Reminiscing on true economic empowerment and its implications for social justice sets the stage for critical analysis and reader engagement.

South Africa has entered its proverbial hall of mirrors, where everyone must be brave enough to face a mirror and reflect on their origins, especially those who benefited from past injustices. This is because our South African identity stubbornly remains a point of discontent regarding the arrangements of economic and symbolic power that have escaped critical scrutiny. We are therefore compelled to examine the phenomenon of beneficiaries of past injustices and accept their recognition.  In recognising those injustices, we must ask whether our acknowledgement that they are there and true is simply about compliance to the Constitution or an attempt to uphold the status quo.

For posterity’s sake, we should question whether the recognition is a symptomatic feature of guilt management by those who continue to benefit from the injustice. Is this a form of political or social mastery to insulate the benefits of acknowledged injustices without committing to the political or epistemological reconfiguration of the injustice to promote social and economic justice?

 

The nature of the injustice recognised by the constitution involves changing power relations rooted in historical advantages, which have become invisible structures shaping opportunities and outcomes in the economy and political economy. 

 

This context has, over the past three decades, influenced how economic opportunity, access, and inclusion are regarded as tangible issues rather than merely social and economic justice projects, with the disintegration of traditional economic dominance models as a measurable outcome.

 

The structural challenges of altering the economic status quo are now algorithmic and connected to a global pro-North framework of dominance. This represents the dilemma of decolonisation and decoloniality as conditions for reshaping economic power in accordance with the principles of political influence achieved. The post-apartheid or post-colonial African state, which remains undefined, has not yet addressed this dilemma. 

 

The obsession with exploring economic empowerment through a perspective that values the wealth it brings has turned empowerment into the opposite of what it should be, rather than establishing a self-standing thesis of a non-racial empowerment programme. The avowed intransigence of templates of disempowerment and the refusal to quarantine the economic transformation spaces as an examinable category has normalised the unthinkability of the RSA economy outside its established demographics.

 

To provoke reflection and discussion, the completeness of a demographics-redefining economic empowerment thesis should be critically evaluated to examine how the desire to emulate certain empowerment models reproduces inequality. Without refuting the myth of economic equality in a capitalist society like South Africa, the least that true empowerment can do is ensure structured, state-intervention-driven equal opportunities. 

The aim should be to transfer the economic power determinants, especially those shaped by previous state policies, to all individuals. At the highest levels of success, economic empowerment ought to distinguish and potentially challenge individual, patronage-driven, chauvinism-inspired, and systemic oppression-based pursuits of advantage. It must also work towards the more complex goal of achieving structural economic and social change.

Economic empowerment must address the discriminatory aspects of absolute economic freedom and the tyranny of state power when unrestricted government control is permitted. Reconciling the free market system with economic or social justice is a fundamental aspect of economic empowerment in post-conflict regions that favour some at the expense of others.