A few years ago Levin Kester hosted a very entertaining course on that flawlessly authored document – the BEE verification manual. He went through the whole thing and unfortunately didn't show how much a verification would cost if you had to follow it to the letter. Anyway one of the things that he did touch on was that of an ID book. He showed us a copy of his ID book with a picture of him that only a mother could love. He then asked a very pertinent question – id est. "How do you know what race I am?" Many people volunteered an answer ranging from the last digit through to the whole number etc. The correct answer is of course – the picture. He told us that ID numbers stopped considering race in the late 80s. I did a little research on this and came across this website.
By the early 80s, through the creation of independent homelands (or Bantustans), Blacks were no longer considered 'true' citizens of the Republic. The remaining citizens of South Africa were classified according to eight categories: White, Cape Coloured, Malay, Griqua, Chinese, Indian, Other Asian, and Other Coloured. The South African Identity Number was 13 digits long. The first six digits gave the birth date of the holder (year, month, and date). The next four digits acted as a serial number to distinguish people born on the same day, and to differentiate between the sexes: digits 0000 to 4999 were for females, 5000 to 9999 for males. The eleventh digit indicated whether the holder was a SA citizen (0) or not (1) - the latter for foreigners who had rights of residency. The penultimate digit recorded race, according to the above list - from Whites (0) to Other Coloured (7). The final digit of the ID number was an arithmetical control (like the last digit on ISBN numbers).
But this all changed in 1987 with the Identification Act No 72 of 1986 (commenced 1 July) which repealed the Blacks (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act No 67 of 1952 and amended parts of the Population Registration Act No 30 of 1950 such that Identification Numbers no longer reflected a person's racial group.
Now we know. And the JSE? Well the JSE has set up a BEE segment on the main board, with SASOL being the first company to make use of this. It's also backed up by an amendment to the Securities Services Act. I can't pretend that the amendment makes for great bedside reading, but it does contain a variety of definitions that need to be looked at. I'm not going to bother with the definition of a black company but concentrate on the definitions of natural people. Here we go
"BEE compliant person" - (a) as regards a natural person, one who falls within the ambit of the definition of "black people" in the BEE Codes. For the new readers to this blog I'll use the definition contained in the codes
Black people' has the meaning defined in the Act qualified as including only natural persons who are citizens of the Republic of South Africa by birth or descent: or are citizens of the republic of South Africa by naturalisation:
(a) occurring before the commencement date of the constitution of the j Republic of South Africa Act of 1993; or
(a) (sic) occurring after the commencement date of the Constitution of the i Republic of South Africa Act of 1993. but who, without the Apartheid policy j would have qualified for naturalisation before then;
The only remaining question here is if we have no litmus test to determine blackness, whiteness, Indianness (you get the picture) then how is the JSE going to be in a position to bar people who choose to participate in this scheme? Are they now given the sole powers to look at an ID picture and say – OK you look black so you can play; hey whitey! get the hell off this board!!
Are we inviting a little legal challenge at some stage? Probably.
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