JAUNDICED EYE
Can it be that the only CEO of a major South African corporate with balls is a woman? Well, duh! Why the surprise?
The business landscape is still dominated, as the #WhiteMonopolyCapital sloganeers never tire of pointing out, by white men. With a handful of exceptions, the companies they head were cowards during the apartheid years and, more worrying, is that most of their successors have done little since to rectify matters.
Every now and then a head pops above parapet, only to be shot off. Andrew Canter, of money management company Futuregrowth, last year ended lending to six state-owned companies because of “oversight and governance concerns”. Parent company Old Mutual was quick to force him to back down.
Unfortunately, the black men – and they mostly are men – who since have joined the corporate luxury liner, Top Knobs SA, are largely cut of the same cloth. There are few of the calibre of Bonang Mohale of Shell and Business Leadership SA, or Sipho Pityana of Izingwe Capital and the Save SA campaign, or Jabu Mabuza of Telkom and Business Unity SA.
And this is how the old boy networks have always worked: be a team player; don’t rock the boat; we’ll look after you, my boy. Whatever their colour, by instinct, most of these men incline towards genuflection and supplication. They share the appeasement gene, a socially debilitating condition first isolated scientifically in Germany in the 1930s.