Cosatu: Strengthen BBBEE, don't roll back transformation

THE successes and challenges of BroadBased Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) have been the subject of much debate recently in Parliament and across society, including the Minister for Trade, Industry and Competition, Parks Tau, indicating a two staged review of the current BBBEE model.

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That's natural. South Africa is a constitutional democracy, something that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and generations of workers fought and died for.

We expect Parliament to interrogate government policies and legislation, to hold the state accountable for their implementation, and where there are challenges, to find solutions. Cosatu as a Federation anchored amongst workers, will always welcome debate but these must lead to solutions that take the working class forward not backwards.

It is important to remember that South Africa's 1994 democratic breakthrough did not arrive with a clean slate. We inherited 350 years of the world's most brutal forms of colonial and apartheid dispossession, disempowerment and discrimination leaving South Africa the world's most unequal society.

Despite tangible progress since 1994 under government led by the African National Congress, we remain a nation where the colour of one's skin largely determines your economic fate. Similarly, one's gender or disability too play an important determining factor.

No sober government could afford to ignore such ticking-time bombs. No sane society would tolerate a state that did not seek to tackle such structural discrimination. The principles and objectives of BBBEE remain valid and they will continue to be as long as we have such stark levels of inequality, poverty and where access to the economy is not linked to one's entrepreneurial talent, but rather race, gender or disability.

It does not help when politicians and noise hustlers demonise BBBEE as the enrichment of a few. This desperation for social media links dangerously polarises a necessary debate. The objectives of BBBEE and the empowerment of the poor and the working class are sacrosanct and cannot be abandoned in pursuit of votes at the ballot box.