Mashatile’s claims of BEE’s ‘great success’ are indefensible, says IRR

All available evidence contradicts Deputy President Paul Mashatile’s recent claims of BEE’s “great success”, says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).

This is the thrust of a letter the IRR sent to Mr Mashatile this week.

The Deputy President recently told the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) that BEE had been a “great success”, that it must be implemented more rigorously, and that to abandon it would be akin to “going back to apartheid”.

But the IRR points out in its letter that BEE has entrenched unemployment, widened inequality, deterred investment, and left the vast majority of South Africans poorer. 

Unemployment is worse today than before BEE became law. Unemployment now stands at 33.2%, compared with 22.6% in 2003, before BEE law was enacted.Black unemployment, which BEE was explicitly meant to reduce, is higher now than before the policy was introduced. If this is “success,” then it is a success the majority of South Africans beyond the confines of elite empowerment deals have been excluded from.

The IRR’s nationally representative polling in 2025 found that most South Africans reject not only the claim of BEE’s success, but the underpinning principles of the policy as well.

• 84% of South Africans favour merit-based hiring over the race-based practices demanded by BEE,
• 82% demand value-for-money procurement over the inflated and wasteful cost of BEE-based procurement, and
• 76% prefer voucher-based empowerment over affirmative action and BEE.

These views are even shared by a majority of ANC voters:

• 73% prefer merit over quotas,
• 65% favour value over race in procurement, and
• 77% say vouchers would do more to help them advance than BEE.

In other words, the very people in whose name BEE is defended do not regard it as empowerment. This dissatisfaction with failed policies offers the most credible explanation for the catastrophic slump in ANC support from close to 70% in 2004 to 40% − and the loss of its majority − in 2024.

Inequality among black South Africans has increased over the last two decades. A small, politically connected elite has amassed extraordinary wealth from ownership deals and procurement contracts, while the poor majority remain locked out. The gap between the richest and poorest black South Africans is wider today than even in the 1990s, clear proof that BEE has enriched elites rather than empowered the disadvantaged.

Economic stagnation has further undermined any claim of empowerment. GDP per capita has been flat or falling since 2008, leaving South Africans on average poorer than they were 15 years ago. Mining investment has been strangled by ownership requirements and shifting charters, with South Africa ranked 68th of 82 jurisdictions in the Fraser Institute’s mining index, far behind peers such as Botswana and Zambia.

Equally, ending BEE is not “going back to apartheid”. Against the evidence, Mr Mashatile’s claim is not only wrong, it is insulting to the people of South Africa and to the ANC’s diminishing legacy. Apartheid was a system of racial dehumanisation, oppression, and violence, marked by racial classification, division, and favouritism. To equate scrapping a failed race-based economic policy with apartheid is to trivialise its horrors while denying South Africans the debate they deserve about credible alternatives.

The IRR has advanced such an alternative − Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED). EED is non-racial, pro-growth, and outcomes-based. It rewards firms for doing what BEE has failed to achieve: creating jobs, building skills, investing in communities, and driving innovation.

Unlike BEE, it targets disadvantage directly, rather than race, and would deliver empowerment that is broad-based and real. And unlike BEE, it wholly rejects the lingering justification of the racial categories created by the Population Registration Act of 1950, and abandoned when the law was repealed in 1991.

The IRR therefore calls on the Deputy President to urgently provide verifiable, data-backed evidence of the “great success” he attributes to BEE. South Africa urgently requires real empowerment: policies that deliver work, opportunity, and growth. The IRR stands ready to present its internationally recognised Blueprint for Growth proposals to his office in pursuit of this goal.

Media contact: Hermann Pretorius IRR Head of Strategic Communications Tel: 079 875 4290 Email: hermann@irr.org.za

Media enquiries:

Anneke Burns

IRR Public Relations

+27 71 423 0079

anneke@abpr.co.za