Last night I went to my first UCT (University of Cape Town) Alumni event called the Alumni Leader Forum, the guest speaker naturally was an Alumni: Ciko Thomas and the topic was "BEE and it's (Entrepreneurship) Discontents"
I went with AC who was also the person that told me about it since apparently until then I wasn't important enough to be told about these types of events. The talk took place at the Hyatt Regency, Rosebank in the Ilanga Room starting at 18:00 and was pretty awesome. AC and I got there really early because we thought that we were going to be in traffic for a while but was pleasantly surprised at the smooth sailing that took us there in less than half the expected time.
We were greeted with offers of drinks and snacks and were introduced to Rene and Jasmine who flew up to Johannesburg for this event. We had a short chat with them concerning the event and other about the forum overall. People started to gather and so we were ushered into the room for the presentation by Mr Thomas interesting surname for a evidently black guy. (For those those who aren't familiar with South African, we define every citizen as Africans and therefore calling someone black is completely PC. Also if he hand any mixed Ancestry we would refer to him as coloured rather than black, hence why the thought.)
The presentation was more than a little disappointing, he raised one or two very good points but overall the failed to surprise me with either facts or opinions. He might be energetic in his presentation but most of that energy seem to be wasted on trying to nail home points that's generally accepted to the group present. For example, he states that current BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) programs have failed in more cases than it succeeded, that maybe we need to shift the paradigm from the idea of redistributing "White" assets to the idea of creating new assets and sharing them in the economic growth through entrepreneurial activities and in order to do so we need to install a new sense of entrepreneurial spirit into the country but failed to present any tangible ways to do so - he left that as a challenge to the listeners to provide it. His central point was that we need to find other ways to nurture entrepreneurial spirit since despite the current governments efforts it has failed. He calls on better education of our students - but fails to mention that we already dedicate a higher percentage of our public spending on education than almost all developed countries. He made a good case, but I was disappointed because he didn't even try to provide a solution for any of these issues, rather to try and motivate us to stand up and make a difference.
At the end of the day he was preaching to the choir and unfortunately lacked that certain spark to inspire me into a true believer - he was just too mild and lukewarm in too much of his presentation. One can't help but wonder if he was trying very hard not to criticize the current BEE implementation too severely since he himself has directly benefited from it. Also by then he has sold his business and is currently working for Nedbank (one of the big 4 banks in SA) doesn't do his gospel of entrepreneurial spirit a lot of good - though one wouldn't go as far as to call him a hypocrite.
At the end of the day, a thoroughly good evening out. Great food at the end and despite what seems to be non-stop criticisms above, I really liked the presentation and the event on a whole. Naturally, good company helped as well.
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