SETUMO MOHAPI | Gumede’s R1-trillion BEE number needs rigorous scrutiny

A senior academic title is a form of borrowed public authority. To ordinary readers, it signals that the person who holds it will conduct their public intellectual work with rigour, transparency and academic honesty.

When that authority is used to advance quantitative claims in a live policy contest, the numbers are not treated as harmless conjectures of a partisan polemicist or an uninformed commentator.

Instead, they often become technical artefacts that audiences, including impressionable students, distant researchers, agenda-shaping journalists and decision-makers across society, accept as credible evidence and subsequently transmit through university halls, academic conferences, newsrooms, boardrooms, diplomatic desks, international trade forums, courts and legislatures, where they are hardened into working knowledge, laws, policies, business decisions and official actions that can affect people far removed from the discourse itself.

South Africa’s current economic transformation efforts are purposeful and deliberate. They must redress the grave and systematic harms inflicted on black people under apartheid; they must drive economic inclusion as well as economic growth; and they must advance social justice.

Transformation policy is not a hermetically sealed domestic conversation, and now properly features in global narratives about South Africa’s investment climate, trade posture and diplomatic alignment.

As with any complex system, these efforts will necessarily move through cycles of design, build, operate, measure, analyse and optimise, and within that context, debate about policy design, implementation choices and efficacy is both normal and necessary.

Accepting this, it is also important to caution that a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for success is that participants, particularly those whose influence is anchored by borrowed public authority, adhere to basic rules of intellectual conduct.

It is against this backdrop that we assess a large number (“the number”) that has recently entered the economic transformation debate and is now cited, locally and internationally, as evidence in arguments about South Africa’s transformation trajectory under broad-based black economic empowerment: specifically, the claim that “conservatively, R1-trillion has been moved between under 100 people since 1994”.

This number, together with its related claims, entered the mainstream through University of the Witwatersrand Prof William Gumede’s column, “BEE is killing the economy and must be ditched” (Sunday Times, May 25 2025). It was then repeated in interviews and secondary reporting.

Alongside the number sit additional quantitative, or quasi-quantitative, claims by Gumede, including that:

• BEE has led to increased poverty, unemployment and inequality in South Africa;
• South Africa’s BEE model has “created a model of corruption” because people set up companies “just to get a contract”; and
• BEE deals in the mining sector resulted in the creation of “47 multi-billionaires” (Daily Investor, January 11 2026).

Beyond May 2025, the number travelled further, together with the public policy opinion and recommendations it anchors. It is reproduced as a fact claim by advocacy and commentary platforms, including the Free Market Foundation (June 12 2025). It is restated in business coverage, including BusinessTech (June 9 2025) and the Financial Mail (October 23 2025). It is deployed in party-political messaging and legislative advocacy, including by the Democratic Alliance (October 20 2025).

Transformation policy is not a hermetically sealed domestic conversation, and now properly features in global narratives about South Africa’s investment climate, trade posture and diplomatic alignment.

A sensational but untestable headline number can indeed become external ammunition used to justify decisions that affect jobs, capital allocation and the policy space available to an elected government.

Gumede’s number has indeed become part of the international risk narrative about South Africa. Directly or indirectly, it is being used to influence capital allocation and trade posture, and to inform choices that affect whether millions of poor black South Africans, whose deprivation is rooted in apartheid’s legacy, gain access to jobs, education and dignity.

Now, it is completely immaterial to me that Gumede holds strong views or that his views may be located far from mine on the geopolitical-economic spectrum.

The deep difficulty I have is his number and, in particular, the manner of its genesis, diffusion, integration and impact. Gumede’s number is unproven; the research behind it is unverified; the report or publication that carried it is unpublished; the underlying data set has not been produced; the methodology remains opaque.

This is a lot of grey for such a large consequential number.

Neither I, nor anyone I know has been able to locate a published technical paper, technical note or data set that would allow his claims to be independently verified or formally interrogated. Furthermore, the B-BBEE Commission is not in possession of any technical note, data set, or report supporting the estimate, despite it requesting similar material in the course of engaging related claims.

Compounding the problem, the number is routinely presented alongside Gumede’s senior academic title and his association with the Wits School of Governance, which signals credibility to ordinary readers. The effect is captured in the way the claim is framed and exported, for example:

“World attention is increasingly focused on South Africa. In the vast, rich country of extremes and diversity, human dramas are played off every day. It is the country of gold, diamonds, apartheid and Soweto. Despite this, a crucial element of South African political reality has largely escaped detection: the BEE billionaires.

Gumede should not get a free pass.

“In South Africa, the motives of the beneficiaries of BEE are increasingly being questioned. Wits professor William Gumede is quoted as saying: “Black economic empowerment has led to increased poverty, unemployment and inequality in South Africa. Over R1-trillion has moved between fewer than 100 (politically connected) individuals since 1994...” – Viv Vermaak (July 6 2025).

For an ordinary reader who takes a university’s reputation as a form of public trust, the combination of a senior academic title and Wits’s reputation as a centre of academic excellence reasonably implies that the work underpinning the number meets basic standards of academic rigour.

When that trust is used, even indirectly, to authenticate large and contentious numerical claims, the institution arguably has a responsibility to ensure the claims are either properly published and independently replicable, or clearly framed as unpublished estimates or personal opinion not verified for compliance with basic academic standards of rigour.

I have, for this reason, published an open letter to the University of the Witwatersrand and the Wits School of Governance. Gumede should also be invited to publish a short technical note or working paper that makes all the quantitative claims (including the R1-trillion number) and publish that disclosure, or link to it, alongside any further republication or discussion of the estimate.

Transformation policy sits at the centre of our social compact, and it should be defended, contested and reformed on the basis of evidence and numbers we can all test transparently. Gumede should not get a free pass.

• Mohapi is an engineer by training, a former public-service practitioner, and a current venture-builder in impact, developmental and transformational data-driven digital economy businesses