Enochonwood got round to gazetting the amended PPPFA regulations after the constitutional court told him that the last ones were shit. I would caution the reader to steer clear of (what's another word for sensational, I've used that word too often) headlines like
Big changes for BEE laws in South Africa
Because these headlines aren't quite on the money. The difference between the former regulations and these regulations is that preference points aren't awarded for BEE levels like they were in the past. Now they are awarded for
"specific goals" means specific goals as contemplated in section 2(1)(d) of the Act which may include contracting with persons, or categories of persons, historically disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on the basis of race, gender and disability including the implementation of programmes of the Reconstruction and Development Programme as published in Government Gazette No. 16085 dated 23 November 1994;
The term "specific goals" here is paraphrased from section 2(1)(d) of the PPPFA. I underlined the word MAY because there could be other criteria. However those criteria are not mentioned in the regulations. What we do know is that the PPPFA states in 2(1)(e)
any specific goal for which a point maybe awarded, must be clearly specified in the invitation to submit a tender
This is where I get scared. In the last regulations you knew that if you were a level 1 then you'd get 10 or 20 points. Room for gerrymandering was somewhat limited. We now have an element of uncertainty. In fact I will posit that the scope for corruption might go up substantially because preference points can be directly allocated to a specific bidder. Think about it – a bid could say preference points will be allocated to a certain family who were removed from Bryanston and taken to the Middelburg magistrate's court (I should coco). It's not impossible that this could happen – not with our quality of daft looters.
Don't celebrate too early. Empowerment criteria are still a big part of the PPPFA. They are just a little better hidden, unlike the sign below.
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