Race-based policies misdiagnose poverty’s roots, deepening inequality instead of empowerment.
Key topics:
B-BBEE enriches elites, failing to uplift South Africa’s poorest citizens.
Race-based empowerment ignores real barriers: education, health, housing.
True reform needs merit-based, grassroots solutions like the IRR’s EED plan.
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“Broad-Based” Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) reduces being economically excluded to being black. Even if this unsupported and contentious position were true, B-BBEE would still be an inherently elitist policy that caters for an entrenched elite already equipped for high levels of economic participation, and leaves the poorest behind.
At best, it is an entrenchment policy and not an empowerment policy. At worst, it is a cynical smokescreen to justify the continual incestuous enrichment of an elite, using the unallayed socio-economic hardships of millions as justification.
If we take economic empowerment to mean a credible route from poverty to at least sustainable membership of the middle class, an honest assessment of the simple socio-economic facts will show that in South Africa, and likely elsewhere, blackness doesn’t cause poverty, nor does poverty cause blackness. The fact that there are wealthy black South Africans makes a factual mockery of any idea that having a black skin causes poverty. And the fact that there are poor white South Africans debunks any idea that a black skin leads to poverty.
For black children from an economically deprived place like Atteridgeville, there are, quite simply, multiple obstacles to their upward socio-economic mobility and the chance of one day joining the middle class. If their skin colour might be one of these factors, even the most ardent champion of B-BBEE cannot honestly say it’s the only one. Let’s take a clear-eyed view of what obstacles lie between black children and their joining the middle class.
