Pissed Nomonde off - good she needs to hear certain realities. My argument is that BEE will not survive these codes. They are not implementable. Her counter argument is that government is the biggest purchaser in the economy and they issue licences and hence people will comply because of that. There is little merit to that argument. Not every company does business with the government but they do do business with the private sector. It is the private sector that has and will continue ensuring the scorecard activity continues. If it's too hard to comply with the scorecard they'll eventually stop doing so - which means that most companies within a certain vertical are now non-compliant. The corporates will need to continue buying from these businesses and so will not consider scorecards because there is no point.
What will happen though is that black business that now are elevated to a level 1 or 2 will happily become agents for those companies that cannot get BEE scores (read fronting). They'll do business with the government and life will continue. There'll a very small number of companies that comply and the rest of us won't bother.
Government alone cannot drive the change. This is what Namibia is going to discover with NEEEF. If they decline licenses etc because of BEE then there will be job losses. Watch next year with the mining charter. The ANC is going to be pushed into a corner with one of two choices - cancel mining licences for non-compliance which will result in dis-investment, job losses and a significant drop in tax revenue; or extend the period for companies to comply. In both cases they will have lost a lot of face - the former is more dire, because it has an impact on votes and social unrest. The latter shows that don't mean what they say anyway.
I will be proved right and it's not going to be the most pleasant journey - but the fact of the matter is that if you are incapable of running a country give it to someone who will.
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