For all the debates about transformation, one fact remains constant: under apartheid, whiteness functioned as a closed system of advantage. It could not be purchased, negotiated or earned. No level of black education, income or professional excellence opened the doors to ownership, capital or institutional power. Access to land, markets, finance and senior leadership roles was reserved for white South Africans by law and by design.
Three decades later, the formal barriers are gone. Yet in practice, the economy still reflects patterns that track race. And a new, unintended consequence of the broad-based BEE (BBBEE) framework has emerged: blackness has become something white-owned firms can lawfully acquire without transferring real control.
Consider a scenario that has become common across high-value sectors. A century-old, white-owned construction conglomerate seeks a multibillion-rand state contract. Instead of restructuring ownership or embedding black leadership with voting power, it performs a compliance-perfect but substance-thin transaction:
- Appoints two black nonexecutive directors, leaving executive and shareholder control intact;
- Allocates 8% to a BBBEE trust whose beneficiaries have no voting rights and whose dividends depend on distant future performance;
- Channels a portion of project value through black subcontractors who carry disproportionate delivery risk;
- Funds a modest bursary programme that yields reputational benefit but limited structural change.
On paper, the company achieves a high BBBEE level. In reality, effective ownership and control remain unchanged. Capital stays in the same hands, management authority stays in the same families, and intergenerational wealth continues to compound along racial lines.
This is not an isolated practice. According to the JSE’s 2023 data, when pension funds are excluded, black South Africans hold less than 4% of direct share ownership. Enterprise and supplier development spending now exceeds R20bn annually, yet only a small percentage of supported firms transition into prime contractors. The gap between compliance activity and structural economic change is widening.
The uncomfortable truth is this: the existing system allows white-owned incumbents to meet the letter of the BBBEE codes while sidestepping their intent. What should have driven permanent transfer of productive assets has too often become a mechanism to rent black participation rather than embed it.
The consequences are profound. BBBEE delivered a black middle class — the UCT Unilever Institute estimated its size at 4.2-million by 2012 — but that middle class remains highly vulnerable. Household wealth remains shallow, debt levels high and upward mobility is not yet secure across generations. Without genuine ownership, the foundation is fragile.
There is another complexity we must confront honestly: parts of the black middle class, the very beneficiaries of redress, have become participants in compliance-driven structures that do not shift control. Nonexecutive appointments, passive trust participation and subcontracting arrangements sometimes reproduce the same asymmetries BEE was meant to resolve.
The work ahead requires closing this gap between compliance and effect. A credible transformation framework must prioritise:
- Ownership with real voting rights, not symbolic equity;
- Control that is measurable, including executive authority and board-level decision rights;
- Graduation pathways for black suppliers into primary contracting roles;
- Transparent reporting on delivery, not intention; and
- Consequences for firms that recycle points without shifting power.
This is not a call to abandon redress. It is a call to recover its purpose. The objective has never been points on a scorecard. It has been the redistribution of economic agency: who owns, who decides, who benefits and who builds generational wealth.
Apartheid told black South Africans they could never access whiteness, no matter what they achieved. The risk today is a BBBEE system that tells white capital it can preserve its historical advantages indefinitely, provided it performs the minimum compliance rituals.
South Africa cannot afford that outcome.
A transformation framework that stabilises inequality instead of dismantling its roots is not transformation — it is drift. And drift, in a country this unequal, carries social and economic costs that no scorecard can mask.
The task is clear: strengthen the system, enforce substance over form, and ensure that ownership and control shift in ways that build a more inclusive, competitive economy. Certificates do not create equity. Power does.
• Nomlala, a former president of the Black Management Forum, is a BBBEE beneficiary committed to genuine economic redress, not its simulation.
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