What Level 1 B-BBEE means for the companies we buy from

A rating is a scorecard. What matters commercially is whether suppliers actually become more capable.

Asibonge Legacy Group holds Level 1 B-BBEE contributor status. It is a genuine credential and it opens doors, particularly in procurement processes where it is a threshold rather than a preference. It is also, on its own, a measurement rather than an outcome.

The question that matters more is what happens to the businesses in our supply chain. A group can achieve a strong scorecard while its suppliers remain exactly as capable, exactly as fragile and exactly as dependent as they were before. The points are earned, the transformation is not.

We treat supplier development as a commercial function rather than a compliance one, because the Group has a direct interest in the answer. Our operating companies depend on suppliers who can deliver on time, hold quality standards, carry the right cover and survive a slow payment cycle. A supplier that cannot do those things is a risk to our customer relationship, whatever their ownership profile.

That reframes the work. Identifying capable local suppliers is the easy part. Improving readiness is the difficult part: helping a business meet the documentation, insurance, safety and reporting standards that larger contracts require, and then giving it commercial access at a scale it can actually absorb. Awarding a supplier more work than it can deliver is not development, it is a way of setting someone up to fail.

The same logic applies to enterprise development. We are interested in entrepreneurs whose capabilities complement our supply chains and our customers, because that is where support has somewhere to go afterwards. A development programme that ends when the funding ends has not built anything.

Transformation influences ownership, leadership, employment, procurement and community participation. Where we have set targets, we will report against them. Where measurement is not yet in place, we will say so rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind. That is a slower way to talk about transformation, and a more useful one.