As we near the end of 2025, the second-biggest political party in South Africa and the ANC’s partner in the national governing coalition has mounted an extraordinary PR and legislative campaign calling for the end black economic empowerment in South Africa.
It is brazen and revealing. Let me start where the DA begins, with the truth that Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment has not delivered on its promise in full.
But let me also start where the DA refuses to go, with the truth that South Africa still lives with the economic architecture of apartheid. The question, then, is not whether economic redress should be put aside, but how a policy can be designed so that the redress can finally begin to work for the people it was written for.
I am one of those who have said that B-BBEE has not worked. And I still stand by that. But my critique has never been about whether we need economic redress, it has been about whether the broad-based part of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment has ever been realised.
When you examine the pillars of transformation contained in B-BBEE policy: ownership, management control, skills development, enterprise and supplier development, and socioeconomic development, you see both progress and failure.
On the progress front, companies that were once untransformed now have black executives in boardrooms, thousands more workers have received training, and corporate supply chains now often include emerging black suppliers. But ownership, the most consequential pillar, remains the Achilles heel of transformation.
According to the B-BBEE Commission, 0% of JSE-listed entities are 100% black-owned, and black people collectively hold only 13.75% of the economic interest on the exchange. Meanwhile, 58% of black South Africans still live below the poverty line, and unemployment among black South Africans stands at 37.6% compared with 7.9% for white South Africans. Black youth unemployment, by the expanded definition, exceeds 60%.
These are symptoms of a structure that still privileges a few and sidelines the many. Therefore, when the DA launches its “Economic Inclusion for All” Bill and says it will replace BEE with a poverty-based model, it is an attempt to erase the question of redress. The DA looks at a flawed policy and leverages its failures to conclude that we no longer need the principle behind it. It is not in the least about inclusion.
Their proposal would remove race as a factor in empowerment and replace it with “need”. On paper, that sounds fair. In practice, it means groups that were never systemically excluded would now qualify equally for the same redress mechanisms meant to undo apartheid’s damage. It collapses the distinction between historical exclusion and current hardship. It’s equality without equity, a comfort to privilege, not a cure for inequality.
It’s an established fact that B-BBEE was hijacked by the ANC for patronage. Every policy they have ever touched has had comrades sitting behind it, asking: how do we benefit? That’s why empowerment turned into enrichment. But that failure belongs to the ANC, not to the principle of redress itself. Our work as legislators is to rescue empowerment from corruption, certainly not to abandon it altogether.
True reform means doing the hard work of broadening empowerment, not scrapping the principle. It means strengthening every pillar:
Management control: because I believe that black South Africans, women, young people and people with disabilities must have equal opportunity to participate in the management and control of companies, regardless of who owns them. Transformation cannot depend on ownership alone; it must be embedded in how companies are led, governed and grown.
Skills development: investing in vocational and entrepreneurial capacity for young South Africans, especially those in townships and rural areas.
Enterprise and supplier development: breaking open supply chains to include black-owned, township-based and women- and youth-led SMEs.
Socioeconomic development: investing in the communities where exclusion is concentrated.
And the Achilles heel of ownership: addressing capital access through instruments such as the Jobs and Justice Fund which we have tabled as Build One SA – independently managed, transparently governed and focused on funding black-, women- and youth-owned enterprises.
In addition, transformation must also be spatial. Apartheid’s geography still decides who gets to participate in the economy. The people left behind live far from where opportunity exists in townships and rural areas without infrastructure or industry, and that was by design.
That’s why we champion Township Special Economic Zones: to bring industry, infrastructure and jobs directly to those communities. They are how we turn empowerment from paperwork into place-based prosperity.
You cannot talk about economic transformation and then leave the spaces where those who were historically excluded still live – the townships, informal settlements and rural peripheries – untouched and unequipped.
“Inclusion” means nothing if those places remain disconnected from opportunity. We cannot separate economic justice from spatial justice. Roads, electricity, reliable water and broadband are the arteries of an economy that includes everyone.
When a young person has to use three taxis just to find work, when small businesses can’t grow because their area has no infrastructure or secure power, that is not just a service delivery failure but the continuation of exclusion. You cannot speak of transformation when the spaces where black, coloured and Indian South Africans are concentrated remain economically disconnected from the rest of the country.
It is telling that even in areas the DA governs, the same black, coloured and Indian communities remain trapped by poor infrastructure, unreliable services and shrinking opportunity. That is the quiet truth behind their rhetoric of “inclusion”, while presiding over exclusion. Until the townships and communities under their watch are connected to opportunity, their call rings hollow.
I have never believed that white South Africans must simply hand over their companies. What I do believe is that it is correct that groups that have been economically marginalised by race, gender, age and physical disability should be prioritised in management and control of companies – regardless of who owns them.
If we are to apply the lens of justice, there is historical rationale that beyond “current need”, opportunity and development must be located where intentional marginalisation as designed by apartheid has been concentrated: in black, coloured and Indian townships – where those groups must be empowered to build and own enterprises of their own. That is where the government’s real work lies: creating fair policy, accessible funding and infrastructure that enables those who were historically excluded to compete and thrive.
And because of the injustices of our past – and the persistent inequality that still defines who owns and who labours – it is right that a portion of corporate proceeds should contribute to a national Jobs and Justice Fund. That fund, independently managed and transparently governed, would channel resources into enterprise development, vocational skills and small-enterprise financing, ensuring that economic redress happens not through handovers, but through shared responsibility and opportunity. That is justice.
To say the DA’s “Economic Inclusion Bill” is about inclusion is disingenuous. It absolves privilege of its historic responsibility and rewrites inequality as mere misfortune that is accidental and ahistorical. Apartheid was deliberate and so must be its undoing. We have to reform BEE to work for the many. We have to build an economy that is both competitive and just, but only if we face our history squarely and confront it. DM