After democracy was installed in 1994, shareholders of corporate South Africa had a one-off opportunity to invest in the upliftment of the many. There were many global examples to draw on. Among the regular visitors to SA was Ratan Tata, then CEO of the Indian conglomerate, who urged SA companies to follow Tata’s community trust-based ownership approach. One which has uplifted tens of millions in the sub continent.
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Big business took a different path. Instead of spreading the love, SA corporates chose expediency by co-opting ANC deployed cadres in the name of creating “Black business role models”. Critics of the approach were usually referred to ANC head of policy and later spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama’s November 2004 clarion call that “I did not join the struggle to be poor.”
There is much to admire about Jeremy Ord (above), who together with a group of school pals from Joburg’s Rooseveld High created and built Dimension Data, the boom-bust-boom multinational tech group. After the dot-com bubble burst, Ord gritted his teeth to guide the business through some very dark years, rebuilding it from near bankruptcy to the point where it attracted a 100% buyout by Japan’s NTT.
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Also read:Â Dan Nicholl talks Business Unknown with Jeremy Ord
This weekend Ord and his company were branded as racists in the Sunday Times’s front page splash. His achievements forgotten because of very public allegations by one of those ANC-deployed “role models”. A former bureaucrat, he pocketed half a billion rand during a dozen years as DiData’s chairman. His lawyers are demanding another quarter billion from the company and Ord personally, because of alleged racial discrimination. As you sow, so shall you reap.
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