BEE proceeds 'cripple ANC'

The SA Communist party has blamed the factional battles rocking the ANC on the narrowness of "broad-based" black economic empowerment. On its online periodical Umsebenzi, the SACP said BEE had returned to bite the ruling party, with factions fighting for total dominance. It said the ANC's "Leadership Renewal" document, to be discussed at the ANC's national general council meeting in KwaZulu-Natal next week, fails to make a connection between factional battles in the ANC and BEE.

The SACP said BEE proceeds were being used to fund factional battles and buy votes in the ruling party. "We are now living with the consequences. Some R500-billion from pension funds, from state coffers, and from the private sector has been diverted into floating private BEE equity deals. "Worse still, this is the money that is now returning back into our organisations in order to buy votes, to fund factional activities, to print T-shirts with the faces of junior leaders."

The communists said that, though they supported the empowerment of the black majority, narrow BEE funding should be discussed at the ANC's general council meeting. "... we need now to ask the obvious question - is narrow BEE, particularly BEE codes that require percentage targets for capitalist ownership, not at the heart of exposing our movement to the material conditions that are having such a negative impact on our movement?"

ANC president Jacob Zuma came under pressure recently to explain the involvement of his family and close associates in BEE deals. Last week, his son, Duduzane, took the extraordinary step of explaining his involvement in an ArcelorMittal SA deal worth more than R9-billion after Cosatu questioned the transaction.

The SACP and Cosatu have also been vocal in condemning the attempts of tenderpreneurs to take over the ANC. The use of money in ANC's elections is expected to come under discussion at the meeting of the national general council because party leaders want to discourage what they term "alien tendencies".

In its "leadership renewal" document, the ANC said that the use of money in lobbying for positions in the party was destroying it. It said that, since the last ANC's national conference in Polokwane in 2007, "alien tendencies" had become "embedded and in fact worsened, especially as part of the lobbying process".

The SACP said that, though the emergence of the black middle class - which is the main benefactor of BEE - was an inevitable outcome of democratisation and deracialisation, it had never been "a strategic objective of the national democratic revolution" - it was "smuggled" onto the ANC agenda in 1996.

Source: Times Live