Anthea Jeffery: The 46 BEE billionaires who should truly “hang their heads”

Key topics:BEE policies blamed for mining investment declineMining wealth concentrated among politically connected elitesExploration, jobs and productivity continue falling.By Dr Anthea Jeffery*.In mid-May 2026 President Cyril Ramaphosa told Parliament that critics of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) “should hang their heads in shame”. Though they constantly claimed that BEE was “a holdback for economic growth,” the mining industry showed this to be “false” and “just a slogan.”After “the democratic government changed the law and nationalised all the mineral rights in our country,” the president went on, many gains were made in the mining sector. BEE “opened up space for black people to get into mining…as owners,” rather than workers. As a result, the industry had “more black entrepreneurs,” who were “expanding their operations,” creating “more jobs” and employing “more and more black engineers…at management level.” In addition, the mining industry was no longer “controlled by six mega companies” and there were “tens and tens of black-owned companies operating in [it].”Apart from the “nationalisation” of all mining rights – as the president revealingly described it – such gains are intrinsically valuable. However, the president’s account of them is often inaccurate and generally misleading. In particular, it ignores the damage done to the mining industry since the government took custodianship of all mineral resources under the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) of 2002 – and began introducing ever more unrealistic BEE requirements under its accompanying mining charter.The MPRDA has given further impetus to major shifts in mining. The number of mining companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has declined from close on 120 in 1994 to around 30 active operational mines in 2025. Mine employment has decreased from some 600,000 to roughly 470,000 over the same period. The mining sector’s contribution to GDP has dropped from 21% in 1980 to 7% in 2025. Total factor productivity (TFP) – which captures how efficiently and effectively labour, capital, materials and other inputs are used in producing output – peaked in 2004. Thereafter TPF steadily declined, even though it generally remained at positive levels. Since 2022, however, “the mining industry has been producing less output per unit of combined inputs (labour and capital) than it did in 2015, signalling reduced efficiency and innovation,” says the Minerals Council South Africa.Some of these delistings and other developments have been driven by mergers, shifts in global capital markets (including the growing popularity of private equity), and the changing structure of South Africa’s economy. Two disturbing figures, however, are directly related to the MPRDA and its onerous – and ever escalating – BEE burdens.South Africa has one of the richest mineral endowments in the world, yet its attractiveness to mining investors has steadily declined since 2004, when the MPRDA came into operation. In 2025, South Africa’s ranking dropped to 57th out of 68 jurisdictions on the authoritative Annual Survey of Mining Companies compiled by the Fraser Institute, a civil society organisation in Canada. This places South Africa almost in the bottom ten..Investor perceptions.The country scored even worse – in 64th place out of 68 – on investor perceptions of the attractiveness of the MPRDA, its BEE requirements, and other mining policies. According to one mining executive cited in the 2025 report: “Affirmative action and enforcement of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) shareholding, the conduct of members of parliament, and the conduct of officials at the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) – with many horror stories covered in local and international press – act as deterrents to investment.”A ranking of 64 out of 68 puts South Africa in the bottom five of mining jurisdictions across the world. It also helps explain the other damaging statistic which adverse mining legislation and BEE policies have helped to bring about.South Africa used to attract 5% of global exploration spending: a figure it last achieved in 2003 (the year before the MPRDA took effect). It now brings in less than 1%. In 2024 “real capital formation in mineral exploration…was R779.5m – the lowest in the dataset going back to 1993,” as investment banker Paul Miller pointed out. This was a small portion of “the R6–R8bn per year” needed to sustain the industry.Other comparative figures are telling too. Mr Ramaphosa talks of the “tens and tens of black-owned companies” now active in the mining sector. But in 2022 only 12 junior miners were listed on the JSE, whereas the Toronto Stock Exchange had 1,600 small-cap mining companies or juniors that year and 600 were listed on the Sydney Stock Exchange. In addition, though South Africa’s junior miners have been granted some 80% of mining rights, nearly 64% of them (nearly two-thirds) see “obtaining a mining licence” as the single biggest obstacle to progress and “the most time-consuming aspect,” as a 2019 study for the Minerals Council reports.Mr Ramaphosa implies that BEE in mining has benefited not only BEE entrepreneurs but also black mineworkers and mining communities. However, he omits to mention the vast chasm between the billions provided to fewer than 50 BEE entrepreneurs – and the small to meagre amounts gained by communities and employees.A draft report compiled in 2015 for the Chamber of Mines (now the Minerals Council), tells the story. The Chamber commissioned this report to assess whether the mining industry had complied with the 2004 mining charter in attaining 26% black ownership by December 2014. The report found that black ownership had risen to at least 28% by then. In addition, if all BEE ownership deals – including those from which black people had subsequently sold out – were taken into account (as the 2004 charter requires), then black ownership stood at 38%. The report estimated the net value redistributed via BEE deals at between R155bn and R282bn..Net value.Tellingly, the report also showed that 60% of this net value had been distributed to “a minimum of 46” BEE entrepreneurs. By contrast, 29% had gone to “a minimum of 6.9 million” community members and 11% had been distributed to “a minimum of 200,000 employees.” These figures are clearly not precise. However, the overall picture they paint is undeniable – and shocking.Having carefully analysed the figures in the report, veteran journalist William Saunderson-Meyer concludes: “On the report’s R155bn–R282bn valuation range, the 60% distributed to the 46 ‘entrepreneurs’ represents an average, on paper, of R2.02bn–R3.68bn each. The 29% attributed to…community structures works out – if evenly shared – at R6,514–R11,852 a head. The 11% attributed to employees works out at R81,190–R147,714 each. Put differently, the average entrepreneur allocation was about 310,000 times the average community allocation and about 25,000 times the average employee allocation.”This confirms what critics of BEE have long been saying: that almost all the benefits of race-based preferences go to a small and politically connected black elite. Most other black people derive no significant gains at all. In addition, the great majority of black South Africans are harmed by BEE in mining (and elsewhere) because it deters investment, limits growth, restricts the generation of new jobs – and leaves millions of black people unemployed and destitute.By enriching the few and impoverishing the many, BEE also worsens inequality. Not surprisingly, this is now often greater within the black population than it is between whites and blacks. This largely explains why the country’s Gini co-efficient has risen from 57 in 1994 to 67 in 2025. In 2017 the SACP noted that the “intra-African inequality” which BEE had fostered was “the main contributor to South Africa’s extraordinarily high Gini coefficient” of income inequality. Added the party: “Enriching a select BEE few via share deals…or (worse still) looting public property…in the name of broad-based black empowerment is resulting in….increasing poverty for the majority, increasing racial inequality, and persisting mass unemployment.”.Socialist utopia.The SACP criticises BEE in this way because it wants even more comprehensive state controls over business, as part of South Africa’s transformation into a socialist utopia. The party is accurate, however, in pointing out that BEE benefits only the few even as it “increases poverty for the majority.”It is not the critics of BEE who need to “hang their heads in shame,” as Mr Ramaphosa says. Rather, it is a narrow group of BEE billionaires – the president among them – whose selfish pursuit of their own self-interest bars them from acknowledging that BEE will always be a fake form of transformation that helps the few and hurts the many..*Dr Anthea Jeffery holds law degrees from Wits, Cambridge and London universities, and is the Head of Policy Research at the IRR..*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission. .Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Anthea Jeffery: The 46 BEE billionaires who should truly “hang their heads”

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