The Black Business Council (BBC) has revived its call for the government to put the control of the African Bank into the hands of black people, particularly in memory of the late Dr Sam Motsuenyane who led the establishment of the bank in 1974 and was its chairman for 20 years.
Motsuenyane, who has been hailed as the father of African Bank and a black business pioneer, passed away on Monday at the age of 97 after a long battle with illness.
BBC President Elias Monage on Tuesday said they cherished and adored the vision of a transformative agenda that Motsuenyane led during the early years of apartheid when he co-founded and led the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nafcoc).
Speaking on the sidelines of the BBC Summit, Monage said Motsuenyane had persevered and registered a bank for Africans despite all the limitations and challenges placed on black people by the apartheid regime.
“As part of the reflection, we need to retain the ownership of that bank in the black hands in the country. We need to use it as a bank that everybody in the country can then use, both in the business side and even the workers, to basically then use that as a bank of choice,” Monage said.
“And we will urge the government also then to use that in terms of paying the [social] grants and other related issues so that they support that black bank.
“And the last thing that we wanted to do with that bank is basically then to have an engagement with the [National] Treasury and the Minister of Finance to look at a better way of a black consortium in the equity of that bank, so that it then remains in the black hands, because currently, there are four major banks and they have 25% of the bank.
“So it would then be much better and ideal to preserve the ideal and the ideas of the gallant, fallen son of the soil, Dr Sam Motsuenyane, so that this dream cannot just vanish.”
The BBC Summit was held under the theme: “30 Years of Democracy - Progress so far and Plans to Accelerate Implementation of Reforms”.
This is not the first time the BBC has raised the issue of the creation of a black-led and focused financial institution for the benefit of black business.
In 2019, the BBC wrote to the National Treasury expressing interest in buying the South African Reserve Bank’s stake in African Bank.
It also outlined plans to buy out commercial banks in the interest of forming a black owned bank.
The business lobby group has been calling for the formation of a bank of this nature since 2012, and had been in communication with President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was deputy president then, on the prospects of establishing the bank.
At the BBC Summit on Tuesday, Ramaphosa said prospects for black business, for black entrepreneurs, and for black South Africans in general were bleak during apartheid.
He said the economic landscape was extremely unequal as a small number of white-owned firms exerted significant control over the major sectors, and new entrants faced barriers to competition, further entrenching the concentration of economic power.
“Access to capital or the ability to accumulate capital was constrained. Laws around land ownership made it impossible for those black businesses who had managed to eke out an existence in the system to expand, grow or become sustainable,” Ramaphosa said.
“A story that has not being fully told or explored, and we should think of how we do this both as government and as the BBC – is of how the democratic state working in partnership with black business, have pushed the frontiers of economic transformation in this country.”
Business Report was awaiting African Bank comment by the time of going to print.
BUSINESS REPORT