The BEE Debate and this election. The regime to change is more economic.

South African black business leaders have been decrying the post-1994 Establishment (mainly political) for not having been serious about Black Economic Empowerment. They argue that current efforts do or will not recalibrate the templates of economic participation, exclusion, and dominance. Notwithstanding the promulgation of a regulatory framework to advance BEE by the government since 1994, the voices of discontent at how the government has managed this policy have grown acutely louder in the 6th Administration.

As the true economy is experiencing structural growth challenges and underperforming to ignite better GDP per capita, an opportunity to be frontal in dealing with economic transformation grows proportionately. Unless economic transformation (or freedom in other parlances) is reconnected to the broader comprehensive liberation project and promise in the Constitution, which the upcoming elections are still about, it will be a own goal to celebrate any change in the political landscape that does not have this aspect as part of the package going forward. If there is a regime to change, it is economic. 

The emergence of black millionaires and billionaires and their influence on selected sectors of the economy have had policymakers, analysts, and pundits waxing lyrical about the hope-measured benefits of BEE in the economic transformation journey of South Africa. The understanding has always been that economic transformation requires a patriotic, committed class of black industrialists. They should numerically be more than black shareholders in the non-industrial sector of the economy.

Economic transformation, and not BEE, has always been seen as the endgame to usher in total emancipation as a condition precedent for the continued stability of the post-1994 democratic order. While South Africa's historical experience is narrated as having been political, the brute truth is that it was a manifestation of the economic interests at play from the first day it was formalised as a non-black, only constitutional democracy. Colonialism and its later adjunct apartheid were fundamentally economic systems, and their undoing should be thus.

Lately, and as a result of current economic performance, the non-Black African dominance of the economy has once again occupied the centre stage of all discourse about (Black) Economic Empowerment. Truths of unemployment, poverty, inequality, and an unannounced investment in industrialisation strike by local investors can only embolden those who want to challenge the economic status quo. Invariably, charges of deceit by those that predominate economic life in South Africa are arguably exact and sincere. 

A great deal of hypocrisy occurs when captains of industry behave as though they are committed to the recalibration of templates of economic participation to allow for black participation when their actual conduct displays a commitment to the maintenance of the status quo. Inconsistent with their well-publicised rhetorical claims to economic transformation and the moral virtue of wanting to do it, the reaction of the (political and economic) Establishment to private-sector collusion in choking economic growth is so silent that the silence has attracted matching louder voices of discontent. 

Hopes of social cohesion and deepened reconciliation have always had, as a risk, the capacity of the economy to reflect meritoriously the demographic makeup of South Africa. Given the oligopolistic character of the South African economy, its value chains, and a few dominant banks' stringent hold on the financial sector, such hopes are proving to have been based on some form of an illusion. The sheer size of the economy and domestic market, and the outcomes of decades-long deskilling of the African majority, South Africa’s institutionalised caste, was bound to yield tensions which would put the economy at risk. 

Consider the call for the establishment of a black bank. The architecture of the financial services regime is loaded against this possibility, notwithstanding the availability of investment capital to do so. The algorithms that are in place to allow for such a decision are a constraint for attaining the objective. Had the financial services establishment chosen to 'bankroll' black economic empowerment through funding industrialisation and primary industry development, the simmering tensions about economic freedom would have been redirected towards social cohesion or nation-building. 

Organised business formations such as the Black Business Council, NAFCOC and professional bodies like the BMF have been calling for the genuine recalibration of the economy to allow for black inclusion and participation. The growing onslaught of what is now considered not to be the real economic transformation tool, BEE, by civil society organisations that display a preference for a pre-1994 status quo is a testament to a general preference by the economic establishment. 

The incendiary rhetoric against BEE by an emboldened right-wing economic establishment in the wake of a Cyril Ramaphosa presidency has brought the policy back to the centre of all discussions about the economy. The BMF is leading the charge with its theme of re-interrogating if not reinterpreting, BEE for the next phase of the democratic order, coalition government. The litigation-driven erosion of the BEE policy's perceived gains by black business and the establishment of jurisprudence to make some transformation non-negotiables illegal, despite their legitimacy, have made the concreteness of economic transformation reality a new distant. 

The highly funded and sophisticated onslaught against BEE, which has been interwoven with a narrative that miscarriages of cadre development are a function of dysfunctions in the BEE policy, is now punted as the cause of a choked economy. The strategic messaging of BEE and ill-conceived cadre development into the state capture and corruption narrative, including the error of positioning the architects of a 'comprehensive liberation project' as 'accused number one' in the dock on corruption, has dealt BEE a fatal credibility blow. The extraordinary appeal of the anti-state capture and corruption narrative, which has brought attention to the general ineptitude of some ‘cadre deployees’ and, by extension, selected aspects of the comprehensive liberation project, has put BEE into an integrity quagmire and ultimately disrepute. The outcomes of these narratives will have deep consequences for the integrity of the economic transformation project as the outstanding leg of the gallantly executed political dimension of the comprehensive liberation project. 

The pursuit of an ideal where the BEE policy is perceived as being deceitful and thus incorrect is well on track, and it is a funded enterprise. As it matures, its manifestations will be when the general societal psyche starts to undermine the legitimacy of the rules and institutions that underpin it. This will invariably find traction if an undergirding political order starts to lack legitimacy, in which case BEE as a policy might need to rely on other coercive means, extralegal or otherwise, rather than acceptance, as it can no longer expect the deference of the institutional prowess of the state.

The need for strategic shifts in the organised Black Business complexes to overhaul the prevailing understanding of BEE as a policy of necessity to effect economic transformation has arrived. The grip of the persistent templates of the economic dominance of South Africa's economy, which has, at best, isolated a substantial number of potential economic citizens into enclaves of consumers and spectators, needs to be fractured. The high numbers of unemployment in the country are an indictment that national election issues are not about the transformation of the structural issues in the economy. Economic exclusion should by now have been declared the trauma our democratic order needs to be rescued of. CUT!!!