ONLY 10,000 Chinese people in SA were eligible to benefit from black empowerment programmes, Department of Trade and Industry deputy director-general Sipho Zikode said on Thursday.
During apartheid, South African citizens of Chinese descent were classed as "coloured". Under the new dispensation, they are therefore regarded as black for the purposes of redress.
The inclusion of Chinese people on the empowerment list has led to dissatisfaction in black business.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are about 10,000 descendants of Chinese migrants who came to SA from Guangdong in China from the 1870s until the mid-20th century.
These descendants, together with SA’s coloured population, were denied ownership of mining licences and land under the racist policies of apartheid.
Addressing the Future of Empowerment summit in Midrand on Thursday, former African National Congress treasurer Mathews Phosa urged the department to engage the public on why Chinese people should benefit from black economic empowerment (BEE).
Mr Phosa said calling Chinese people "black" was an artificial definition and the department needed to deal with questions from black entrepreneurs about the issue. "The department should calmly engage with us and accept when something is wrong … not go into denial mode," he said.
Mr Zikode told the conference that not all people of Chinese origin in SA stood to benefit from BEE.
"Those Chinese were South Africans brought in by the apartheid government and the number is about 10,000 of them … these are Chinese that are today classified as blacks by the current legislation, not the 1.3-billion in China. Only the 10,000 that were here before 1994," Mr Zikode said.
Mr Phosa warned of unfulfilled expectations in the country.
"When we exercised our right to vote in 1994, we expected a country very different from what we have today," he said.
SA was plagued by slow economic growth, high unemployment and a lack of policy cohesion, which had hurt the economy, he said.
He lambasted the leadership for "political disregard and disrespect for the hopes and wishes of the electorate with rampant graft, corruption and embezzlement … stealing by any name is stealing".
Mr Phosa said while BEE codes and transformation were being debated, the effect of job losses was not being tackled.
After the long strike at Lonmin mines, he said, small businesses in Rustenburg had collapsed.
"Lonmin will have a future, what about those small businesses, they’re gone," said Mr Phosa.
Violence, especially in mining towns where people "saw money being made" while they remained unemployed, was a big issue, he said. The violent protests sporadically taking place in the country were a result of their dissatisfaction, he said.
Government had been putting out fires in many areas affected by protests over poor service delivery and unemployment.
The people could not be blamed for reacting to the lack of decent jobs, Mr Phosa said.
