Bidvest’s bursary backfire: A lesson in HR missteps - Simon Lincoln Reader

Key topics:Bidvest slammed for HR race policy and poor communication strategyMcKinsey’s diversity report debunked as flawed, misleading researchCritics call for merit-based hiring amid global pushback on race quotas.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Simon Lincoln Reader*.Bidvest is exposed as discriminating against impoverished white toddlers, so Solidarity’s Chief Executive, Dirk Hermann, writes them a letter. Bidvest then responds not through its CEO, but its corporate communications guy, and that − to paraphrase the final line of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken − has made…a massive, jarring cockup. For a medium-sized country, we have an unenviable history of corporate communications cockups, starting with Oscar Pistorius’s Vuma Reputation Management, then Bell Pottinger, and now this, from a man called Julian Gwillim. As the response goes, so each sentence becomes more embarrassing and unnecessary, like the sequence of a man walking in on a toileting lady, then walking out, then consciously walking back in to compliment her on her seated posture. There were two courses of action available − both acknowledging the febrile atmosphere surrounding race recruitment policies at present − and I’d like to think that were Bidvest’s founder Brian Joffe still around, he would have taken one. The first option would have been for the CEO to have personally called Dirk Hermann and Jaco Kleynhans, Solidarity’s spokesperson, to arrange a meeting. The second would have been not to discriminate against impoverished white toddlers in the first place, by including them in the 2026 Bidvest school bursary applications. Neither option was taken. Race policies in recruitment and selection the world over are deservedly being scrutinised, and not with an eye to greater compliance, but like checking a neighbourhood’s crime statistics before a prospective tenant makes his or her decision to move there. In the UK toward the end of 2021’s misery, internship recruitment adverts for institutions such as the BBC and the civil service started appearing with disclaimers at the bottom: “This position is open to minority ethnic candidates only”. Calculating that this equated to only 17% of the population, fair-minded critics seized on the obvious: UK law makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race − so why be a criminal? In the US, the convergence of the moral fraud perpetuated by (mainly) privileged, overeducated, white BLM adherents, the myth that America was a racist project and the fallout from the dishonest 1619 Project initiated by The New York Times became a powerful force in handing Donald Trump a mandate in 2024. The most diverseTo understand why these things happened, perhaps we should return to May 2020, and a report published by the global consultancy McKinsey. Then, four of its partners assembled to compile “Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters”. This report concluded, in the manner of climate scientists, that the world’s most successful corporations were also the most diverse, so in other words, the argument is over. Chief executives duly summoned their HRs, the HRs then blitzed the joints and in September 2023, Bloomberg reported that of the 100,000 jobs in America added by S&P 100 firms in 2021, 94% had gone to people of colour. .Read more:.BEE: Time to rethink race-based economic policy - Patrick McLaughlin.But McKinsey’s claims made no sense, particularly in the context of Japanese and South Korean behemoths, and soon sleuths were on the case. When pumped for its methodology, the McKinsey Four claimed they had applied the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index in the analysis of corporations, but they refused to divulge data sets. The independent researchers condemned McKinsey for basic scientific misconduct, before building their own sample based on the S&P 500, which overlapped with McKinsey’s. Their finding? There was absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support McKinsey’s conclusions. One of the McKinsey partners involved in the report left the company to become a music teacher. Admittedly you can’t loathe the crap spoken at the annual World Economic Forum enough, but perhaps this may aid: the report was showcased by the crowd at Davos. South Africa is seen as ground zero here. Whereas the West had long influenced the country insofar as the arts, sports and business were concerned, from 2020 South Africa appeared to be influencing the West. Not everyone was in on the act. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo has long questioned the foundations and validity of race-based selection. More articulate criticism comes from the English-Guyanese campaigner Trevor Phillips. The American economist, Thomas Sowell, has dismissed discrimination via immutable characteristic as a “joke” and while it may not be fashionable to quote Rwanda’s strongman Paul Kagame on many topics, his sentiments that race is no substitute for merit are spot on. Ethiopian Premier Abiy Ahmed Ali is said to be so spooked by BEE as applied by the ANC that he Introduced policies to create the most merit-based civil service on the continent. This, all before we get close to Professor William Gumede’s most recent statements. In a word – madnessSo where do bad corporate ideas coupled to neurotic HR practices get us? In a word − madness. Success stories like Bidvest and Dischem, with their admirable founders and humble origins, can mutate into crises within minutes.Companies like McKinsey can behave like a corporate Rasputin − until we peasants have had enough and shoot them in the balls. Bidvest never needed to promote division − it could have simply carried on with the bare minimum of compliance. The fact that it chose to, that it sees surplus-to-requirements prejudicial judgement as beneficial, despite all the known and newly emerging evidence (e.g Does Greater Diversity in Executive Race/Ethnicity Reliably Predict Better Future Firm Financial Performance?) to the contrary should be of extreme concern to shareholders and customers. Messes like this should force us to double our efforts in lobbying for the establishment of conditions that help our people: i.e rampant, unimpeded growth. Let them eat money. And if officials and corporate bosses and their HR departments and their little communication helpers are unwilling to entertain the prospect of letting our people eat money, well, then there are always black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques to sort that one out. .*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. .This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Bidvest’s bursary backfire: A lesson in HR missteps - Simon Lincoln Reader

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