From elite enrichment to true empowerment: Pulling up South Africans.
Key topics:
BEE enriches elites, leaves most South Africans unemployed and poor.
EED targets disadvantage directly, non-racial, and empowers individuals.
Growth and opportunity, not racial quotas, drive real transformation.
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By John Endres*
The following is the text of an address I delivered late yesterday at a Liberal Sundowners event in Cape Town.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to speak with you today. It is a privilege to address people who carry such responsibility for the future of our country.
My topic is “Pulling up instead of trickling down: an alternative to BEE”.
Finding an alternative to BEE is not just an academic question. It is about the lives of millions of South Africans. It is about whether their future will be one of exclusion – or of opportunity.
Let us remind ourselves of where we stand today.
We are now more than three decades into our democracy. The Born Free generation is old enough to have children of its own.
The promise of 1994 was that freedom would bring not only political rights, but also expanding economic opportunity. For a time, that promise seemed within reach.
Between 2004 and 2008, our economy grew at 4.8% a year. As jobs were created, unemployment fell. Incomes rose and a new middle class began to emerge.
But since then, progress has stalled. Over the last decade, growth has been weak. The World Bank puts average growth for the most recent ten-year period at about 0.7%, with 0.8% in 2023 and 0.5% in 2024. That is not enough to move the dial on jobs or living standards.
Unemployment is the human face of this stagnation. The official unemployment rate is 33.2%, and on the expanded definition it is 42.9%. Those figures describe a job market in a structural crisis, not a cyclical downturn. Half of all the households in the country receive at least one government grant, and for a quarter of households grants are the main source of income.
