After 15 years of democracy in South Africa, black economic empowerment remains elusive for the majority of black South Africans, professional services firm KPMG restructuring advisory MD Sandile Hlophe said last week, following the release of KPMG’s latest national black economic-empowerment (BEE) survey.

The survey’s findings were released last month under the title ‘Are We There Yet?’, along with a proposed drastic rationalisation of broad-based BEE (BBBEE) to accelerate its intended impact.

Speaking in Johannesburg last week, at a BEE conference aimed at discussing the results of the survey and the way forward, Hlophe said that, despite the disappointing figures, the survey found that the current economic downturn had had no discernible impact on the implementation of BBBEE. The survey found that businesses actually appeared to insist on greater compliance in some aspects, rather than deviate from their empowerment plans.

“Businesses have realised that a dual system of running their operations (normal business processes on the one hand, BEE processes on the other) is not viable, and have rationalised around BBBEE to optimise costs. This is espe- cially true for procurement,” Hlophe said.

The key recommendation emerging from the survey is that the current seven traditional elements of the BEE scorecard should be narrowed down to only four critical elements, namely ownership, management control, employment equity and preferential procurement.

“Because the findings show that companies have consistently met their targets for the socioeconomic development element and because enterprise development and skills development have had little impact, there is a need for companies to refocus their energies on the other four critical elements,” Hlophe said.

The survey showed that, over the past year, only ‘limited progress’ had been made in respect of ownership, while ‘poor progress’ was made in respect of the management control element. ‘Great progress’ was noted for the socioeconomic development element, while the other elements only made ‘progress’.

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