LUCKY MATHEBULA: Motsuenyane was a catalyst for true black economic freedom

As our country is in the last laps of selecting leaders from what is on offer, we are saddened to learn of the passing of Sam Motsuenyane, a thoroughbred from a cohort who sought to model business leadership.

In every waking hour, on behalf of the people whose business destiny Motsuenyane sought to determine, he provided the object for their curiosity and gaze. He became the native, plural baNtu, and an African-in-particular among several variants of the human race. He was the business leader who was eloquent in foresight, the genius that apartheid bondage and colonialism could not destroy and the embodiment of an African story that kept unfolding until his last days.

He was an advocate of a black-owned bank, a believer in the recalibration of the templates of economic domination through a change in the ownership structure of the financial services sector. The banking system, he opined, stood somewhere between African people’s intractable striving to gain access to economic opportunity and the country’s economic establishment’s stubborn and belligerent refusal to grant it — a mission he worked on to ultimately establish the African Bank.

To paraphrase his friend, Nelson Mandela, out of Motsuenyane’s demand that the financial services sector must catalyse economic freedom, “the truth is that we are not yet [economically] free; we merely achieved the freedom to be free, and the right not to be economically dominated”.

Our political freedom is not the final step but the first step on a longer and more difficult road: the struggle for the right to live.

To Motsuenyane, significant revolutions were not always political, it was also the new economic ideas that effectively, powerfully and lastingly alter the lives of humanity.

As the post-1994 premium of blackness started to go bottom-up following the political economy value of the black cognitive elite and political class, a new kind of African-in-particular network and software began to take shape.

The grand handshake between the economic establishment and blackness, inoffensively called black economic empowerment, disrupted the epistemic economic freedom the Motsuenyane generation of business leaders were threading with the new political elites in the ANC.

To his generation — the Mayibuye cohort — economic freedom started with correcting the ownership of real estate injustice. It was only completed when black businesses could be funded to thrive without chauvinist encumbrances. With the formation of the National African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nafcoc) during apartheid’s golden decade, 1948 to 1958, wherein it was legally expressed, together with luminaries such as  Richard Maponya, Bigvai Masekela and others he established an institution they believed would be the voice of African business interests.

Organised white business, at the behest of government policy, set SA’s founding principles of apartheid, or rather white supremacy, loose to run amok through the new templates of economic dominance they designed and built. Nafcoc sought to be a black response to such marginalisation.

The rise of separate development, a softened version of apartheid, a substrate of colonialism of a special type, began the long-standing process of turning African businesses — businesses with the largest market and true African experiences, hopes and interests, aspirations and legitimate grievances against their economic dominance — into abstract establishments destined for invisibility as part of the mainstream economic data.

The criminalisation of blackness in spaces declared exclusively white was systemically rolled out in the regulation of black business in a way that apartheid’s extractive philosophy of business creates institutionalised value chains that would take generations to change or fracture.

Licensing of enterprises, allocation of business rights, business loan-granting criteria, African debt characterisation and the general limitations that came with the invisibility of African business in the political economy of SA condemned African entrepreneurship to appendage status in one of the continent's economic behemoths.

Evolutionarily, crossing the proverbial river by framing the organised business context for growth within its constraints, the Motsuenyane generation entered into several scrums with the apartheid state, which resulted in trading licences being opened in black townships and manufacturing permits given in self-governing territories.

As the continental export market in the subregion imposed trade restrictions which demanded black intermediaries to conclude contracts, as well as the demands for C-suite representation by black professional organisations, the Motsuenyane generation catalysed black business interests to move several needles for the advancement of black entrepreneurship.

He was a model political-economy activist who grew in stature as the African business struggle icon. He was comparable in politics to the iconic generation of Nelson Mandela and in liberation theology to Desmond Tutu. Motsuenyane’s moral integrity, economic diplomacy skills and conciliatory image masked the beating heart of a political-economy radical who believed in social democracy.

He privately railed against economic injustice and viewed collaboration with the softer side of the apartheid business system as a coercive tactic with potential to change comprehensive value chain. The little that was left of African entrepreneurial dignity was conceived by his generation as a kind of citizenship based on a daring combination of economic self-determination.

The parallel visions of his generation of business leaders and that of their political counterparts, which found expression in the economic clauses of the broader liberation movement’s monumental documents, was a shared (though rarely celebrated as such) political symmetry between these generations.

Motsuenyane, through his focused demand for a significantly African-owned, operated and socioculturally grounded financial services sector, leaves a legacy of revolutionary business politics that should lead attentive generations beyond his to recalibrate the true meaning of economic transformation or empowerment.

His life should spur us to be honest in our choices about who deserves to lead us.

The genius of our economic caste system, which most distinguishes it from its politically liquidated predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. We are its new architects. The filth in the system is that jurisprudence might have given licence to the powerful to continue with this status quo. Recognising the economic injustices of the past is not the problem. Institutionally refusing to fracture the templates of dominance is the problem.

As his generation ascended the podiums, they bought into our South Africanness in a manner that makes us, the served and led, greater than them. As we mourn Ntate Motsuenyane, the grandfather of organised African business, we should understand that every tear shed waters the tree of the leadership institution he was. Leadership in Africa is abundant; we must just shift when we have served to allow the new to emerge. This Motsuenyane did. He did not want to be an ancestor but was physically alive.

In the Cornel West parlance: “He had to sit at the helm of organised African business, for African leadership excellence to stand up in SA, Africa and the world.”

Like the ancient kings and thinkers of Mapungubwe who shaped the civilisations of the subcontinent, he towered for Africanness. Like a flag, his leadership is a polyvalent symbol of its various meanings. He represented in himself the many facets of being African.

Robala ka kgotso. Mokwena-wa-Modimosana. Mokgethi ya kgethileng sechaba go ikwadisa pelong tsa batho.

• Dr FM Lucky Mathebula is a public policy analyst and founder of Tshwane-based think-tank The Thinc Foundation