BEE supposedly stands for ‘Black Economic Empowerment’, but South Africans aren’t fools and know that it actually stands for ‘Blatant Elite Enrichment’.
But don’t take our word for it! Let’s look instances where important ANC cadres have admitted that ‘Blatant Elite Enrichment’ has failed.
“BEE policies have not worked, and have not made South Africa a fairer and more prosperous country.”
"The present black economic empowerment policy... is with respect, not a cure-all to real broad-based black economic empowerment. Millions of black people feel left out and are very sceptical since they cannot enter the formal economy. They only see a few that largely benefited from tenderpreneurship and not from hard work.”
“This thing of having a bottle of water that you can get for R7 procured by the government for R27 because you want to create a middle-class person who must have a business is not on… It must stop.”
“We have to acknowledge that there have been pitfalls along the way. In the main, the story of Black Economic Empowerment over the last 15 years has been a story dominated by a few individuals benefiting a great deal.”
It been more than 15 years since ‘Blatant Elite Enrichment’ became government policy. It’s long overdue to ‘looks at the scoreboard’ and see the results.
Overall unemployment? Worse.
Black unemployment? Worse.
South Africa’s economic performance? Worse.
South Africa’s global competitiveness? Worse.
South Africa’s economic freedom and global ranking? Worse.
Now, while it would be unreasonable to place the full blame for these failures on ‘Blatant Elite Enrichment’ as government policy, there’s no two ways about it: BEE has been a disaster and must be scrapped now.
Policies must be measured by whether they’ve made life better for the people who need it most. On this key performance measure, BEE, well, sucks. And what’s worse is that the ANC bigshot elites know this. But why should they care? ‘Blatant Elite Enrichment’ has, after all, made them very comfortable, thank you very much.
Watch FAN's explainer on BEE:
Listen to FAN's podcast discussion about an alternative to BEE:
