Support Black Business

 

We need to support black business. Point blank, and said with no reservations. That is the only way in which the black people of our country will ever develop into a higher level of living. Let black owned businesses hire preferentially black people. Let those businesses do business with other black businesses at a high preferential level. We need to be very aggressive in our approach if we are to be any effective in addressing the problem of unemployment and general slave-mentality, in both the political and most importantly the economic arena, which is proving time and time again to be the dominating consensus among my fellow black bothers and sisters.

 

Why are we still so far behind in economic, academic and social stature in this country as the majority race in South Africa?  We’ve confirmed and furthermore propagated the spread of this type of mentality among ourselves and that has been the single most important reason detailing why we are where we are as a people in the present time.

 

Our youth need skills, mentorship, experience opportunities, and a more diverse outlook on the state of the country in terms of sociological make-up, and more importantly, the economic dynamics governing our country and ultimately the entire world. We need skills in order to infuse them with initiative in order to play our role in the mobilisation of resources towards the development of our people, thus ultimately redressing past imbalances through consistent and directed effort, instead of ‘toyi-toying’, criminal alternatives, or giving in to under-handed elements that are destined to ultimately destroy us.

 

We need specific and detailed blueprints that will be the guiding documents in our process of progressive, yet aggressive change. Aggressive, because we believe that the time has come for us to be time-conscious in our endeavours and not to allow ‘open-clauses’ and ‘flexible deadlines’ to be the pillars upon which our projects are based on.. We need concrete steps of action to follow, not general rhetoric or propaganda that will diminish our leverage in the whole economy. We need leverage in order to be able to share in the decision making power and processes that govern us in our country as a people, disregarding of racial boundaries. We need to acquire decision making power in order to be able to structure things in a manner that can benefit us as a collective whole.

 

I believe in collective bargaining, and in that token I am a staunch supporter of co-operative business set-ups. I believe also in the powerful ideas of collective investments with the clear aims of fostering leverage in our favour in order to re-build black economy. I refer herein to the ‘re-building’ of the black economy in South Africa, following the fact that my opinion is based on research with special regards to black business prior to the 1976 uprising, unequivocally claiming the title of being the climax of the Apartheid era. During those times, it was very interesting to note, how much the patriot act among black consumers was having an extremely positive effect on the growth and resilience of the black economy at that time i.e. spaza shops, wholesale markets, local clothing manufacturers etc. In Real terms, I would estimate that the general standard of living of our black South Africans was slightly lower now as compared to what it was then, if we are to use the criteria of the rate of unemployment of our people. Note however, that I do acknowledge the fact that the bulk of our population were employed by big white-owned industrial cartels, as well as the mining industry, thus allowing argument to be posed as to the extent to which our black brothers and sisters were actually economically active in such a capacity as to influence major decision-making in the country due to using their economic leverage. However, my point is simply that the situation hasn’t changed much in favour of us as a people in the present day, but to the contrary the situation is actually worsening proven by our rate of unemployed among the economically active population of our people, despite the fact that we have probably a 110% advantage over our previous generation which died under political oppression.

 

I might seem to be provocative or cynical at my point of reference but I believe that I should rather be called inquisitive and cautious of common ideologies and political rhetoric. I often find it a striking question to me, that shouldn’t the acquiring of economical freedom, by a previously subservient and oppressed people, automatically mean the rebirth of an economy, at least to the extent of including the bulk of the section of the population that has been previously unjustly sanctioned, and thus had always managed minimal participation in the sections of the economy where it really mattered. I’m quite disturbed at the slow rate at which black economy has progressed since our 1994 rebirth. I will always look at the economy as a dual economy, one of the ‘haves’ and the other of the ‘have-nots’. What I find disturbing about the whole scenario is the fact that every time I assess who is always dominating in the ‘Have-nots’ section of the economy, I am not surprised anymore to find a black brother or sister. I am not intending to whine or complain about this situation, but I feel we need to be upfront and unashamed to call things by their rightful names if you are to address anything which you feel needs correction or adjustment. Following that, I conclude that the average black person in South Africa, despite all that raw talent, inspiration, and latent potential fully packed inside them just waiting to explode, remains at the bottom of the food chain. Given we are experiencing as a steady rise in the number of black graduates in various professions and disciplines, but how many of those graduates ever really use their knowledge to build leverage by using their experience to establish enterprises that can develop your own. I believe it would also be powerful for them to use their experience to mentor skills back into their society through using various initiatives to achieve those aims. According to my research, more than 98% of the sections in Soweto have NGO’s or civic organisations focused on capacitating youth in those particular areas, as well developing entrepreneurship as a viable solution to unemployment and the fact that the black race in South Africa remains with 10% of the wealth but could easily represent 80% of the total population of the country.

 

So we need to support black industry, and that is my battle cry. However I believe everyone would agree that the natural question to ask next would be: Is there a black industry, competitive enough not to make us to loose our natural comforts that we’ve gotten so used to, to support? And my research convinces me of the negative. But that does not go to mean that black people are not capable of such action, however physical reality at the present suggests that the black business community needs to do better that what they done thus far.

 

So in my opinion the solution to this issue is two-fold and quite simple yet must be systematic:

 

·        First of all I believe that we need address our own stereotypes and prejudices that we has as South African consumers towards doing business with purely South African businesses, and with regards to highly specialized sectors such as finance, high-end ICT etc, that are quite sceptical of wholly black owned entities, and in reality engage in moderate business with them just to meet superficial ‘BEE Scorecards’. I refuse to accept the lie that we’ve forced to believe for so long, that black people remain and are destined to produce substandard products and are in themselves of substandard calibre in terms of education and experience and thus collectively substandard as a person. Don’t get me wrong, I am not belittled by the comments of another race about the supposed incapability and shortcomings of my indigenous people. But what totally kills me is when I witness my fellow black brothers and sisters actually propagating such derogatory hogwash without seemingly the slightest idea as to the damage that their instituting on any further growth prospects that we as black people could possibly have. I could easily compare such action as ‘cutting off the lifeline’ of the black race. It totally escapes me how people who are supposedly so ‘knowledgeable’ find it hard to realise that miracles happen because people believe that they will happen. So as long as we help our opposition in diminishing the last remnants of what ever self-esteem; which we need profusely to develop as a people by the way; we have left, the dirty picture of squalor, poverty, crime etc; the many ‘beautiful’ spin-offs of a hungry people; will not change anytime in the present future. We need to understand that black business has every ounce of potential to reach service and quality levels of all the present conglomerates that are holding us at ransom at the moment.  Or have we become so selfish as a race? Have we begun to subscribe to the ideologies of ‘God for us all, man for himself?’ Granted, I believe in that mantra as far as it goes in emphasising the use of initiative for the acquisition of anything. But further on , I believe that we were all brought on to this earth to exist and live together. That constitutes sharing, motivating of one another, in order to acquire a better collective standard of life. One cannot do it alone. White people ‘cling’ together, Indian people ‘cling’ together, and so do the other myriad number races that co-exist with us in South Africa but remain probably more dominative in many spheres of our lives as a black majority. So if we can change the way we think about black business, meaning we start to believe in black business, then we will be more prone to support black business in terms of investments, as well as supporting the existence, development and growth of black industry.

·        Secondly we need to capacitate the black industry in order to be able to produce sufficient quantities of what is required at the necessary service and quality levels. This will thus require great investments in terms of skills, and monetary investments that will ultimately culminate in mobilisation of economic power. This is where leverage comes to play in the whole scenario. If we have more investments of skills and money, we can build more businesses, and more successful businesses at that (Note my emphasis on skills transfer), and these business generate more money as black people start supporting them even more. This means that these businesses can then hire more black people to work in a number of industries and also start their own business, which will be largely supported by black people, and we start building or leveraging enough capacity in order to gain a certain degree of self-sufficiency. That in itself, means we are in a higher standard of living. We’ll have more jobs for our people, and we’ll be able to feed more of our starving many and be able to groom them to the stage where they can be self-sufficient within an industry that we know will embrace them and furthermore help them flourish. If India can establish their own movie industry i.e. Bollywood, which at the moment is raking in the billions of dollars, what is stopping us. The interesting thing to note is that Bollywood succeeded solely because their people believed in the idea and themselves and make it a point to make it happen. Today everyone wants a small piece of Bollywood. I use this example to show that I am not restricted to one particular industry, e.g. ICT, finance, thus limiting the sectors wherein we can make an impact. I believe we can establish any type of business that any other group can produce and furthermore replicate and even surpass their service levels and quality levels. We just need to try. We need to believe in ourselves in enough to take such risks and in that way cease the opportunity. The black population just needs to start producing and producing things that matter. We need to confirm that indeed people can solely depend on black industry without being forced into a situation of drawing comparisons between the present and the supposed ‘better past’.       

