The Democratic Alliance’s recently unveiled Economic Inclusion for All Bill erroneously wants South Africans to believe that the playing field has been levelled. The policy tells us that poverty in South Africa is an equal-opportunity affliction, untouched by history and indifferent to race. They claim nonracial inclusion, but this is regressive as it is done at the expense of Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) policy.
The DA would have us believe that black South Africans were not structurally disadvantaged and that democracy itself miraculously neutralised inequality. However, the legacy of exclusion from economic opportunities for black people remains and was not miraculously corrected by the vote.
According to Statistics South Africa’s 2024 Labour Force Survey, black Africans make up more than 80% of the population but hold less than 15% of top management positions in the formal economy. This is not a coincidence, but the architecture of inequality persisting through time. This and many reports by the department of labour and KPMG released over the last decade indicate that despite affirmative action policies 70% of all new appointments and promotions go to white people. The DA policy suggests it is happy with this state of affairs.
To deny the racial dimension of disadvantage in South Africa is tantamount to engaging in historical amnesia. The DA’s policy substitutes need for race and proposes that government assistance be allocated without regard to race, as if deprivation were randomly distributed across society.
They forget that authentic empowerment in this country cannot be colour blind because poverty is not. The overwhelming majority of those who are poor, unemployed and marginalised are black. To claim otherwise is to confuse the symptoms of inequality with equality itself.
True nonracialism does not mean pretending race no longer matters. It means working consciously until it no longer does. That requires policies that see race clearly and confront its consequences directly.
The DA’s proposal is not new. It is a recycled conservative idea that resists transformation under the guise of fairness.
It seeks to preserve the privilege enjoyed by a majority of their constituency while disarming those who seek access to opportunities. The reality we cannot ignore is that only a tiny fraction of the ownership of the economy is in the hands of black people ― this doesn’t seem to worry the DA much.
Their policy reduces black people to a bunch of employees who must be kept far away from the means of production; accordingly they are only good enough as a mass production of blue-collar workers. If this is not the case, why are there no proposals that would change ownership patterns for key economic sectors? Or maybe this will be in draft two of this poorly thought out policy?
B-BBEE, despite its flaws, remains an expression of justice. It is government’s acknowledgment that equity requires more than equal opportunity. It requires redress.
Redress is conspicuously absent from the DA’s vocabulary. They want South Africans to believe efficiency and not moral obligation will correct centuries of economic exclusion. This is why their model, which removes race as a measure, undermines the foundation of our democracy’s social contract. That contract rests on the promise that those who were excluded will be brought into the centre of the economy through deliberate policy.
The DA continues to argue that B-BBEE benefits only a connected elite, which is convenient for their agenda. The system has been exploited by a select few, but loopholes that require tightening should not mean the complete abandonment of transformation.
Enforcement of the policy through accountability and greater coordination by relevant stakeholders is what is required. If anything BEE needs to be properly funded to ensure more black people can start successful enterprises that can create jobs.
Trillions of rand are not being invested by private and public organisations to ensure renewed economic activity because of the negativity towards empowerment policies. This is where the focus must be instead of a reverse gear that the DA wants us to embarrassingly engage.
The DA’s model claims to reward impact and need. But who defines impact in a society where access itself is unequal? How do you measure need when deprivation is rooted in race? Without historical context, need becomes a bureaucratic trick that allows privilege to masquerade as merit.
The DA’s policy goes against progress. It is regression dressed up as reform. It is a retreat from transformation at the very moment South Africa needs acceleration.
If implemented, the DA’s policy would freeze inequality in its current form, preserving economic power in the hands of those already advantaged and predominantly white minority, while declaring victory for “nonracialism”. True nonracialism does not mean pretending race no longer matters. It means working consciously until it no longer does. That requires policies that see race clearly and confront its consequences directly.
Economic prosperity will not flow from the erasure of history but from its honest reckoning. A genuinely inclusive economy recognises the uneven starting points of its citizens and acts deliberately to bridge them.
Transformation is not charity and it should cease to be treated as such by those who are desperate to preserve the gross inequalities in this country. Transformation is, however, an investment in stability, productivity and social cohesion.
The DA’s approach, by contrast, is an austerity of vision that seeks equality by ignoring inequality. It offers a narrow arithmetic that counts rands and points but not people and pain. It suggests that the market, left uncorrected, can achieve what history has denied. But markets do not heal. They reflect the power relations within which they operate. Without intervention, they reproduce inequality with remarkable efficiency.
South Africa does not need colour blind empowerment. It needs empowerment to be conscious. It needs a state that acknowledges that equality on paper is not equality in practice. It needs a private sector that understands that transformation is not a compliance exercise but a growth strategy. And it needs citizens who refuse to be seduced by the language of neutrality when neutrality serves only the status quo.
The vision that must guide us is not the DA’s imagined post-racial utopia but a real, lived equality that ensures that a child born in Soweto or Mamelodi has the same chance of success as one born in Sandton or Constantia. That vision cannot be realised through the DA’s “inclusion for all” because the starting conditions are not the same for all.
Democracy gave the black people of South Africa the right to compete and B-BBEE gives us the capacity to do so. To remove empowerment is to hollow out democracy itself. It is to declare that freedom without access is sufficient, and it is not.
As we continue to debate the future of B-BBEE, South Africans must choose between the comfort of denial and the courage of truth. The DA’s bill represents the former. It seeks to soothe the nation into forgetting that inequality has colour, shape and origin. But forgetting is not healing but rather a preservation of those who continue to benefit disproportionately.
Until the day our society’s starting lines are truly equal, empowerment must remain deliberate, race conscious and unapologetically focused on redress. Anything less will not unite us. It will preserve the distance between those who have and those who still wait.
Inclusion that ignores history is exclusion by another name.
Prof JJ Tabane is the editor of Leadership Magazine and adjunct professor of media studies at the University of Botswana. He is the convener of Frank Dialogue
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