Race and business

Race doesn’t end at sports, of course.  Getting blacks onto the field is one thing, but the real objective is to give them an economic leg up and power/ownership in society.

To that end, SA also has an explicit affirmative action policy called BEE (Black Economic Empowerment).  It has evolved somewhat into BBBEE (Broad-Based…).  This means that the government, when choosing any private company to deal with, looks at the BEE score when choosing a vendor.  Obviously, then, businesses want to have good BEE scores, particularly since according to the CIA Factbook the government expenditures are approximately 30% of GDP.  (Seems high to me, but I didn’t dig further.)

I don’t fully understand how it works yet, but you basically go through a survey about your company.  You get points for black ownership, points for blacks at different levels, etc.  (It was described to me as having different point values for blacks, coloreds, Indians, other Asians, and whites.)  You have to hit some point target to be “BBBEE certified” is my understanding.

There are so many BEE consultants that they have their own association:

http://www.nabc.org.za/

Two sites with overviews of BEE – I couldn’t find any actual BEE score forms with a quick search (which also means I could be wrong about some of this).

http://www.ghostdigest.co.za/code/A_919.html

http://www.beeconsultants.co.za/empowerment.html