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The Black Business Council (BBC) is going to hold a summit that is set to give major political parties an opportunity to win over its vote ahead of the national elections on May 8.
Speaking to City Press at his business premises in Bryanston this week, Sandile Zungu, president of the BBC, said the two-day summit, which will be held from February 28 to March 1, is set to tackle a number of pertinent issues including Eskom’s load-shedding, land reform, the fourth industrial revolution as well as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).
It will also give political parties a chance to pitch their stance on matters affecting black business.
“We will invite the main political parties to come tell us what their posture on BEE is. The reason we are doing this is not because we are taking sides, but we just want to put it out there that we are watching them. Depending on their posture on BEE we will guide our members and we will be quite vocal in guiding them,” Zungu said.
Asked if the move would not be encroaching onto the political terrain, Zungu said: “We are not doing that. We just want to influence all political parties because what we have found is that whenever there is a bill that affects BEE, whether it is the competition commission amendment [or something else], when we go there we want to lobby all the political parties who are in the committee to understand where we are coming from and why we need the bill to be twisted in a certain way in order to benefit black business players.”
Zungu said the event would have black captains of industry, who will also take part in different commissions on various topics.
He said the summit, which will also be addressed by President Cyril Ramaphosa, would tackle government’s plans to unbundle Eskom and look at whether there were any black businesses that would have the capacity to buy, should the components of the power utility be eventually sold.
“Is black business ready to buy those assets if, for instance, they are unbundled and sold? If, for example, there is a consensus that there has to be private sector investments in the power stations, the question that arises immediately is who the ready buyers among black businesses are. We know banks will buy because they have strong balance sheets but banks are proxies for established white business interests.”
“If those assets end up on the balance sheets of whites, you will never catch them because they will have a cash-cow for the future,” he said.
The summit discussions, Zungu said, would be consolidated as resolutions and will form the organisation’s official positions on the various matters.
The organisation also recently signed a memorandum of agreement with a university that will see the establishment of a research centre, which the BBC will be able to tap into for its economic research needs.
“The research centre will be based in an institution of higher learning and we will be able to tap into people who are doing doctoral studies to do the work for us which qualify for their thesis,” he said adding that the centre would be launched later this year.
Zungu said the move was to, among other things, dispel misplaced notions that the BBC tended to make pronouncements lacking facts.
He admitted that the upcoming summit was fully backed by a healthy corporate sponsorship but the BBC’s own finances are not yet healthy.
The organisation was recently paid an embarrassing visit by the sheriff with a court order in hand to attach its furniture and had to find itself a new address to operate from because it failed to pay its mounting rental bill.
It is now based at one of the Black Management Forum’s properties in Sandton.
“BBC is not in a healthy financial state yet,” he said adding that work was still underway to get it out of the red.
