Mpumezo Ralo completely misunderstands SA’s economic situation (“Why abandoning BEE policy entirely is not a viable option for SA”, The Herald, January 29). This means he is defending a policy that is incapable of fulfilling the aims of those who have piled discriminatory law upon discriminatory law with the aim and intention of eliminating discrimination in the economy. BEE has not, as he maintains, been a “catalyst for growth”, and its determination to “end the dominance of the efficient white population” has been a national disaster.
It has been no more successful than the Soviet Union’s land reforms, which created communal farms (which never achieved the production foreseen for them) and harried the remaining peasant proprietors, the so-calledkulaks, by making examples of them as being greedy and executing them with great vigour and bloodshed. Bad business decisions, insisted on by the newly empowered, have sunk at least one airline and any number of lesser enterprises. Refining the BEE system has not improved it, but simply ensured that it has become more restrictive and a hindrance to enterprise.
Ralo refers in passing to the overwhelming white ownership of productive farmland. Farms have been handed to black owners, who have been promised assistance in establishing themselves as commercial farmers, but the help (especially financial) has not been forthcoming. And lack of interest on the part of many black farmers has led to the collapse of many thriving enterprises, notably the Zebediela citrus estate and the tea-producing farms of Transkei.
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(Note: while the Transkei Republic is no more, the region it covered is still the land across the Kei.) Beyond that aspect, there is still the vast area of land controlled by tribal leaders and trusts. Private ownership is needed to turn those regions into productive farms.
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