Cape Town - While there should be more focus on entrepreneurship and business competitiveness in South Africa, billionaire businessman Patrice Motsepe said he still ultimately supported black economic empowerment (BEE).
Speaking to a packed media briefing session at the World Economic Forum on Africa on Thursday he said South Africa needed regulatory certainty when it came to the new BEE rules.
“At the heart of BEE was the need to get blacks to be stakeholders in economy,” he said. “Broad based BEE is important because we have to bring in new people so you don’t have the same faces.”
He said “we have no future in South Africa if we don’t create opportunities for as many people as possible, otherwise there will be social and political instability".
“When colonialism ended [across Africa], there was a new black elite in governments,” he said. “They were exclusive beneficiaries.
“The majority of the population either went backways or did not participate,” he said. “That is a recipe for long-term for political and social instability.
“We need meaningful black participation in economy,” he said. “We need a middle class who have a stake in this economy.”
Motsepe said his grandfather and father were entrepreneurs long before BEE came around. “What we knew was that our colour was irrelevant,” he said. “Our transactions happened before BEE.”