WeeklySA_AdminDREAM: Once hailed as the moral bridge between liberation and equality, Black Economic Empowerment was meant to remake South Africa’s economic soul — instead, it became a monument to betrayal…
By Themba Khumalo
There was a time when freedom tasted like rain after drought — sharp, cleansing, alive. The air itself seemed to hum with promise as dawn broke over a new South Africa.
We had clawed our way out of the apartheid pit, bruised but unbroken, drunk on the intoxicating belief that justice, at long last, would be ours.
The poor would eat. The forgotten would be seen. The dispossessed would finally take their rightful seat at the nation’s table. To give substance to that dream, Black Economic Empowerment was added to the mix — a promise to reshape the new South Africa, not only politically but economically; to turn liberation into livelihoods, to tether freedom to food, dignity, and ownership.
It was meant to heal the deep fractures of history, to lift a people whose poverty had been legislated and whose hope had been stolen. For a fleeting moment, it shimmered like salvation.
BEE was never meant to be a grubby transaction; it was the sacred covenant between freedom and fairness — an economic gospel for a wounded people, the beating heart of restitution made real. It wasn’t a handout; it was a reclamation.
The promise was simple and profound: that the wealth of a nation once stolen would, at last, circulate in black hands, nurturing the generations that apartheid had starved.
But 30 years on, what a cruel joke it has become. That once-bright promise now lies sprawled in the gutter, mugged by greed and dressed up as progress. The grand vision of shared prosperity has soured into a sordid bazaar of connections and contracts, where transformation is not a calling but a currency. Empowerment, that luminous word, now reeks faintly of rot — the scent of tenderpreneurs and backroom deals, of policies twisted into instruments of privilege.
We were promised a revolution; what we got was a reshuffle.
What began as an audacious dream of inclusion has turned into a marketplace of favours. Transformation, once the rallying cry of a people reborn, is now little more than a business pitch. It’s not about justice anymore — it’s about access, about who gets invited to the trough.
BEE, bless its broken halo, was supposed to break the spine of white monopoly capital. Instead, it has been swallowed whole by it — digested, polished, and spat back out as a slightly darker version of the same beast. The stirring moral vocabulary of liberation has been bleached away, replaced by the bloodless jargon of “equity partners” and “stakeholder value.”
Once, we spoke of justice. Now, we whisper about portfolios. The tragedy isn’t simply that BEE failed to redistribute wealth — it rebranded inequality. It painted the old order in new shades, creating a sleek, politically connected elite that swapped struggle songs for share certificates. Apartheid’s machinery of exclusion didn’t die; it evolved. It learned to pronounce “empowerment” with a posh accent.
Of course, the BEE faithful will point to “progress.” Look, they’ll say — black executives in glass towers once barred to them! Annual reports adorned with smiling faces, glowing headlines about transformation! But these glossy montages conceal a brutal arithmetic. For every millionaire minted by empowerment (and there aren’t that many), thousands of black families remain ensnared in the quicksand of poverty.
The township economy still gasps for air. The rural poor remain ghosts in the national ledger. The unemployed — millions of them — continue to wait for a promise long turned to dust. And still, the gospel of BEE preaches salvation through ownership, as if the hungry can dine on equity or quench their thirst with dividends. It is a cruel mirage — empowerment that flatters the few while leaving the many stranded in the wasteland of deferred dreams.
What corrodes BEE isn’t merely incompetence; it’s complicity — the deliberate betrayal of principle dressed up as pragmatism. A policy once conceived as a moral lodestar has been hijacked by a political aristocracy and refashioned into an instrument of patronage. Contracts are bartered like currency. Procurement is the new frontier of plunder.
Somewhere between the gleaming boardroom and the township, empowerment lost its soul. What should have been an engine for inclusion became a bureaucratic labyrinth — a compliance industry built to serve conglomerates, not communities. The informal trader, the self-taught coder in Soweto, the small builder in Limpopo — they are still locked out by the red tape of a system that rewards connections over competence.
Real empowerment should have meant skills, education, and access to capital — a transfer not only of wealth but of agency. Instead, we built a cathedral of scorecards and tick boxes, a monument to managerial mediocrity. Transformation by spreadsheet.
Equity by calculation. Dignity reduced to data. We didn’t dismantle apartheid’s economic edifice; we merely redecorated it — gave it a slick new coat of political legitimacy and watched it grind on, same gears, same direction.
Yes, the face of corporate South Africa is a bit darker now, but its heartbeat remains the same. A few black CEOs have joined the club, but the club itself has not changed its rules. Power still flows upwards, privilege still circulates inward. We have mistaken representation for revolution, diversity for deliverance, and visibility for victory. Ownership without control. Participation without power — the pitiful hallmarks of cosmetic inclusion masquerading as justice.
The deeper failure of BEE, then, is not economic but moral. It is the betrayal of a sacred trust — the quiet, devastating realisation that liberation itself was commodified. Freedom sold wholesale to the highest bidder, sanctified in boardrooms while the streets stayed hungry. BEE was never meant to mint a black bourgeoisie perched precariously atop a black underclass. It was meant to shatter the very logic of exclusion. Yet here we are, three decades later, with the same pyramid of privilege — only the skin tone of its apex slightly altered.
If South Africa is serious about transformation, it must perform moral surgery on itself. It must excise the ghosts of greed that haunt the very language of empowerment.
It must return to the tangible — to education that liberates, digital access that levels, and entrepreneurship that dignifies. We must stop treating emerging black entrepreneurs as charity cases or political accessories and start treating them as the backbone of national renewal.
The state should not merely fund them; it should trust them — by breaking procurement monopolies, enforcing payment discipline across departments, and dismantling the red tape that throttles small business before it can breathe. Every township should be a tax-incentivised innovation zone, every youth incubator a seedbed of ownership, not dependence. Give them capital, yes, but more crucially, give them infrastructure, market access, and the protection of law. Let enterprise flourish from the ground up — not from the corridors of big corporates and parliament down.
And yet, somehow, the original dream of economic empowerment refuses to die. Beneath the sediment of cynicism, beneath the stench of betrayal, the old fire still flickers. It burns in the small business that thrives without political blessing, in the cooperative that refuses corruption, in the restless youth who still believe in fairness as a birthright, not a favour.
The true tragedy of BEE isn’t that it was doomed from the start — it’s that it was abandoned. But the revolution it once promised — the equalisation of dignity, not merely income — is still within reach.
If we are to reclaim that dream, we must recover our moral compass. We must remember, with clear eyes and uncorrupted hearts, that empowerment was never meant to enrich a handful — it was meant to redeem a people. Until then, BEE will remain precisely what it has become: a designer label stitched, with breathtaking irony, to the tattered rags of inequality.
• Khumalo is an independent columnist and a former newspaper editor.
