“Historically excluded South Africans…are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.” Steve Biko, I Write What I Like

South African black business leaders have increasingly criticised the post-1994 political settlement for failing to treat Black Economic Empowerment as a sufficiently structural project of economic transformation. Their critique is not limited to uneven implementation or weaknesses in administrative design. Rather, it targets the persistent architecture of economic ownership, control, finance, procurement, and industrial participation, much of which still reflects the historical imprint of apartheid political economy. The 1994 democratic transition decisively altered the political franchise, but it did not, in itself, fundamentally reconstitute the distribution of economic power produced through colonial dispossession, racial capitalism, and apartheid exclusion.

This essay argues that contemporary contestation over BEE should be interpreted not merely as a technical dispute about compliance points, procurement rules, or politically connected enrichment, but as part of a broader struggle over the organisation and control of South Africa’s political economy. The language of “regime change” is often presented as a democratic response to governance failure. However, in the South African context, any analysis of regime change must also examine the economic interests it may consolidate, the interests it may displace, and the institutional order it may produce after shifts in political power.

Political economy, hegemony and substantive equality

This essay rests on four interrelated theoretical propositions. First, political economy is not a neutral description of markets, but an analysis of how power, institutions, property relations, law, and class interests organise economic life. On this view, markets are historically constituted rather than naturally self-regulating. The institutional approach is useful because it treats the economy as a historically specific social organisation embedded in wider social and political institutions. This matters for South Africa because apartheid did not merely distort an otherwise neutral economy; it actively constituted an economic order through law, coercion, spatial planning, labour control, racial exclusion, and state-backed accumulation.

Second, the contest over BEE can be read through the lens of hegemony. Durable power, including economic power, is maintained not only through coercive institutions, but also through consent produced in civil society. In contemporary South Africa, the struggle over BEE is therefore also a struggle over common sense: whether society comes to regard historical redress as a democratic obligation or as an irrational interference with market efficiency. The ideological construction of BEE as corruption, racial preference, or economic inefficiency is not simply descriptive; it is part of a broader contest to define the boundaries of legitimate economic policy.

Third, BEE should be located within a theory of substantive equality rather than a narrow theory of formal non-discrimination. Formal equality asks whether the law treats individuals alike in the present; substantive equality asks whether law and policy can transform the structural conditions that prevent historically disadvantaged groups from participating on equal terms. This distinction is central to the South African constitutional order because redress is not an exception to equality but one of its enabling conditions. In this sense, race-conscious measures are not necessarily opposed to non-racialism; they may be instruments through which a non-racial society becomes materially possible.

Fourth, the justice claim underlying BEE involves both redistribution and recognition. The distinction helps because it shows that justice cannot be reduced to cultural recognition or material redistribution alone. In the South African case, racial capitalism produced both economic dispossession and status subordination. BEE’s legitimacy therefore depends on whether it can address the distribution of assets, opportunities, skills, and ownership while also affirming the equal standing of those historically excluded from economic citizenship. A purely symbolic empowerment regime would fail because it leaves material inequality intact; a purely technocratic redistribution regime would fail if it ignored dignity, historical injury, and the political meaning of inclusion.

Political freedom without economic transformation

As the real economy confronts persistent structural constraints and weak growth in income per capita, the case for a more coherent programme of economic transformation has become more, rather than less, compelling. The limits of formal political inclusion become most visible where they are not accompanied by material economic restructuring. Unless economic transformation is reconnected to the wider liberation project and to the substantive equality commitments of the 1996 Constitution, changes in the political landscape may leave intact the underlying economic relations that reproduce poverty, unemployment, inequality, and racialised exclusion.

The 2024 elections, the approaching 2026 local government elections, and the longer trajectory towards 2029 should therefore be read not only as contests over party performance, but also as struggles over the state’s ideological orientation, the permissible scope of democratic economic policy, and the legitimacy of redistributive instruments. The decisive question is whether a changing political order will deepen the democratic transformation of the economy or normalise a form of political democracy that leaves the inherited distribution of economic power substantially undisturbed.

BEE as a means to an end, an instrument, and not a destination

The emergence of black millionaires and billionaires, and their influence in selected sectors of the economy, has led policymakers, analysts, and pundits to wax lyrical about BEE’s gains in South Africa’s economic transformation journey. These gains cannot be dismissed. They matter because apartheid was not only a system of political disenfranchisement but also a system of deliberate exclusion from property, capital, education, markets, and industrial opportunity. Yet the appearance of individual black wealth must not be confused with the transformation of the economy itself. The central test is not whether a small number of black people have entered boardrooms, but whether the economy has been structurally opened to black ownership, management control, productive enterprise, skills formation, and industrial capability.

