Is there anything one can say about BEE that hasn’t already been said? Sunday Times deputy editor Mike Siluma seems to think so when he writes: “We should not shy away from rethinking BEE”, and I agree.
The last campaign I ran at the IRR was to scrap BEE at Eskom, particularly in procurement, in order to combat load-shedding. A new working paper from Harvard’s ‘Growth Lab’ has come to the same conclusion: if you want to put the lights back on, cut BEE out of SOE purchases.
Non-governmental organisations warned parliament’s standing committee on finance that the Public Procurement Bill in its current form did not have adequate measures to prevent the scale of tender corruption seen during the years of state capture.
Bianca van Wyk and Thembalethu Seyisi (Understanding DA s exploitation and resistance to AA and BEE: What is the truth?) make a good point in observing that the Democratic Alliance (DA) has not been accurate in its campaign against the implementation of the amended Employment Equity Act (EEA).