The BEE Debate

The Democratic Alliance has made Black Economic Empowerment an election issue. it has put the BEE policy of government in the centre of its campaign message. This matter has morphed to a level where it is now defining the empowerment of Black people as a strategic existential issue for the DA as a political party. They have drawn the line.

Black Economic Empowerment is an intervention policy to deal with the systemic and then state sponsored exclusion of Black people from participating in the economy. Notwithstanding that it was modelled as a restitutive policy and not a self standing thesis of empowering Black people, as a systemic policy to address the templates of economic dominance in South Africa it has a profound moral and normative standing. 

In a society where race and gender are stubborn vectors of all manner of analysis and continue to define access and opportunity, it is immature to target affirmative action programs such as Black Economic Empowerment. It is true, and arguably inarguable, that the post-apartheid state allowed most of its restitution policies to be a political elite project that isolated its visible beneficiaries into unfortunate categories of crass materialism. The perception of patronage for those close to political power is real and cannot be rationalised out of existence.

Without vitiating the statistically justifiable claims that the implementation of the otherwise legal Black Economic Empowerment policies, it is immoral to want to imagine South Africa as a society with the current access and opportunity demographics. The current reality is embarrassing. Economic participation in the South African economy still has race as an algorithm and requires state sponsored interventions that target exclusion of those targeted to be marginalised.  

The foundation of South Africa as a constitutional democracy is the pursuit of human dignity, social and economic justice, and the fulfilment of the Bill of Human Rights in the Constitution. It is therefore an obligation for anyone that lives under the legal firmament of the constitutional order to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the liberation promise in the Constitution. Supreme law of the country includes the supremacy of its restitutive objects aptly captured in its opening two lines, "we the people of South Africa, Recognise the injustices of our past".

It would be important for the opposition complex against the African National Congress as a political party that governed or misgoverned the country on the basis of what the Constitution had provided, not to be equated with the Constitution itself. The ANC is not the Constitution and neither is it government. It is a constitutional obligation for all that live in South Africa to recognise the injustices of the past, and proceed to heal the divisions of the past this has caused. To do this, all South Africans, the DA included, should demonstrate an unwavering and unencumbered, commitment to establish a society based on democratic values, human dignity, social justice and fundamental human rights. 

Economic disempowerment is a recognised injustice of the past. It is isolatable for state sponsored interventions that should make its eradication to include legislative mechanisms that make economic empowerment enforceable by and through the law. Lawfulness in South Africa is or should be incomplete if it does not deal with recognised injustice and healing whatever divisions of our past. 

What might, and arguably, be plausible is the DA's courage to point out that the otherwise constitutionally correct Black Economic Empowerment policy might have been a victim of misgovernment by the ANC somewhere in its three decades of governing. By its own admission, the ANC has isolated nine of its thirty years as being wasted. This excludes the 'singing with dololo capacity moments", and "being accused number one on the corruption dock". 

The unsavoury relationship with the truth as pointed by former President Thabo Mbeki, and a litany of anti-the-constitution rhetoric by those in positions of power wearing the "ANC T-Shirt", as Mbeki has characterised some, should not make Black Economic Empowerment a casualty of incompetence. Black Economic Empowerment is a policy that requires a capable, professional, and meritocratic state or public service to be implemented as a demonstration that "we the People of South Africa, recognise the injustices of the past. A past the world has declared large parts of it as a crime against the humanity we are all part of.

South Africa cannot afford the gevaarisation of Black Economic Empowerment. It should not be the removal of past injustices that become voter mobilisation statements. Once an injustice is foregrounded as not being a problem because we oppose efforts to bring about the justice that should have been, the campaign to do so might find itself in a path towards being a variant or a hate speech of a special type. Justice and injustice are contextual, it is those wearing the injustice shoes, being past victims of disempowerment as an injustice or of disempowerment as a result of correcting. 

Instead of putting up polarisation billboards and conveniently excluding ourselves from the National Dialogue process, which might craft consensuses on these matters, it would be prudent to reset and remember that South Africa, including its economy, belongs to all who live in it; we the people.