Economic transformation, not BEE as a label, has always been the endgame. BEE should be understood as one policy instrument within a wider constitutional and developmental project: creating an inclusive economy in which those historically dispossessed can own, manage, produce, innovate, and accumulate sustainably. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment framework formally recognises this wider ambition through elements such as ownership, management control, skills development, enterprise and supplier development, and socio-economic development. These elements are intended to move empowerment beyond symbolism and into the structure of economic participation itself; they should not be the end state.

This distinction matters because opponents of BEE often reduce it to patronage, fronting, rent-seeking, or racial preference. These abuses exist and must be confronted. However, treating abuse as the policy’s essence evades the historical problem it was designed to address. Colonialism and apartheid were fundamentally economic systems; their episteme is inextricably linked to an extractive mercantilist economic paradigm. Their undoing cannot be achieved through elections, symbols, or constitutional declarations alone. It requires deliberately restructuring access to the means of production such as land, capital, credit, procurement, ownership, technology, and productive assets.

The economy as a site of unresolved power

Lately, and amid weak economic performance, the continued dominance of the economy by historically advantaged interests has once again occupied the centre of discourse about BEE. Unemployment, poverty, inequality, and sluggish domestic investment have emboldened those who argue that the economic status quo is both morally indefensible and developmentally unsustainable. Recent public debate has highlighted persistent high unemployment, severe youth unemployment, and weak growth as the backdrop against which BEE is now being reassessed. In this context, the charge that the economic establishment has benefited from democracy without sufficiently sharing economic power is not merely rhetorical; it reflects a lived reality for millions who remain consumers and spectators rather than producers and owners.

A central analytical difficulty is the divergence between public commitments to transformation and institutional practices that continue to protect established patterns of ownership, market concentration, credit allocation, and supplier dependence. Corporate endorsement of inclusion has too often coexisted with limited restructuring of value chains and barriers to effective participation by emerging black firms. Where formally neutral market rules continue to produce racialised outcomes, the legitimacy of those rules becomes increasingly contested.

The normative aspiration of social cohesion and reconciliation was always likely to encounter strain if the structure of economic power remained largely insulated from democratic transformation. The oligopolistic character of key sectors, the concentration of financial power, and the dominance of established firms in strategic value chains have limited how far political inclusion has translated into broad-based economic citizenship. The resulting tensions are therefore not incidental; they are symptoms of a political settlement whose democratic dimensions advanced more quickly than its economic settlement.

Finance, ownership and the question of a black productive class

The recurring proposal for a transformation-oriented black bank illustrates this wider institutional problem. The issue is not simply whether an additional financial institution should be created, but whether South Africa’s financial architecture is capable of allocating capital in ways that advance economic restructuring. Risk models, collateral requirements, networks of institutional trust, and established lending practices often reproduce inherited advantage and constrain the emergence of black industrialists. A financial system more deliberately oriented towards patient capital for industrialisation, manufacturing, agriculture, infrastructure, and primary industry development could have converted empowerment from a largely transactional project into a productive nation-building strategy.

Organised black business formations such as the Black Business Council, NAFCOC, and professional bodies have therefore been right to insist on a genuine recalibration of the economy and its templates for managing who enters. Their demand is not simply for access to tenders, though procurement, as a means to rebalance economic access, remains important. It is for an economy that enables black entrepreneurs to build firms, own assets, employ workers, innovate, export, and participate in high-value sectors. A country cannot build durable reconciliation on political rights for the majority and economic command for a minority.

The constitutional debate and the political meaning of non-racialism

It is prudent to pause and submit that civil society organisations such as AfriForum and other opponents of BEE have consistently sought to frame their opposition through the language of non-racialism. They argue that the constitutional value of non-racialism is undermined by policies that use race-conscious measures to redress historical disadvantage. Yet this argument often isolates non-racialism from the Constitution’s equality clause and from the historical context that made corrective measures necessary. Section 9 of the Constitution prohibits unfair discrimination while also allowing legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons disadvantaged by unfair discrimination. Properly understood, non-racialism cannot mean blindness to the racialised distribution of economic power created by law, violence, and policy over centuries.

The incendiary rhetoric against BEE from an emboldened, historically advantaged economic establishment, amid a changing political environment, has returned the policy to the centre of economic debates. At the same time, litigation-driven challenges to sectoral transformation measures are increasingly shaping the terrain on which empowerment policy is defended or weakened. Major law firms, for example, have challenged the legal sector code on legality and rationality grounds.

More recently, a High Court ruling on BEE-related requirements in the property sector was reported to have set aside rules linked to operating licences. These developments show that BEE is increasingly contested not only in party politics and public discourse, but also through judicial review, administrative law, and the technical vocabulary of legality and rationality. Yet a purely procedural reading of such disputes may obscure the extent to which economic regulation is itself embedded in historically produced power relations. The question is therefore not whether empowerment measures must comply with legality; they plainly must. The more difficult analytical question is how legality, equality, and historical redress should be reconciled in an economy whose institutional structure remains marked by past political choices.

