President Cyril Ramaphosa will this week announce the appointment of the new Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) Advisory Council, which will help the country to expand the frontiers of BBBEE.

The council, comprising government, business, labour and other stakeholders, was established to champion the cause of economic transformation.

“While there has been significant progress over the last two decades, there are some areas where there has been regression. We have gone backwards when it comes to increasing black management control, upscaling skills development, entrenching enterprise development and broadening procurement to give opportunities to black women and the youth,” he said.

He explained that the country’s commitment to entrench and deepen economic empowerment was unwavering, adding that this was the reason why black economic empowerment was an integral part of the country’s economic reconstruction and recovery in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ramaphosa said BBBEE would only be achieved through partnership and a shared commitment to transformation, calling on business, labour and industry to work with the council as it undertook this vital work.

He said there had been important private sector initiatives and deliberate measures by the State to facilitate greater and more meaningful participation of black people in the economy.

“Between 2017 and 2020, nearly 500 empowerment transactions were submitted for registration to the BBBEE Commission. In key sectors such as construction, property, information and communications technology, tourism and transport, black ownership has exceeded targets,” he explained.

He said that through sectoral masterplans government was driving localisation that benefited black-owned businesses.

“For example, 10 black contract growers have been established with an investment of R336-million as part of the poultry masterplan. Government has also launched a black exporters network that will connect black-owned companies in food, engineering products, auto components, beauty products and other sectors of the economy,” he added.

Last year government approved R2.5-billion in new support to about 180 black industrialists in the form of loans from the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and National Empowerment Fund (NEF) and grants from the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition incentive scheme.

Over the next three years a further R21-billion has been committed by the IDC, NEF and other institutions to support black industrialists. An additional R25-billion has been committed to support black-, women-, youth- and worker-owned companies.

Ramaphosa said it was clear that much more work needed to be done to address the many challenges that black businesses faced. This included the difficulty of accessing start-up and expansion capital and the ability of small, medium-sized and microenterprises to find markets for their products.

Black women-owned businesses, in particular, encounter difficulties in taking on large-scale empowerment transactions.