Black economic empowerment (BEE) does more than just empower a potically connected few. The actual value of BEE is that it masks the true nature of the South African economy and its differential impact on whites and blacks.
Ironically, BEE is pushed by the ANC alliance as a mechanism to “deracialise” the economy, but it was designed and funded by white capital. BEE was a response of white capital to the real possibility of its expropriation by a black revolution. Properly conceived BEE is a mechanism to buy legitimacy for the white wealth created out of the triple dispossessions suffered by blacks — land, labour and African identity.
If we stopped moralising about BEE and looked at it for what it actually is, we could then see that its purported weaknesses, such as corruption, fronting, enriching a few and openness to political manipulation, are not aberrations but part of its logic — which is in fact the logic of white capital from whence it is sired. It must be never forgotten that white capital in South Africa emerged out of plunder, theft and systematic violence.
Hence Rian Malan is correct to say the biggest achievement of apartheid is the northern suburbs where whites live charmed lives. BEE is the gift the ANC emerged with from the negotiation table. In exchange for giving up political power the white settler regime, representing the white community as a whole, would fund BEE and crudely co-opt blacks associated with the ANC into the existing structures of the apartheid economy.
In other words, the fundamental logic of the apartheid and colonial economy would remain intact as a few blacks were allowed to accumulate and consume at the rate of old white capital. That ensured that the apartheid economic structures would essentially become the economic reality of democracy.
Blacks in the main would be servants and workers and a new class of black owners and managers would emerge who essentially would become the new whites. Basically, this means BEE is an exercise to legitimise colonial and apartheid theft. This is true despite the occasional complaints of lack of transformation of the economy.
The post-1994 macroeconomic policy, Gear, further emasculated the state and accelerated the formation of a class of a subordinated black bourgeoisie. In addition to the BEE codes, there was the employment equity mechanism and preferred procurement by tender.
Collectively these mechanisms were meant to help in the process of “deracialisation” of the economy. But it meant blacks could really become part of the economy only through political connectivity, by getting a tender and scheming.
The BEE policy environment created the possibility of legalised theft becoming endemic. How else could blacks penetrate an economy owned
by a minority settler population?
The tender process was perhaps the vilest mechanism to build a black business class. It came at the cost of social change and meeting the needs of the majority. The apartheid state created capacity within itself to deliver social services to the white population.
The ANC through Gear broke down this capacity by privatising service delivery — all of a sudden a comrade was called upon to become a businessman to build roads, schools and take care of waste management. The politically connected but economically impoverished elite had to use the state to gain access to the means of production, as it were.
From this point of view corruption must not be seen as an aberration but is part of the logic of the accumulation path inherited and now protected by the ANC. For instance, private capital has not stopped its evil profiteering ways. The Competition Commission has only scratched the surface of how evil private accumulation is.
How else does capitalist accumulation occur if not by unjust means?
BEE actors are mere junior partners in this larger evil drama. The most useful return white capital derived from the BEE investment is that it has been removed from the public eye as different factions of the political elite fight over the BEE crumbs.
Revelations of petty corruption week after week serve this purpose very well. There is no discussion in larger society about the historical injustices that created modern South Africa and the need for reparations to be paid by white capital to the black community as a whole.
The white debt to the black community can’t be paid in BEE instalments. The logic of capitalism breeds greed, fear and a “feeding” frenzy. The revelations that the ANC would directly benefit from the Eskom deal to sort out a mess it has created was the first sign that things are falling apart badly.
Now there are further reports that the ruling party, through its business arm Chancellor House, has acquired more than 500 mining prospecting rights and has applied for another 400. This means corruption and theft are legalised and political connectivity is being used to loot on a grand scale.
When ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema’s nationalisation finally happens, we will be buying back our mineral rights from the ANC, which is currently helping itself for free. This is legalised theft at its best.
The tragedy of BEE is that it will not alter the fortunes of the black majority. At best it will create a layer of a black capitalist class that will continue the exploitative practices of apartheid, as we see with the Aurora mines.
On the other hand interventions such as affirmative action would only breed a new layer of black managers who would be personally well off while managing the apartheid production processes that exploit and exclude the black majority. Nothing short of democratising the economy will do.
BEE is the biggest hoax of the 21st century — it was hatched by white capital and implemented by the ANC alliance.