JAMIL F. KHAN | DA's anti-BEE policy seeks to erase affirmative action, ignore SA's past

In one of its latest stunts of political theatre, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has proposed a bill that does away with Blakck Economic Empowerment (BEE), claiming that the focus of our transformation policies should be poverty and not race. Further, Helen Zille claims that BEE was always designed for corruption, while saying that the DA acknowledges our country’s past and the need to address it.

The position is not that the system must be subject to oversight and stricter controls to prevent corruption – a role that an official opposition party should fulfil, especially now that it has been entrusted with more power to govern in a Government of National Unity (GNU). The position of the DA is to completely do away with a policy of affirmative action, after less than 30 years, after a period of 400 years of locking Black people out of the economies of both commerce and dignity. It seems then, that they do not actually acknowledge our past or the need to address it.

Foregrounding the racialised language that defines this policy, the DA creates the impression that BEE is policy aimed at harming white people. For context, StatsSA released data on the 29^th of January this year, noting that “on average white-headed households earned the highest income of R676 375 per annum. Followed by Indian/Asian-headed households (R417 431), coloured-headed households (R260 816) and black African-headed households (R143 632).”

Alongside this, a disproportionate amount of wealth in South Africa is concentrated in white hands, while comprising 9% of the population. This, of course, means that the majority of Black people in our country live at varying levels of poverty. What the DA refuses to acknowledge is that this connection is not a coincidence – it was engineered.

Through successive colonial establishments over centuries, white people in this country have had their economic power and prosperity designed by policies that were unapologetically race-based. The requirement of merit, that is so glibly hurled as an insult to Black people who have ascended the ranks of their professions, was never relevant for an apartheid system of White Economic Empowerment.

Even where an utter lack of skill or capability made white people unemployable, the system absorbed their failings to secure the ultimate goal of white economic dominance. Anika Teppo writes, entire suburban laboratories, such as Epping Gardens in Cape Town (now Ruyterwacht) were set up to tutor poor white people into respectable whiteness and save them from falling into the degeneracy of their Coloured neighbours in Elsie’s River.

Entire communities of white people were economically subsidised with the taxes that everyone paid to a government that refused them full citizenship. This happened specifically because they were white, and hence their economic power was a function of their race, and by implication, the economic deprivation of Black people was a function of their race. To deny the salience of race in policies of economic transformation is, in fact, to not only ignore but rewrite our past. While Black people are not the only people who are poor in this country, this history still dictates that a majority is and race-blind strategies of poverty alleviation risk replicating racialised bias in a world that still insists that white suffering or distress must be prioritised above all else.

The insistence on making BEE solely about tender fraud, and high-level corruption, that is very real and has had deadly consequences, is a wilful deflection strategy that overlooks a much broader impact of BEE policies. While I agree that the system has been abused to create a politically connected Black elite, we must not forget that through a manipulation of that same system, white corporate capital has been able to join hands with this supposedly specific “Black corruption” to continue to reap the rewards of collusion with elites that undermine an entire country’s interests.

This is not an invention of the African National Congress (ANC) leadership, but an inheritance of one of the most corrupt systems in history: apartheid. Additionally, the demographic in South Africa that has gained the most out of BEE has been white women, because the policy acknowledges the economic impact of gender oppression as well.

The insistence on BEE as a tool for fraud also ignores how these policies have transformed the lives of so many people who would never have had a chance before. While the idea of being a BEE hire or a quota appointment is wielded as a weapon to diminish Black people’s credibility and achievements, I have always been a proud and grateful beneficiary of our country’s BEE policies.

My journey through the university system of South Africa was initiated through a recruitment process that made a place for me, as a Coloured person, in the intellectual and economic future of this country. My tertiary education was largely subsidised by funds and bursaries that demanded academic merit. Within this system, still only the “brightest” and “most promising” Black youth are prioritised, dispelling the myth that BEE is about handing unearned opportunities to Black people over highly qualified white people. The Black people who receive these opportunities in the vast majority of cases are often more qualified than their white competitors.

What I know about my journey to becoming a scholar and thinker whose ideas receive a public platform, is that none of my hard work, brilliance, skill or talent would have seen the light of day had it not been for a policy of redress that acknowledges the generational opportunities that have been stolen from me and so many others, like me. And in a post-apartheid South Africa that did not adopt a substantive approach to redress and equality, we would have remained overlooked in favour of less talented and capable white peers, while the reason for our exclusion remained concealed by a bias towards 400 years of White Economic Empowerment.

BEE has been abused, surely, but the beneficiaries of this abuse are not simply a new Black elite, but a centuries-old collective of wealth hoarders who simply let a few new members in. None of this will ever take away from how deeply necessary the opportunities to at least pursue a chance at full citizenship, have been for so many people, including me. If the DA’s concern is truly corruption, they will throw their might into fighting for more oversight and accountability instead of trying to remove a system that insists on our inclusion in an economy that remains largely of benefit to white lives. BEE has barely begun to do the work is still needed for and we must make sure it succeeds.

Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.