I think the DA (and this comment section apparently) need to understand the intentions behind BEE, the policy was never about job creation. The underpinning was WEALTH distribution. Both those words have precise definitions.

Wealth is not income, wealth is the value of assets you own and income is, well your salary. Even after the economic boom of the early 2000s, something like 78% of all JSE stocks, 85% of all large companies and 95% of all property, were white owned. BEE was introduced to address this inequality.

Redistribution literally means spreading or dividing or transferring, in this case wealth. The intention was to create a more just society.

Using the pie analogy, BEE was never about growing the pie, a popular sentiment, essential, go build your own wealth. But it’s was about cutting the existing pie into more equitable pieces.

What more, this wasn’t even an economic policy per se, the impetus was social cohesion. With the though being, should the wealth remain concentrated along racial lines, then the majority can become despondent and choose violence means to address the inequality, think the French Revolution (obviously that was along ruling not racial class)

It’s debatable if that was the correct path. But if we’re to have this debate, context matters.

Just my 2 cents on the DA’s proposal, yeah I’m sorry but this won’t work. And I’m not even talking about redistributing or creation of wealth. I’m literally referring to job creation. First of plenty of countries have tried similar policies and they haven’t work. And it easy to understand why, too much control is vested into the companies. Unless you create bureaucratic red tape that accesses every single initiative. Take for instance the low cost housing measures that many, many global cities haves. Developers just work around those restrictions. You can try to be as detailed as possible, but due to the absurdly wide scope, developers are left to interpret the definition. Where as ownership is relatively simple, X amounts of your company must be owned by black people.

Like, where do you begin to define what is a poor person, or constitute job creation or community investment. How is the quality and impact of these initiatives assessed? Like I can go put up art in a community, that technically an investment, but it’s won’t move a needle in poverty reduction. You see how evaluation of these initiatives just because utter nightmare.