Lest we forget, black people did not invent black economic empowerment.
Our forebears didn’t spend years in prison, suffer the misery of exile, risk their livelihoods by downing tools at work, threaten their future by boycotting school classes and even lay down their lives in the liberation struggle so that, someday, a few would have the privilege to own 30% stakes in white-owned companies.
You can go as far back as the founding of the Union of South Africa, and the subsequent African response in the form of the formation of the South African Native National Congress. The demand was clear, the right for black people to build their own enterprises without being impeded by discriminatory legislation and state practices.
For instance, take the African Claims document crafted by Dr AB Xuma’s ANC in 1943 in response to the adoption of the Atlantic Charter by FD Roosevelt’s US, Winston Churchill’s UK and other countries that were to be central in the formation of the post WWII international order.
“We protest very strongly against all practices that impede the obtaining of trading licences by Africans in urban and rural areas, and we equally condemn the confinement of African economic enterprise to segregated areas and localities. We demand the recognition of the right of the Africans to freedom of trade,” reads the African Claims document.
Even the Freedom Charter – adopted in Kliptown, Soweto, in 1955 and whose economic clause is sometimes dismissed by some in the chattering classes as too socialist-oriented – speaks of “all people” having “equal rights to trade where they chose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions”.
Our forebears were begging for no handout. They were not asking for crumbs from anyone’s table. They wanted their own table.
But, as the likes of the late professor Sampie Terreblanche have aptly demonstrated over the years, BEE – in its original form – was the invention of the white business elite fearful, in the early 1990s, that a post-apartheid government will nationalise the mines, take over the banks and impose stringent trading conditions for other industries.
So to have a direct beneficiary of apartheid, Pretoria-born Elon Musk – the world’s richest man – accusing democratic SA of having “openly racist ownership laws” just because of BEE must rank among the highest insults this country has suffered in recent years.
In a clip doing rounds on social media that appears to have been taken from a Reuters interview, Musk’s father Errol even goes as far as to suggest that the government is waging a “war on white people in SA”. This perhaps explains where US President Donald Trump, who is close friends with Musk junior, gets this idea that SA is treating “certain classes of people VERY BADLY”.
Trump has gone on to claim that white people’s properties were being confiscated, without providing a shred of evidence for his fiction.
If anything, post-apartheid SA has often bent over backwards to allay the fears of big business and the propertied classes – sometimes to the frustration of the vast majority who yearn for a country where the colour of one's skin doesn’t mostly determine whether they would be poor or well to do.
Apologists of the economic status quo are now opportunistically using the threats by Trump and his friend Musk to call on government to abandon its constitutional mandate of redressing the balances of the past.
Like the Nats in the dying days of apartheid, they are trying to hoodwink us into believing that, left to their own devices, the markets would eventually deliver the kind of economic growth that would make the cake big enough for all to share.
But the lived experience of the majority does not attest to this. Instead, where there has been little or no regulation, there has hardly been any deracialisation. Hence the need to use a combination of instruments – including BEE processes – to build the kind of economy and country our grandchildren would not have to still fight over.
Ideally, the best instrument would be a focussed programme on entrepreneurship. After all small enterprises do not only help grow the economy, they create real jobs. But as you would hear from most black people who have tried unsuccessfully to venture into business, access to finance is the main stumbling block.
Defending themselves from accusations in parliament that banks discriminate against black people seeking funding for business purposes, Standard Bank SA CEO Kenny Fihla had this telling response: “Credit decisions are by their nature discriminatory. Africans do not have an asset base one could leverage.”
They do not have the “asset base” because of our history, and that is precisely why we need the policies and legislation that Musk denounces.
Although we desperately need foreign investment, staying on course to transform the economy is in our long-term interest. Besides, just because Trump and Musk are now in charge in Washington doesn’t mean the whole world suddenly does not remember the painful history we are recovering from.
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