Paul Janisch

How on earth do you develop a sport like cricket, start with the coaches

Rudolf and I have a friend who goes by the name of Richard Bands.  Richard is a total character, it will always be worth your while spending a few hours with him because he only ever talks about the humorous side of his professional rugby career.  The proverbial 10,000 hours is never mentioned but you know it exists.  Richard is also very interested in the development of the sport.  Richard will tell you that his focus is on the grass roots of the grass roots (this might have been a little lost in translation).  Richard's idea is to create an environment where young sports people could be provided with an opportunity to earn a living whilst they play at club level. He has identified three characteristics that a competent sports person will need

1. Sport teaches discipline, specifically in a team sport environment
2. You learn to deal with disappointment.  If you lose on Saturday then you will try to win on Wednesday
3. You have to be able to get on with people.  Maybe not so much in tennis and sculling but everything else requires this

Strangely enough every entrepreneur needs these characteristics as well.

Rudolf approached Cricket South Africa to discuss the development of cricket through their 70 hubs across the country. Any educationalist will tell you that a will to learn must be nurtured by competent training staff.  Someone who enjoys the game and has an interest in teaching it.  CSA have sorted out the head coaches but there are sub-coaches who assist the head coaches that are there as volunteers.  CSA wanted to arrange for these people to get corporate sponsorship in the form of some form of vocational training and sponsorship of their stipends. 

The benefits to the corporate is that they are growing the game, creating some hope in the most depressed areas of South Africa along with potential marketing benefits.  Oh yes - there'll also be some a BEE benefit

The upshot of this post is that it's now possible to sponsor a coach or coaches and develop the sport in South Africa.     Rudolf is the perfect person to run this programme because his passion for the sport rivals my passion for Peter Green.

If you are interested in knowing more send Rudolf an email.

And Bands - we'll let Bullet and Brian explain it

And then we are told the HDI is back in the allocation of preference points and Treasury is involved

The term HDI or Historically Disadvantaged Individuals hasn’t been used for years.  It was around in the late 1990s and was hastily discarded in the mid 2000s.    The reason behind this is that the definition was roughly – all those people who did not have the vote under the constitution that predates our current constitution that came into effect in 1994.

The definition included all women and disabled people.  This contradicted with the definition of black which is om en by Indian, Coloured or African born in SA.  The HDI definition would then exclude all those who born after 1994 irrespective of race.

But it seems that a tender (which I haven’t seen and can’t seem to  find) issued by National Treasury, the justice department and Solicitor-General for the provision of government legal services for the next three years awards points for HDIs.  And so a few organizations are going to court.

The General Council of the Bar (GCB) and Advocates for Transformation (AFT) are suing the ministers of finance and justice, as well as the Solicitor-General over the use of a tender process to constitute a "panel of referral advocates" who would then be briefed on all state litigation for the next three years. In other words, black lawyers who are 30 or younger would not receive the points allocated to HDIs. "This definition, with respect, does not pass muster," ……He added the HDI definition in the tender was unlawful and clashed with the Constitution, Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act and Broad-Based Black Empowerment Act.

How on earth did this happen?  It’s from Treasury who are trying to push the procurement bill through to get away from the PPPFA. 

They are firmly aware of the definition of black.  Old Dali must be dancing in the aisles because his lose at all costs policy is still available to continue assist the state in losing cases. After-all he is willing to work for peanuts for the awful busi.

Government wants us to fix its buildings- PPP territory but how many takers

In other words a PPP (Public-Private Partnership).  I thought PPPs had died down - this is not the case.  They are happening.  Refurbishing and managing a building probably won't be too hard a bidding process.

PPPs are a different beast that don't appear to be issued under section 10 of the BE Act, you know that section that incompetent government officials hide behind when they use race criteria to offer support under COVID.  The BEE aspect of PPPs is in fact a code so it's issued under section 9 and this one of the first codes, it came out in 2004.  When it comes to PPPs we have a code that can be found on Treasury's website or here.  

Back to this article.  It's building across the country.  If we think about inner city buildings I think this will be a hard sell.  So does our esteemed government

So far, five government properties – Telkom Towers, Cervitas Building, Public Works House, Police Barracks and Department of Defence Flats – have been identified in the City of Tshwane as pilot projects of these public-private partnerships.

Said to be done in phases, the first project is expected to commence in March 2024. “No property has been leased out as yet as the process is still in its conceptual stage,” said the minister.

We have a BEE for PPP course coming up in March this year.  I'll keep the blog updated.  There are rumours that the Minister will update the code this year.  Let's see

Draft Transport Code – rumours are that it will come into effect in March 2024 but does it exist

This is odd.  Mind you everything in this industry is odd.  A female Adrian (who I care not too credit) wrote in October 2023

The new Director of the Transport Council confirmed that the integrated Transport Sector Codes will be aligned with the Codes of Good Practice and published by the end of December 2023 and further confirmed that it is planned that these Amendments will come into effect from the 1st of March 2024, with no transitional period.

