BEE Is a Flawed and Failed Policy
Dr Thami Mazwai says he shudders with disbelief at efforts to scrap BEE. But given the failure of BEE to uplift blacks, it is amazing that Mazwai persists in advocating its continuance (Business Report, February 25).
Nowhere in his attempt to justify BEE does he cite the fact that unemployment has tripled since 1994. Nowhere does he cite the research of Wits. Professor William Gumede, who posits that over R1 trillion in funds transferred in the form of BEE deals have benefited only a handful of blacks (15% according to Dr Anthea Jeffery) while creating a tight network of fixers, frontmen, political connections and tenderpreneurs (see: Daily Friend, October 17, 2021).
Overall, Professor Gumede described BEE as “one of the most wasteful, costly and ineffective redistribution strategies devised in any post-colonial society since the end of WW2.” Equally appalling, as the Daily Friend noted, BEE is for all intents and purposes a proxy war between black and white elites about who controls resources and power.
The egregious nouveaux riche image of BEE is on display in upmarket suburbs and shopping centres, particularly in the car parks. For those who have worked their lifetimes or who are modest salary earners or those who can’t get a job because of their demographic status, the common sight of some youngster driving a million Rand vehicle, that Dr Mazwai, is what causes them to shudder with disbelief.
Amazingly, Dr Mazwai applauds the World Bank’s citation of how China wiped out 95% of its poverty through mass entrepreneurship. Yet in the same breath, he urges the “aggressive implementation” of BEE. Can’t he see that BEE, with its demographic quotas and Byzantine bureaucracy, is exactly what is throttling mass entrepreneurship?
BEE has had over a quarter of a century to prove itself by lowering unemployment and reducing inequality. Instead, it has achieved the opposite. Thus, by insisting BEE continues and is more aggressively applie,d reminds one of a definition of stupidity: expecting a different result from the continued application of a flawed policy.
