The (beach) sands of time are running out for those who wish to comment on the Tourism BEE charter. I went through it and found it weak and lacking in substance with its fair share of REALLY BAD errors - did you know that the two generic scorecards add up to 102 points without bonus points. And then there is the grave mathematical error under the 2012 scorecard for management where the total is supposed to be 14 but it clearly adds up to 16. If you want to see my breakdown please mail me and I'll send it to you.
But I think I missed the point almost completely after I read Kevin Lester's comments. He has gone through the scorecard in the minutest detail and looked at everything from the procedure to substance of the scorecard. I've attached his email here.
The most important to me is that of applicability, Kevin isolates certain instances where a type of activity might appear to have a tourism angle but in fact does not fall into the sector.
- Restaurants that are outsourced canteens of corporates or government departments
- Conference venues run by corporate training companies or operated on an outsourced basis by large corporate
We could probably think of a number of instances where this just won't work. I am therefore forced to somewhat agree with jungle jim that the generic codes are probably the better bet here.
Financial Sector Charter
So where is this going? It appears that the banks walked out of the negotiations because the black ownership requirements could not be agreed upon. It is difficult to figure out what happened here but I really hope that they did walk out, this kind of protest is so overdue. Cosatu does it at the drop of a hat and then they condemn the banks for behaving like the unions.
Now that I have climbed off my soapbox where does this leave us. We all know that the deadline is the 31st of August (this year!!!! DTI) and it doesn't seem that this issue is going to be resolved. I have seen a version of the newest charter and it is largely aligned with the dti's codes and seems to be well thought out. Apparently a meeting will be held by Trevor next week to resolve this issue and the charter will be gazetted under section 9(5) at the end of the month. I hope it is the new charter and not the one gazetted under section 12 because we'll never get this issue resolved.
And finally
I've noticed that Vuyo is moving away from the ownership debate and looking at sustainable empowerment in the form of enterprise development, which pleases me greatly. His last article makes for very interesting reading, he shows up the folly of gazetting and meeting deadlines. The end of this month marks the end of the interim period and I doubt whether anything has been done in the last six months. Can the dti afford to have more egg on its face by extending the deadline? We'll have to wait and see.
And on the subject of charters, Vuyo is absolutely entitled to the last word