A search for this draft revealed nothing, I can’t even find a website for the Transport Council.  If there is a draft then where the hell is it.  I asked a lot of people.  Greg Wood (from Magna BEE Ratings) sent me the attached draft.  I looked through it and noticed that there were a number of things missing – like bursaries (and we still have student fee protests – another anc failure) , the procurement was similar to the first iteration of bolshie’s gift to a static economy. I started writing this post when I looked at the date of this draft – 2016. 

If there is a draft that’s newer I don’t think it exists.  slaptjips has done very little BEE stuff. Election year, there’s no electricity, no railway network and the only thing that keeps this country operating is the road-freight sector (which also destroys the roads), no leadership, cyril in fact has none; I’m not sure that this useless government has the mettle to ruffle the feathers of the only thing that works (and gets violently targeted too).  What am I saying – of course they would do whatever they could to fuck up the country – hell they even have an extra day to do it in this year.

I’m not with girl Adrian here.  I don’t think that there will be a revised transport code by March 1 this year.  But then I believed in cyril when he started.

What is a participant then - and who do we work for?

A participant is defined as a natural person holding rights of ownership in a Measured Entity (got to love that term). Simply put it’s a living breathing black person.  That’s simple enough. Where this word appears it must refer to a natural person. For example

Black New Entrants” means Black participants who hold rights of ownership in a Measured Entity etc

This is the inspiration for this post. In my industry we are always trying to one-up each other.  Since Rudolf and I have start delivering our courses I have come across at least two people who I would recommend in a heartbeat – you know who you are Marc Thompson and Ricky de Souza.  But you also get VAs who try to argue because they think it’s a gunfight.  When it comes to verification we have one outcome – that is that the client gets the result they expect.  The VA needs to defend what they do with SANAS, so if they are able to do so then allocate the points.  Don’t argue for the sake of arguing.  In my case it’s my reputation.  I’m interested in cheap points.   Give them to me.

I digress.  One person refused to allocate the new entrant points because the trust was a new entrant. I think he delighted in rubbing my nose in it. 

Corporate SA is gatvol of BEE

Those aren’t words from my mouth, I would have used more choice words.  This came from a person who is a player in SA business.  I approached the person to ask their advice about certain skills projects we have going.

This is not a surprise at all.  The largest corporates have long paid lip service to the process.  Claiming that they are committed to transformation.  They “engage” with the government at every level.  And to what end?

Corruption, crime, potholes, electricity, infrastructure. Theft, incompetence,  duplicity, racism, blame, you name it.  We’ve all had enough of this.  And the government knows it.

Where does this leave us?  I can’t see that BEE is going to be canned in a hurry, but I do see that the desire to comply to the letter of the law is waning.  I don’t think we need worry about the BEE Commission.  They have probably  realised that they are toothless.  As for the DTIC I think we need worry – because the incompetence levels there are scary.  How’s this for a story

There is a company that dropped a level (multiple levels)  because they had lost their ownership.  They had completed  a YES programme and wanted to go from that skimpy level 8 to a 7.  I sent an email to someone whose name was on the DTIC’s website.  And I was given the name of a militant Millicent who would hear our case.   It was obvious that she had little time for two white people pleading their case.  She found fault with the fact that there had been a two year gap between certificates.  I informed her (and I know this as a fact) that there is no requirement to renew ever.  “Oh yes there is!” thundered Millie.  “The Verification manual requires it was well.”   Pity Millie didn’t know that the manual is only applicable to VAs.

She then went onto to insist on evidence that the verification agency would have taken into account.  Why would you do this?  It  sounds like a personal agenda.  And you know you are powerless because she’s clueless and militant.  Where’s the reward for doing YES?  It doesn't exist.

It all talks back to the government.  They are not to be trusted.  This article came out a few weeks ago and I wholly agree with it.  The author concludes with

The biggest hurdle, in my view, to making the undermining of BEE more common is not the risk of legal jeopardy, but the sentiment harboured by too many South Africans that they owe the South African government a duty of obedience in conscience. Once this hurdle has been scaled – and it is becoming easier to scale as government’s incompetence and incapacity gets more pronounced by the day – BEE will all but collapse under the weight of noncompliance.

We aren’t there yet but it’s coming.  As this awful government starts losing power so will the revolt gain momentum.  If we become a coalition government then it’ll move quicker.  There’ll be so much infighting that governance is bound to suffer.

Ownershield is geared for this change.  It’ll be cost effective and non-invasive.  Like the things we’ve been offering over the last few years, we have expanded beyond ownership and intraternships.  Budgets are tight and BEE was only invented for the good times. Perhaps that’s the point.  We’ve been taken for complete and utter fools for 30 years.   If you want compliance that talks to your internal requirements then we can help you.  If you want to spend a lot of money then we’ll have to turn you down.

And why do you want to spend huge amounts of money on this ludicrous programme.