Over the past year there has been an unprecedented campaign against South Africa’s BEE policies. Debates about transformation are now toxic and polarised, mostly along racial lines.
On the right, many people have been emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidency in the US. The campaign has resorted to Maga-inspired strategies of “flooding the zone” with big lies about transformation. According to this strategy, big lies work better than small lies. This raises important issues for the media, which must create firewalls that prevent the publication of fake news and statistics.
For BEE supporters it is difficult to separate good faith arguments against transformation policies from the racists and fringe groups on the right who believe the ANC is a communist organisation. For such people, facts do not matter.
Last week debate was sparked online by a Business Day report that said, “The IMF estimates that BEE has set SA back by 2.5% of annual GDP since 1994.” Nolwazi Tusini, a journalist, wrote on X that she had not found any such statement after hours of checking IMF publications. She could only find a Free Market Foundation and Solidarity study that claimed BEE compliance costs of R145bn-R290bn. It emerged that the headline was derived from a letter to the editor that incorrectly attributed the statistic to the IMF. Business Day removed the letter.
Two weeks ago I interviewed Theuns du Buisson from the Solidarity Research Institute about a finding that “JSE firms achieved 30% black ownership by 2020, implying that R1-trillion to R2-trillion in equity shifted since 1994, amortised at R30bn-R60bn annually for large firms”. I asked him which databases had been used to calculate BEE deal flow statistics, and where the organisation found the ownership data. He said it had used BEE Commission reports.
While people such as President Cyril Ramaphosa and former cabinet minister and Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale benefited from earlier waves of BEE deal-making, this was no longer the case in 2008.
But 30% of the JSE’s market capitalisation in 2020 was equal to about R5.4-trillion — not R1-trillion to R2-trillion. It was also obviously not true that black people owned shares worth R5.4-trillion in 2020 — this should not even be debated. If the BEE Commission had a precise number for black ownership, why was there such a large range, I asked? I felt sorry for Du Buisson, because he clearly did not know what he was talking about and referred me to his co-author “who worked on that section”.
In May 2025 Wits associate professor William-Mervin Gumede estimated that R1-trillion had been transferred to 100 politically connected people by 2008. This was also obviously not true, because if you add the value of all BEE deals from 1994 to 2024, as I did in a paper I will publish soon, you get a number that is far lower than R1-trillion.
BEE 101 indicates that there is a huge difference between the gross and net value of black ownership. Many BEE transactions since 1994 did not transfer anything to black people, and the rest transferred a fraction of gross value.
While people such as President Cyril Ramaphosa and former cabinet minister and Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale benefited from earlier waves of BEE deal-making, this was no longer the case in 2008. Today, the overwhelming majority of black ownership on the JSE is broad-based ownership schemes.
The media should stop publishing Gumede’s statistic until he provides the receipts and names of the 100 people who received an average of R10bn each. I have had enough of fake black ownership statistics; the paper I will release soon is the product of the past few months crunching the numbers.
• Gqubule is an adviser on economic development and transformation.
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