The true victims of BEE: How black South Africans were betrayed – Andrew Kenny
Andrew Kenny
BEE has one purpose only, and that is to enrich the political elite. It has been brilliantly successful. The result of BEE exactly fulfills the intention: it has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and has worsened the injustices of the past.
When I heard President Ramaphosa’s address to parliament praising BEE and promising to extend its stranglehold on the South African economy, I could not help thinking of the 155 South African children under the age of five who have died of malnutrition at our public health facilities this year and juxtaposing their deaths on images of President Ramaphosa: his massive wealth of over R6 billion, his mansions across South Africa, his BMWs and Mercedes, his 4,500 hectare Phala Phala game farm, his use of private jets and his big beaming self-satisfied smile.
All of this Ramaphosa owes to BEE. He obviously feels very pleased with himself and feels that BEE has been a huge success, which it certainly has for himself and a tiny politically connected elite. It has been a disastrous failure for the South African economy and a catastrophe for the great mass of poor black people in South Africa. But they are expendable for the ANC. They don’t matter to the ANC elite.
BEE has white victims and black victims but their victimhood is entirely different. The victimhood of the blacks is incomparably worse. BEE has condemned them to grinding poverty and joblessness, sometimes to death, whereas the white victims of BEE I know have merely been condemned to comfortable, high-earning jobs in the UK, the US and Australia.
When I say BEE, I include racial affirmative action or DEI, employment equity and cadre deployment, all much the same, all awarding jobs and contracts on the basis of race and political connections rather than merit (qualifications, competence, experience and track record). Ramaphosa, who has done more harm to the South African economy than any other president, has tightened up all these job-destroying laws, the latest being his amended Employment Equity Act which sets “Sectoral Numerical Targets” for the different races.
Doesn’t want them
Essentially this act prevents skilled, dedicated, patriotic white engineers and technicians from helping to build up South African industry and manufacturing; it wants to stop them fixing our crumbling infrastructure and our failing water supply and sanitation. Ramaphosa doesn’t want them; he wants black politically connected BEE cronies to get the contracts.
As I’ve said before, my only formal qualifications are in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). These are fields where the BEE laws are particularly focused on getting rid of whites. Most of my white engineering and science colleagues, knowing they were unlikely to get jobs and promotion, and knowing they were unwanted by the ANC establishment, emigrated and have all done very well overseas, where they were welcomed and appreciated. