True empowerment is what exactly? (Jan 2010)

 Here's the crux of the matter.  BEE is only for the good times.  If you vendor finance your transaction and your "partner" is incapable of paying off the debt, YOU SUFFER.

 If you don't make your car payments, the bank takes your car away.  If you default on your mortgage (you see I have recently become a British and so I am modifying my language to assimilate) then they take your house.  If you don't pay your rent then you are kicked out (in theory).

But not with BEE transactions.  Nope - these only have an upside.  We were really taken for fools at the time.  Thank god that's not so much the case anymore.

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  And I quote

Chief operating officer of empowerment rating agency AQRate KZN Brigitte Brun said yesterday that the recession had a “helluva impact” on BEE deals. A lot of them that have been finalised have resulted in little real empowerment as black investors have been left with a huge debt burden. She said this year “either deals will be structured differently or there will be fewer deals”.

Forgive me Brigitte, I am quoting something that is attributed to you and I haven't checked whether you did say it.

Since when does a huge debt burden not create real empowerment.  Do you mean that if they paid cash for the shares or got them for free they'd be fully empowered?  This is the way I understand this quote.

This is rubbish - the operative word here is INVESTOR.  And INVESTOR put money into something with an eye on a return on this investment.  At worst they could lose all their money - such is the nature of economics and capitalism.  Why do so many people assume that if black investors accept a risk then they are not truly empowered?  Is it because the codes award the full number of realisation points if the 25%+ is paid off?  Even this is completely flawed.

We have to move from this mindset.  If a person is a shareholder (just like it is in the real world) then they mustbe regarded as empowered - they are shareholders which is one better position in the empowerment scale!

Drop this notion and let's see if we generate some real wealth across the board.  Real wealth will only come from a balancing of risk and reward - there's been a little too much reward going around.