 

 

 

From this pretext comes the idea of focused skills development initiatives with a purpose. We need initiatives that will not only instigate temporary superficial change, but will actually drive the change that needs to take place. We need consented effort that will help us in addressing the internal imbalances that exist within our communities in terms education, basic standards of living, and development of the people in a holistic manner.

 

D2D Initiative is proposing to play a hand in addressing those imbalances through the “My Name is Change!” project. The project is about the following:

 

·        Acknowledgement of where we are as a people and the stressing of the fact that we need not stay where we are if we want different.

·        We need people to acknowledge the following statement: “No Effort, No Change… No Change, No Progress… No Progress, No Life!” – (TPM: 2006, EC Training). We need people to embrace change, and to understand that without change, we can’t achieve anything that we do not have already. If you want to have what you’ve always had, doesn’t it make sense that you just need to continue to do what you have always done? But if you want different, then doesn’t it also go that you need to do something different? And that my friends, is change.

·        Introducing youth participants to sporting and team-building activities that they have not been exposed to in the past. We plan to include extreme sports and a variety of other activities that many black youth in the township do not get the opportunity to experience. Through these amazing experiences that they will be exposed to, we plan to include an educative element.

·        Apart from being exposed to new and exciting activities, they will also be exposed to exciting and very powerful skills. These skills will include among the following:

o       Purely academic learning channels i.e. skills courses and other formal learning methods that will ultimately culminate in the participant gaining some form of recognized, formal certification for a particular field of endeavour. These skills will empower the participants to be able to access exit opportunities (job opportunities or entrepreneurial) that they otherwise wouldn’t have acquired had they not participated. Skills are a prerequisite to achieve positive change of any environment. People need to know how things work and how things are done. Without that, the chances for achieving monumental and lasting change are at best minimal.

o       Learning from what we choose to call the D2D Initiative ‘Survival Camp’, where the participants will be receiving less ‘formal’, and structured learning, to foster the integration of more social issues and aiding in the process of finding our own solutions to the problems that face us. This in itself means that we need to do something to help in fighting the problem, of whose existence we helped discover. This is probably the most interesting part of the process, as the participants are given a mandate to use their initiative in order to foster physical change in some form of problem that they witnessed in their environment. I don’t believe that there is anyone alive today, who has never complained about something in their environment. But what I find interesting is that 99.99% of the time, we don’t do anything about it, because we somehow feel that it is not our place to act, yet we are quick to put ourselves in a position to criticize. Thus the ‘Survival Camp’ will be about instilling that resilience and confidence within the participants to such an extent to which they realise the immensity of the potential that they possess within their being to inspire change; no matter how small it might seem at the time. It is about the participants growing as individuals through greater self-knowledge through promoting the use of conversation and interaction as a remedy to many frustrations in life. We believe that the participants can ultimately influence physical and relevant change towards what they feel needs to change.         

·        At the end of the day, the programme is about teaching our black youth that they need not always complain, about them being negatively influenced by their environment and that is why they won’t amount to much; but instead acknowledge the fact that they can do something about it.

·        If ever the participants had to leave with any one thing from the programme it would be this: “Forget what you’ve been told before, there are no limits!!!” The programme is about waking up that sleeping giant within the bulk of our black youth who seem to have given up, or at most aiming too low to achieve any real impact in life. I believe in people living their passions, and challenging themselves to reach levels of achievement that they never knew existed. Thus a D2D Survivor is a soldier who is fully equipped with the relevant weapons at hand to face anything that life is yet to throw at him. The D2D Survivor is a mentor to both himself and others, and strives to always be better today, as compared to where he was yesterday; but more importantly to be better tomorrow as compared to where he is today. D2D Survivors make strides and has positive influences in community where it really matters. D2D Survivors are obsessed with leaving beautiful legacies behind them, and share their worth with everyone as much and far as they can. The D2D Survivor in my books is a winner!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thando Makhathini

D2D Initiative: Chairperson

©June 2008