Maritime BEE strategy focuses on job creation

THE MARITIME transport sector intends to have its black economic empowerment (BEE) strategy in place by the end of August.
This was announced after the second indaba of the sector - representing industry, labour, the government and the parastatals - held in Durban recently.
According to Fred Jacobs, co-chairman of the BEE maritime transport steering committee, the meeting was designed to construct the maritime transport charter.
“This,” he said, “is part of a broader process initiated by the National Department of Transport toward developing a sector-wide BEE strategy including aviation, rail, bus, taxi and the road freight sectors.”
This has so far seen an analysis of the status of empowerment in the sector, challenges to empowerment, as well as interventions to generate broad-based empowerment in the sector.
“The process is currently at a stage of negotiating targets in line with the Department of Trade and Industry’s BEE scorecard concept,” said Jacobs.
“The maritime transport sector has elected to focus on job-creation, skills transfer, preferential procurement and poverty alleviation components of broad-based BEE, encompassing both the capital intensive and services aspects of the industry.”
According to Jacobs, there has been considerable discussion of ownership related to foreign-owned shipping lines and other empowerment options such as partnerships, joint ventures and enterprise development.
“With respect to skills transfer,” he said, “aspects of supplier development programmes have been identified where both domestic and foreign-owned corporates have a critical role to play, in addition to the transport education and training authority (TETA).
“With the long-term objective of developing SA into a maritime nation, as well the desire to optimise BEE in the maritime transport sector, there is much optimism and commitment to the process of seeing both these sectoral objectives unfold.”