GHALEB CACHALIA | Calls to boycott Dis-Chem are misguided (original) (raw)

Dis-Chem shareholder Mark Saltzman’s online comments in response to journalist Redi Tlhabi’s criticism of Israel were repugnant. Let’s get that out of the way.

His public remarks revealed views that have no place in civil discourse, and the outrage directed at him personally is entirely warranted. Dis-Chem itself was quick to distance the company from his statements, and rightly so.

However, the leap from “boycott Saltzman” to “boycott Dis-Chem” is where the campaign loses its moral and logical footing and where consumers deserve a clearer framework before they act.

Dis-Chem is a JSE-listed public company. It is not Saltzman’s personal political vehicle. Its shares are held by pension funds, institutional investors, unit trusts and hundreds of thousands of ordinary South Africans, many of them the people the boycott call is targeting. Punishing the company for the private views of a shareholder, however prominent, is a category error. It conflates the man with the institution.

The relevant test in any corporate boycott is simple: has the company itself adopted, funded or formally endorsed the position that offends? If Dis-Chem was making donations to the Israeli state, if it held corporate positions on the conflict, or if its board had officially aligned the business with Saltzman’s views, the case for a boycott would be clear and defensible.

But none of that has been demonstrated. What we have instead is one individual with ugly views who happens to be a significant minority shareholder.

That distinction matters because it has to apply consistently. Consider where consumers are migrating: Clicks. Its shareholder register reads like a who’s-who of global institutional capital. BlackRock, whose CEO declared there was no moral equivalence between the October 7 2023 attacks on Israel and the violence meted out by Israel in Gaza, holds between 2.3% and 4.9%.

JPMorgan Asset Management’s parent company set up employee donation-matching programmes for Israeli humanitarian relief and maintains active commercial operations in Israel. Vanguard has been cited in a UN human rights report for holding Israeli government bonds in its fixed income portfolios.

Nobody is calling for a Clicks boycott. And they shouldn’t be for the same reason a Dis-Chem boycott grounded solely on Saltzman’s personal views doesn’t hold up. The standard cannot shift depending on how visible the shareholder is or how easy it is to attach a face to the company.

This is not a novel principle. South African consumers do not boycott Liberty because of the political views of its founding families. They do not avoid Standard Bank because one of its institutional shareholders takes positions they disagree with. They don’t abandon Woolworths entirely. They choose, as many do — including me — not to buy specific Israeli-labelled products. That is a coherent, defensible, targeted form of consumer activism.

Targeting a listed company because a shareholder holds objectionable views would, if applied consistently, make participation in the modern economy nearly impossible. The JSE is full of companies with shareholders, local and foreign, who support causes many South Africans find troubling. The principle cannot be selectively enforced based on which shareholder made the news this week.

The anger is justified. The target is wrong. Direct it at Saltzman — who, like a number of South African billionaires here and abroad — is simply beyond the pale. Call for his removal from any board position, if he holds any. Demand accountability from him personally, lay charges against him for hate speech, and pressure Dis-Chem to formalise its distance from his views in governance terms.

But a blanket consumer boycott of a public company, absent evidence of corporate conduct, risks being more symbolic than substantive. And worse, it risks being inconsistent in a way that undermines the credibility of the cause itself.

• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.