This is precisely why BEE requires a renewed intellectual and policy defence. If its defenders rely only on moral memory, they will lose the argument to those who frame empowerment as irrational, inefficient, corrupt, or unconstitutional. Until economic transformation is elevated to a societal matter, where “we, the people” share a commitment to it and accept the rules that hold the programme together, BEE will remain a quasi-national obligation. If its defenders rely only on compliance machinery, they will lose society’s trust. The defence of BEE must be constitutional, economic, moral, and developmental. It must show that empowerment is not a deviation from non-racial democracy, but a condition for making non-racial democracy real.

From compliance to developmental accountability

The contemporary critique of BEE has been strengthened by the claim that state capture, corruption, weak cadre development, and administrative incompetence are intrinsic to transformation policy. This claim is politically effective because it attaches legitimate public frustrations to a broader rejection of redistributive policy. Abuses have undoubtedly occurred, including fronting, procurement manipulation, politically connected beneficiaries, and enforcement failures. However, these failures point to weaknesses in design, governance, and implementation rather than to the illegitimacy of transformation itself. To collapse BEE into corruption is to allow implementation failures to discredit the constitutional imperative of economic redress.

What is needed is a shift from compliance-centred BEE to developmental accountability. Empowerment should be judged not only by certificates, scorecards, and once-off transactions, but by whether it builds productive capacity, expands employment, transfers skills, supports black-owned enterprises, deepens industrialisation, and changes ownership patterns in strategic sectors. The B-BBEE Commission’s ten-year transformation report presents an evidence-based assessment of progress, persistent challenges, and opportunities to strengthen implementation across ownership, management control, skills development, enterprise and supplier development, and socio-economic development. Public reporting on that assessment indicates improvement in some areas, while also acknowledging stagnation and marginal decline in others. This mixed record calls for neither giving up nor complacency, but for reform with a clearer developmental purpose.

Regime change and the future of BEE

Read through this theoretical lens, an economy is an institutional terrain in which interests are organised, mediated, contested, and stabilised through firms, markets, laws, and state policies. Attempts to redress historical injustice within such a terrain necessarily affect existing distributions of advantage and therefore generate political, legal, and ideological resistance. In a society whose economy was shaped by colonial and apartheid forms of exclusion, economic transformation cannot be treated as an external intervention into an otherwise neutral market order. Instead, it must be understood as a contest over the institutional inheritance of that order and the normative direction of democratic reconstruction.

Consequently, the construction of BEE as deceitful, unconstitutional, inefficient, or morally exhausted should be analysed as part of a broader ideological struggle over the legitimacy of economic transformation. Over time, such framings may shape public attitudes in ways that weaken the institutional foundations of empowerment policy. This is where regime change and political economy intersect. If the political order that authorised BEE loses legitimacy, the policy may lose the social consent and administrative capacity required for effective implementation.

In such a context, the economic establishment would not necessarily need to abolish empowerment explicitly. It could instead narrow its scope, weaken its legitimacy, litigate its instruments, and recast it as a constraint on growth rather than a condition for inclusive development. The resilience of inherited economic structures lies precisely in their capacity to present historically produced advantage as market neutrality and redistributive intervention as distortion.

The time has therefore come for organised business formations, policymakers, constitutional scholars, trade unions, and developmental state institutions to overhaul the prevailing understanding of BEE. The task is not to defend every past transaction or every administrative weakness. The task is to defend the principle that political democracy without economic citizenship is incomplete. Persistent templates of economic dominance have isolated millions of potential economic citizens into enclaves of consumption, dependency, and spectatorship. High unemployment is not only a labour-market statistic; it is an indictment of a democratic order that has not yet resolved the economic trauma inherited from colonialism and apartheid.

Conclusion: economic transformation as democratic completion

BEE is at a crossroads because South Africa is at a crossroads. The country can either let the language of regime change become a vehicle for restoring the confidence of entrenched economic power, or use the present crisis to renew the constitutional promise of substantive equality. The first path will produce a democracy increasingly hollowed out by inequality, racialised wealth, and social anger. The second path requires a disciplined, transparent, broad-based empowerment regime that links ownership to production, procurement to enterprise development, skills to industrial strategy, and transformation to measurable public value.

The struggle over BEE is therefore not a side debate in South Africa’s democracy. It is one of the central battlegrounds over the meaning of freedom itself. If political liberation is to be completed, economic transformation must stop being treated as a negotiable irritant and be reclaimed as a constitutional, developmental, and moral necessity. The unfolding contest is not merely about who governs after the next election. It is about who owns, who decides, who produces, and who benefits from the economy that democracy was meant to transform.