BEE has enriched a connected few, not empowered the black majority - IOL
Forty-six politically connected individuals secured 60% of all BEE mining deals, becoming billionaires overnight.
I HAVE previously argued that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) was never designed to empower the black majority.
Thirty-two years of evidence confirm this assessment. Professor William Gumede of Wits University notes that 46 politically connected individuals secured 60% of all BEE mining deals, becoming billionaires overnight.
These are not architects of broad-based prosperity; they are beneficiaries of a system meant to transform lives but which instead entrenched elite access.
Since 2004, cumulative damage may exceed R5 trillion, with annual growth cut by 1.5% to 3% and around 192 000 jobs lost yearly. The ANC’s response is predictable: Criticise the policy, and you are accused of opposing justice itself.
But there is nothing just about a system that excludes millions while enriching a few. BEE has created a class of tenderpreneurs who profit from political connections while the majority remains locked out. The policy must be rejected, not because black empowerment is wrong, but because this version has failed. Black South Africans do not need BEE.
The loudest advocates of Broad-Based BEE (BBBEE) are not black entrepreneurs, but ANC NEC leaders who own land and control the economy’s commanding heights. They have systematically abused BBBEE for personal enrichment.
The policy has become an engine for capital flight. Billions earmarked for liberation are extracted into luxury goods — German cars, French handbags, Italian suits, Swiss watches, Brazilian butt lifts — enriching foreign economies while domestic poverty persists.
We must remember that today’s ANC is a miscarriage of its founders’ ideals. The men and women who gathered in Bloemfontein in January 1912 were not pseudo-communists. They were aspirant capitalists and elites who did not need political power to self-actualise, despite the Boer regime’s monstrosities.
Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the ANC’s founder, was a scholar, lawyer, entrepreneur, and Pan-Africanist visionary. Educated at Columbia and Oxford, he became one of the pioneering black lawyers in South Africa.
He established a national newspaper and initiated a huge land-buying scheme through his company, the Native Farmers Association, registered in 1912. Seme and his colleagues did not ask for an equivalent of BEE or social grants. They asked for equal rights and the freedom to build.
John Langalibalele Dube, the first President of the ANC, built the Ohlange Institute to cultivate self-reliance and self-determination. He stressed industrial training alongside academic skills, teaching shoemaking and other trades. His philosophy was clear: native empowerment through value addition and entrepreneurship, not state dependency.
Before 1910, black South Africans were not passive recipients of welfare. They were active economic participants. Black farmers dominated produce sales to colonial markets. In the Cape and Natal, an independent African peasantry emerged, with black entrepreneurs succeeding in agriculture.
Black people owned farms, transport businesses, brick-making operations, and wagon-making industries. This success intimidated the Boers, who seized this self-made wealth through draconian race policies upon gaining political power in 1910.
Today, the ANC and many parties tell black South Africans they only need jobs and a minimum wage. This infantilises them, suggesting they are incapable of building their own enterprises. It sells them the bare minimum while black leaders own companies, afford private health and education, and divert public monies into tenders and proxies.
The founding fathers of Africa’s oldest liberation movement did not want a helpless society dependent on the state. They wanted a meritocratic generation to amplify their work, integrating neither into a system dependent on whites nor on government.
They wanted to build their own institutions, economies, and futures. The current ANC has abandoned this vision, replacing self-reliance with dependency, enterprise with entitlement, and agency with victimhood. As Anton Lembede often said: We must reject the “Ja Baas mentality.”
Rejecting BBBEE is not the end of this argument; it is the beginning. My next article will address social grants, as both are expressions of the same failing philosophy: that black people need to be managed, fed, and empowered from above rather than freed to build from within.
I will turn to the welfare state and ask the uncomfortable question few are willing to confront: What happens to a people given everything except the opportunity to stand on their own feet? Thomas Sowell’s work will be central to that discussion.
* Phapano Phasha is the chairperson of The Centre for Alternative Political and Economic Thought. The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Pretoria News.
