President Cyril Ramaphosa is a machine.
Just back from a gruelling trip to Washington, he spent the first few days of this week promising a trillion rand in infrastructure spend, lecturing an Afrikaner MP on the economic rewards of BEE and, far away from Donald Trump, being outraged at the very thought of preventing Julius Malema from singing “Kill the boer” to large crowds in football stadiums.
His defence of BEE in parliament on Tuesday was a peach. Dressing down a FF+ MP for criticising the way the ANC is going about redressing the ills of apartheid, he found it “very worrying that we continue to have this notion that BEE is the one that’s holding our economy back. It is the partial and exclusive ownership of the means of production in our country that is holding this economy [back] from growing.”
I haven’t heard much about the means of production since I left university 50 years ago, but it is top of the presidential mind.
“We must allow more and more people to play an important role in the economy of our country,” he said. “And this is what baffles me by those who are opposed to BEE... do you want to see black people continuing to play the role of labourers, drawers of water, hewers of wood and consumers only?”
Ramaphosa’s chat is sometimes so rudimentary you wonder whether he is yanking the white chain because it’s so easy.
The fact is BEE is a cruel joke on the poor. They are, he said, cheered up by the sight of a firm owned by a black man. Yeah, right. I remember Imelda Marcos once telling me she owned thousands of pairs of shoes because it made Filipinos happy to see her in them.
It’s a catastrophe, and you would have thought that after so much failure someone in the ANC might wonder whether they need to change.
BEE might indeed be creating a cohort of black business shareholders or owners, but mainly because the hope is that they become a source of funds for the ANC.
With BEE, or what Ramaphosa repeatedly refers to as “inclusive growth” as its central impulse, economic growth has averaged 1.2% for the past 17 years and much less since he became president in 2018, the surge to 4.8% the year after Covid-19 notwithstanding.
The national debt is now so high at R5.4-trillion that we pay R1.2bn a day in interest, R48.4m an hour. Unemployment in the first quarter of 2025 was 32.9%, a record, and over 40% if you count people no longer looking for work.
It’s a catastrophe, and you would have thought that after so much failure someone in the ANC might wonder whether they need to change.
Ramaphosa thinks the problem is the absence of reforms in the way the state runs its monopolies, but the moment his reforms become awkward for the ANC they will be throttled. If, that is, they ever get beyond the effortless decision to allow the private sector to generate its own electricity.
The problem is not redress. No-one in their right mind thinks it’s not necessary. But how? And how hard, in the absence of growth, can the answer to that be? It’s one thing to say we shouldn’t forget apartheid, but quite another to use apartheid industrial policies as your development model.
BEE, or redress, should be both voluntary and, at the same time, incentivised by the state. A party so expert in the way capitalists function as is the ANC would surely by now have figured out that few investors walk away from a juicy tax break.
And, dear me, can the DA seriously not craft a way to use our economic calamity as an opportunity to sell an alternative to BEE that is attractive to the vast masses of our fellow citizens being left behind by it?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail
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