use these scores in my own assessments with my clients, as will many other verification agencies. So we have a self-assessment endorsement from the great protagonist of independent verification.
Brian Leroni asked me what the average score was in the top 50. It is 64.1. This does seem quite high but perhaps the larger the company the easier it is to achieve these targets. I wonder what jungle jim would have to say about this. Amongst his many (often amusing but always infuriating) utterances is that the targets of the FSC are too lenient. Is he going comment in a similar vein?
On the subject of jungle. I presented at a conference recently and got there early because he was speaking. I was singularly unimpressed. He spoke to the audience as if there were no white people present and rambled on about how black people should pronounce their names correctly. But he did say a few things that concerned me greatly.
- We should get rid of the PPPFA. In order to do this you would have to change the constitution. A singularly dof idea - see Bright below.
- He and the department of labour have decided that all QSE's must include EE in their scorecards. He maintains that the scorecard will be rejected if it is not included. I wonder how he is going to do this. The labour department has yet to go to court over their Comair allegations and they had such a watertight case too. I have added Comair to my Google alerts and nothing has come up.
It is this lack of consideration for law that makes things very difficult for me. If a law is passed then you are expected to live by it. A person who declares that certain laws or conventions just be scrapped without any consideration for the constitution should be censured.
A fantastic example is that of our northern neighbours. I have been watching this very closely because I believe that once Bob and his cronies are removed Zim has the most amazing potential.
I was listening to Redi Direko interviewing Bright Matonga (ZANU-PF propagandist). I have heard some nitwits in my life, but never anything that compares to this one. He is often compared to Comical Ali (that Iraqi Information Minister who maintained that Baghdad was not under threat) because he continues to preach the ZANU-PF message of provocation etc. There are so many absurd comments coming out of his mouth (you don't have to coax them out of him but you do have to ask him to shut up between sentences because you might die laughing) but the best one is the threat of white farmers coming to invade their land. I haven't seen any pictures of a bunch of white farmers astride their wheat threshers and Massey-Fergusons on the Zambian border waiting to invade.
Oh - Bright (can't imagine why he was called that) has a farm too. He took it from a family called Schulz in 2002. What makes this story more bizarre is that Bright married a white English woman called Anne who apparently accused the Schulz family of stealing her land. You can read the ridiculous story here.
I wouldn't like to be in Bright's shoes (ever really) when Mugabe and co lose power. Because I have my doubts whether he will find Zimbabwe a hospitable place at that point. I just hope that our government doesn't offer him or any of the other ZANU hoodlums asylum here.
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