Points will be deducted from companies that do not invest in skills and supplier development in terms of the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Act, says Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.
Government is in the process of amending empowerment legislation, with the department seeking to tweak both the BEE Act and codes for empowerment.
"Far too much empowerment has offered people passive shares in established companies. Far too little has been on real ownership by black companies and development of suppliers," he noted.
Davies was speaking at the opening of the two-day Black Suppliers Development Summit hosted by the Aveng group in partnership with the dti.
The minister noted that some of the most successful business models around the world were those that involved relationships between big and small business.
"What we are trying to do is concentrate more resources around programmes where there's real training [to small business]," said Davies, while urging big business to be involved in the development and training of small business.
The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Amendment Bill aims to align the B-BBEE Act with other legislation impacting on black economic empowerment. It was gazetted in December 2011.
"The evaluation we've been doing of empowerment, the evaluation of small enterprise development programmes in South Africa is telling us that we need to concentrate our resources on delivering real entrepreneurial capacity and addressing a lack of black industrialists," he said on Tuesday.
Source - SAnews.gov.za
