PANYAZA LESUFI

The debate surrounding black economic empowerment (BEE) is often disingenuous. The prevailing narrative presents this policy as an irrational, ideologically driven measure that has failed the country, hurt GDP and should be replaced by a meritocratic free market.

This perspective overlooks 350 years of history and treats a constitutionally mandated policy of redress as an experimental deviation while ignoring the fact that the existing economic framework was originally designed to benefit the minority.

This is not a good-faith argument about economic efficiency but a self-serving campaign to preserve inherited privileges, and understanding this requires the dismantling of the myths that underpin this critique.

The first myth is that BEE represents a radical break from a neutral, meritocratic economic past. This is historically inaccurate. The South African economy was not shaped by the free market’s invisible hand but rather by the harsh reality of racial engineering.

This project was advanced by the National Party after 1948 through the ideology of volkskapitalisme (people’s capitalism). The state, recognising the economic disadvantage of Afrikaners compared to English-speaking South Africans, did not rely on a free market. Instead, it used state power to promote an Afrikaner capitalist class. State contracts were directed to Afrikaner companies, licences were allocated along ethnic lines and savings were mobilised through state-backed institutions. This approach reflected not capitalism, but state-sponsored ethnic economic mobilisation.

Most of the time, these critics don’t provide a real alternative

The dark side of this project was the systematic destruction of black economic life through race-based laws.

This was the economic architecture that was inherited by the democratic government in 1994, and to claim that merely repealing these laws would create a level playing field overlooks the fact that the starting point was shaped by centuries of state-sanctioned theft. BEE was not a radical invention; it was the first necessary step to dismantle a deeply entrenched system of racialised capitalism.

The second layer of dishonesty in the debate is the selective amnesia regarding the constitution. Some South Africans profess to love the constitution — until its transformative obligations become inconvenient. The 1996 SA constitution is not a libertarian charter designed to protect the status quo; it is a transformative document born from a negotiated settlement that explicitly acknowledged the injustices of the past.

Section 9 of the Bill of Rights, the equality clause, does not merely require equal treatment. It specifically mandates that “legislative and other measures” may be taken to “protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination”.

When critics label BEE supporters as unreasonable, they are not defending the constitution; they are demanding that the descendants of the dispossessed disregard the document’s core purpose while they themselves continue to enjoy the protections it provides for their property and rights.

There have also been attempts, sometimes using false statistics, to claim that BEE has hindered growth. If the public thinks a policy is ruining the economy, there’s no need to discuss its moral or constitutional basis.

This strategy includes conflating BEE with state capture. Critics often put the state capture report and the BEE framework, which is real but has problems, in the same group. They want to make the idea of economic inclusion look undesirable by linking it to corruption.

The debate is also marked by shifting goalposts and selective outrage that sees BEE criticised for creating a narrow elite — a legitimate concern. However, many of the same critics oppose alternative forms of broad-based redress, such as radical land reform, increased public spending on black education, or antitrust actions to dismantle monopolies established under apartheid. This creates a trap in which any form of redress is rejected, either as too radical, as with land reform, or as insufficiently transformative, as with BEE.

Most of the time these critics don’t provide a real alternative. People who advocate a “free market” or “meritocracy” are not making serious proposals, because they assume that getting rid of BEE would automatically make the economy more efficient and inclusive.

In reality, without BEE, ownership patterns on the JSE would likely still look like they did in 1994. What’s more, social stability, which is essential for investment, would be threatened by even deeper racial inequality.

It is possible to support the idea of BEE without agreeing with how it’s been implemented. Problems like fronting, corruption and benefiting only a small group are real, but they come from poor management and weak oversight, not from the policy itself. If a plan to fix past injustice is implemented badly, the answer is not to give up on the plan but to fix its implementation.

If we abandon BEE because of a campaign built on half-truths and a false nostalgia for a meritocratic past that never existed, we would be accepting that the apartheid system was right. That’s not an economic argument; it would be a moral surrender that no fair society should accept.