BEE’s broken promises: How the ANC’s empowerment ideals betrayed SA’s majority - Sara Gon
Key topics:
Ramaphosa's BEE vision clashes with harsh economic realities
Sakeliga challenges private-sector hiring quotas as unconstitutional
Cadre deployment and failed projects show BEE's harmful effects
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By Sara Gon
“Amongst the most salient features of our country’s empowerment laws are their practicality, feasibility and responsiveness to economic conditions without deviating from the objective of redressing the economic injustices of exclusion of the past.
This stems from the need to meet two separate but interdependent objectives.
The first is to achieve substantial change in the racial composition of ownership, control and management of the economy to overcome a history of exclusion.
The second is to achieve growth that is not only inclusive but sustainable in the long-term, by broadening the economic participation of enterprises owned by black South Africans, women and young people.
The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment legal framework applies to all companies wishing to invest in and do business in our economy, whether they are local or foreign.”
Cyril Ramaphosa: From the Desk of the President, June 30, 2025
Like many of the President’s utterances this is a message of myth and fable.
His idea of “ownership of the economy” bears no relation to the reality of the South African economy, or to that of any successful economy for that matter. Ownership of other people’s ingenuity and hard work means little for the good of South Africans. Employment of people by the ingenious and hard-working is what means something.
Most telling is that the reach of the benefits of BEE is so small that it barely touches the millions of South Africans who desperately need real growth and the benefits from it that should accrue more widely.
The fact that the ANC and those who support ongoing social engineering can take pride in the fact that there are more people dependent on social grants than in employment is profoundly immoral. It says much about the disregard that the President has for the vast majority of ordinary South Africans: he seems to have little regard for the human value of being employed.
Helping people just to survive, rather than freeing them up to use their own agency to strive for decent lives, is tragic and demeaning.
BEE in the private sector − the third wave
Russell Lamberti, Director at Sakeliga, an his interview BizNews Television: ‘Sakeliga Takes on ANC Hiring Quotas’, refers to the “third wave” of BEE in describing the targeting of private business-to-business relationships.
Lamberti describes this as “creeping authoritarianism”. This is particularly perverse in a political environment where the plea to scrap BEE is finding more and more traction. Trump is just the larger-than-life manifestation of opposition to this growth-denying ideology.
Consequently, Sakeliga has launched an interdict against these measures, which it considers are “extreme, unrealistic and threaten to paralyse already fragile businesses”.
Sakeliga argues that the regulations imposing quotas on private businesses are unconstitutional and legally damaging.
A reminder of what public sector BEE looks like
Examples of BEE underpinned by cadre deployment and the elite access that significantly hampers our growth and well-being can be found in the following very recent examples:
Young lions ‘get their share’ (Sunday Times 20 July 2025)
Eight ANC Youth League ‘leaders’ have been given posts on the boards of Gauteng’s public hospitals. The ‘comrades’ were encouraged to apply and, if they did, the ANC would lobby to get the posts. They will be paid an estimated R10,000 for every meeting they attend. The advert for the posts requires applicants to be professionals with “legal, finance, management, governance, medicine or health-related” background.
According to one senior provincial government official, the process reeks of “‘Nkabane 2.0′”, with reference to the higher education minister Nobuhle Nkabane, now-dismissed for trying to appoint ANC cadres to the boards of Setas, and lying to Parliament about it.
2. Patients froze to death in hospital because of dysfunctional management (TimesLIVE 30 July 2025)
An investigation by the health ombud into two hospitals for psychiatric patients “uncovered alarming levels of systemic failure, gross negligence, and widespread mismanagement”. Two patients died (from hypothermia and pneumonia) at one hospital and two patients are in a critical condition at the other hospital.
Prolonged power outages, leaking roofs, a blocked sewerage system and a lack of emergency equipment contributed to the disasters. One hospital took a year to repair damaged electricity infrastructure, where an adjacent private hospital managed to repair its damage within days.
The ombudsman found dysfunctional supply-chain management, poor quality pyjamas and blankets, and several Instances of staff shortages.
“Both hospitals lacked professional leadership and the management was ineffectual and inefficient”.
3. R135m school project crumbles as Joburg whip faces ‘construction mafia’ allegations (News24 21 July 2025)
An ANC councillor and Johannesburg Council’s chief whip has been accused of using his position to control development projects through a “business forum” which he once chaired.
The school project in Vlakfontein has stalled. And this is not his first rodeo. He and two other ‘forum’ members were sentenced to two months in prison for violating an interdict. He doesn’t appear to have served any time.
The BEE requirement that contributes to this criminality comes from the obligation to have 30% ‘local’ involvement in infrastructure projects, but it provides an open invitation for cadre deployment of the most venal and uncaring kind.
Not a day goes by without criminality linked to BEE and cadre deployment being splashed all over our media. This is bad enough in the public sector, but for the ANC to apply BEE quotas to the private sector, while putting a middle finger up to Trump, is malevolent.
How the government identifies racial categories
And how is racial classification going to work? Since there is no basis in law for determining the race of an employee, the Department of Employment (the irony!) and Labour has put the onus on employers to determine race by getting their employees to ‘self-identify’. A copy of the form follows, for your elucidation.
The problem that both employers and the Department may face is: What happens if employees choose to identify ‘incorrectly’. What measures are they going to employ to ‘correct’ self-identification?
The havoc that could be wrought by employees choosing how to identify themselves may be a price worth paying for the meaningless statistics that result.
‘BEE’ starts at the bottom
The ANC has long failed or refused to understand that empowerment of a genuine and lasting kind is not to be found in legislative injunctions to put people on company boards or give them ownership that is not genuinely earned.
Like most things in life, empowerment is achieved through long, hard slog, and giving children a decent education that sets them up for life. It was a commitment made to democracy that has been observed in the breach for 30 years.
In an article written for the SA Jewish Report’s National Jewish Dialogue series, Joshua Shevitz writes that safety, dignity and opportunity are the key values towards securing our country’ future.
Shevitz says our crisis isn’t economic or political; it’s educational. “We never treated education as the foundation for everything else”. He refers to the statistics we know so well: 6% of GDP results in 81% of grade 4s who can’t read for meaning, and fewer than 2% of matriculants achieving distinctions in maths.
Shevitz refers to the “tangible cracks in our foundation” which have led to “an entire generation left behind, unemployed, alienated, and disillusioned.”
The ANC may have gambled that if it artificially created an elite whose children could then benefit from the education necessary to make it in a 21st-century world, then society could prosper.
Engineering society doesn’t work like that: empowering the few and not doing the hard work properly to empower the many is dooming us to fail. There is nothing to replace the constant work required to ensure that succeeding generations are educated sufficiently to access opportunities leading to better lives.
The quick fix of ideologically hidebound bureaucrats, whose instinct is to punish the private sector rather than reward it, will help to seal the failure of South Africa.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and was republished with permission