Business has no choice but to comply with black economic empowerment (BEE) legislation and fall into line with developing a charter, said Dali Mpofu, chairman of the ICT Empowerment Charter Working Group.
Mpofu was speaking at the Cape Town leg of the national roadshow to introduce the first draft of the BEE ICT charter to local constituencies. The first roadshow presentation was held in East London earlier this week.
"Mark my words - in five years` time it will be almost impossible to do any business in this country, never mind with government, without having a significant black empowerment component," he said.
Mpofu said the broad-based black empowerment legislation introduced by government would eventually apply to all companies that supply goods and services to those that supply to government.
US companies criticised
Mpofu criticised foreign organisations that were resistant to the idea of giving equity in their local operations.
"It has been mainly US companies that say they do not give equity in their South African operations because these are divisions rather than subsidiaries. However, this is important to us and if necessary, we will invite ourselves to go to the US and speak with their principals about it," he says.
Some South African companies say they will be unfairly prejudiced if they are forced to comply with BEE requirements and their foreign-owned competitors are not.
In spite of the local criticism, US companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and CSC feature prominently in the higher paying donation categories of the ICT empowerment charter sponsor list.
Scorecard presented
Mark my words - in five years` time it will be almost impossible to do any business in this country, never mind with government, without having a significant black empowerment component.
Dali Mpofu, chairman, ICT Empowerment Charter Working Group
The audience was presented with the ICT empowerment scorecard, which is designed to measure companies` direct and indirect empowerment initiatives. It measures the score based on Department of Trade and Industry weightings, an ICT split weighting, and then mid-term and long-term targets.
Among other issues the ICT BEE charter hopes to address is that of funding for small black-owned IT businesses. This includes providing them with preferential payment cycles. "Funding is probably the most important of the issues," Mpofu said.
Comments from the audience included the need for greater skills awareness in the charter and for women to feature more prominently throughout.
A living document
Mpofu described the charter as a "living document" as it would be up for review every year by the BEE ICT Council, to ensure targets remain realistic and are adapted to the ever-changing ICT environment.
He said the ICT charter had learnt from the experiences of the mining and financial services sectors and that it had become an industry initiative rather than one driven by government.
"Some of the lessons we have learnt is that we should not tie ourselves down to a specific timetable or to specific objectives just yet," Mpofu said.
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