The words that we South Africans commonly use convolute our own discourse. As if it weren’t already sufficiently complex, different meanings are intended and interpreted by different users depending on circumstance and audience. Clarity is reduced to confusion, contention to cliché. Such is the consequence of propagandistic heat, perverting a dialogue supposedly intended to promote consensus.
Even so basic a term as transformation can have good or bad connotations. Make your choice, from where you sit, between SA being “transformed” from an apartheid to a non-racial society or to one where demographic representation is an institutionalised objective. The former contradicts the latter.
Allied to it is black economic empowerment itself. For illustration, focus on the ownership aspects as they apply under the all-important scorecards of the mining and financial sectors.
In dispute is whether a company, having concluded a BEE transaction that elevates its points to a required level, will retain this level once the BEE beneficiaries sell their shares. To discriminate or not to discriminate between shareholders?
To restrict them from selling is to restrict them from realising their capital. To allow unrestricted sales, should the “once empowered, always empowered” principle not apply, would be to force one BEE transaction after another.
With each transaction will necessarily come further dilution of existing shareholders, substantially including foreign investors and local pension funds; no matter that SA is perpetually in pursuit of foreign investment as well as better retirement outcomes for members of pension funds. No matter, either, that many millions in the latter category are black.