DON MAKATILE | Small businesses shortchanged by tender system

I’m a sucker for war cries and quotable quotes. Like good lyrics, especially when matched by equally uplifting instrumentals, a good song grabs me with the same allure.

“Small business is big business” was the mantra of the late Afrikaaner business mogul whose revised biography, Anton Rupert, The Life of a Business Icon, by Ebbe Dommisse, is my current read.

I’m at the point in the time where his brainchild, the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC), opens doors for trade. Two white men with money took to the helm of the financial services providing entity at the time – Harry Oppenheimer as chairman and Rupert as his deputy.

Alongside them were the best of black business at the time, Dr Sam Motsuenyane and Habakuk Shikwane. Rupert is on record as having said: “To create jobs one must think small.”

He was saying this with his eyes on the ball many years ago, faced with the insurmountable task of “improving the living conditions of urban black [people] and creating jobs through small business” during apartheid.

The way to go was SBDC, which came to life on March 3 1979 with a nominal capital of R1m. Its multiracial board of directors was an anomaly of the time, a thorn on the side of the government.

The SBDC had Soweto, for example, in its sights – but the government had prohibited all industry there. The National Party had plans to invest every cent they intended to disburse only in the black homelands. In the townships, the yargued, black people were temporary sojourners.

Rupert saw it differently. Housing, jobs, health, etc had to be upgraded in the townships, where urban black people were residents. In the SBDC, Shikwane, the pine furniture king, offered a sage piece of advice. If an applicant wanted R10,000, “dole it out in installments as the need arose, otherwise he might be tempted to use the money to buy a car instead of developing his business”.

He did not live long enough to witness the jamboree of the so-called tenderpreneurs under the new black government, who had the propensity to splash out on a new black Range Rover before even paying workers’ salaries! As a result of this trend, many black businesses (read construction companies) have folded, leaving multi-million rand projects unfinished.

When new political dispensation was ushered in [in] 1994, among the first tasks of the new rulers was to dissolve the SBDC, and changed its name to Business Partners. The SBDC ran one advert years ago titled “The SBDC helped me set up”.

The entrepreneur whose story was being punted was Herman Mashaba, now leader of a political party. The ad said that Mashaba, founder of haircare products company Black Like Me, was helped “with shop and factory space, [and is] just one of a million people who have been assisted by the SBDC”.

And former finance minister Trevor Manuel was at the head of a government initiative that was adamant it was capable of “creating a new institution that could better respond to the needs of small black businesses”. It did – with a coterie of BEE billionaires. Who knows, it might in the future run its own magazine advert featuring Edwin Sodi.

■ Makatile publishes The Sentinel