In this last year of the current Board’s tenure, however, the core challenge has remained the same as it has always been - the fact that the NEF is a small organisation with a big mandate. Tasked with facilitating the ideals of BB-BEE, partly through engendering a culture of savings and investment among Black people, and partly through enabling Black entrepreneurship through financial and non- financial support, ours is indeed a historic mission, which is nothing less than to continue the liberation struggle on the economic front. It is a mission to contribute to our nation’s growth by propelling the economic participation of Black people, so that they too can own, manage and develop sustainable enterprises, contributing to the creation of employment, rural development, skills acquisition, savings and investment solutions for the vast majority who live across the length and breadth of our beautiful land.

As an agency of the dti, the NEF has a key role to play in the implementation of BB-BEE, and in delivering on the key target areas set for the organisation by AsgiSA.

We are therefore clearly and unequivocally focused on overcoming the historic divide in our economy, and we can confidently declare that the NEF is implementing its mandate with a greater vigour, integrity and patriotism.

During the past four years, major NEF initiatives such as Asonge and the NEF’s support for broad-based public share offers such as Sasol Inzalo have significantly increased Black participation in the economy, particularly through savings and investment, as have the many management buy-ins and buy-outs that the NEF has financed.

Increasing Black participation in the higher asset classes of the economy has been a very important undertaking for the NEF.

In the Asset Management arena, the phenomenal results of the NEF Asonge Share Scheme, which saw over 86 000 investors countrywide oversubscribing by 13%, has provided an exceptional empirical and sociological foundation upon which future strategic interventions will be devised.

These include:
• Ensuring that new products are aimed at accessible subscription levels and structures so that lower income groups are deliberately included,

• Addressing geographic access to product offerings through targeted communication campaigns, as well as engagement with provincial governments and other stakeholders in order to entrench the message of the need to save and invest,

• Obtaining the transfer of state allocated interests in State-Owned Commercial Enterprises (SOCE), a process that will no doubt see the NEF provide more equity ownership opportunities for Black people.

Similarly, Sasol Inzalo provided ordinary South Africans with the opportunity to become shareholders in a local company with global reach, operating in the strategically important energy sector. The NEF provided significant strategic advice and support to ensure that Sasol Inzalo became the success it did. By 2005 when this Board’s tenure began, the NEF had disbursed R25 million to 11 investees. On the Fund Management front, we are pleased that as at 31 March 2009 the NEF had approved 177 transactions worth in excess of R1.4 billion, which marks a significant achievement in the development and maturing of the NEF.

With these achievements behind us, it is now important to assess where the gaps are to gain greater insight into what Black participation in the economy really means, and to determine whether the path we are on remains definitive, or whether our objectives and methodologies require re-assessment.