THIS ISN’T
MENTORSHIP
M
entorship is one of the key
ingredients in career success.
Person after person interviewed
by Quarry Southern Africa in face-to-
face personality profiles attributes a large
measure of their success to wonderful
mentors — and they willingly continue to
mentor others.
It is therefore logical that government
would want to emulate this in the course
of transformation of our economy.
However, an increasingly heavy-handed
and demanding approach to this practice
is becoming evident by government, which
sees it as an obligation of businessmen
and women to mentor emerging business
people. This stigma of compulsion is more
likely to chase away potential mentors than
attract them. Here is a cautionary anecdote
from the experience of one bookkeeper
and tax consultant whose story is doing the
rounds. She runs a modest business and
was approached by a government body to
mentor an entrepreneur whose books and
tax affairs were in poor shape.
Accepting the much over-used cliché
that she “should give something back to
society”, she agreed. Today, she is living in
fear of her very life — too scared to even
answer the phone.
The experience saw her descend into
the murky world of tenderpreneurism.
The individual to whom she was “giving
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back” of her time and energy, turned out
to be far wealthier than she could ever
aspire to be. He won substantial business
from government tenders, and one reason
at least for his wealth was a refusal to
pay VAT. He blithely submitted ‘nil’ VAT
returns each month. This administrative
‘blind spot’ of his was the primary reason
the bookkeeper’s help was sought, but far
from being willing to correct his behaviour
(he apparently owed in excess of R20-
million by this stage), he continued the
practice and sought to pin the blame on
the bookkeeper, and began threatening and
intimidating her when she resigned her
position.
This is a betrayal of someone’s good
intentions. Government should be careful
of associating its good name with such
activities, and individuals should similarly
be extremely wary of any appeal to mentor
someone they are not familiar with and
cannot vouch for. The growing attitude that
there is an obligation to mentor the less
fortunate is not the purpose of mentorship.
Mentorship remains a powerful tool
but it cannot be enforced — it has to be a
relationship between a willing giver and a
willing taker on a basis of mutual respect.
Another characteristic of mentorship
explained by many business leaders, is
that it is a two-way process — the mentor
typically learns as much from the process as
COMMENT
Eamonn Ryan, editor
[email protected]
the mentee. The idea is not that he or she is
conned into becoming the face of nefarious
activities.
At a recent CETA SMME Summit,
delegates seemed delighted by the
misfortunes of large construction firms,
seeing in it not loss of jobs and destruction
of South Africa’s world-class engineering
capability, but rather an opportunity for
SMEs to replace those larger firms. That’s
the nature of the free market, of course, but
officials present reinforced their view that
newly retrenched executives with many
years of experience are a national resource
that can now be redeployed to mentor
those small businesses that will now replace
them and benefit from their demise.
Like education before it, the idea seems
to be that all the barriers to entry of the
business world — such as skills, experience,
and capital, the ‘skin in the game’ — will be
lowered to facilitate the entry of unqualified
businesses to bid for the biggest, most
complex infrastructure contracts, with the
notion that ‘mentors’ will do the actual
work. This is presumably not what is meant
when economists and analysts call for red
tape to be reduced so as to facilitate small
business.
QUARRY SA | MAY/JUNE 2019_1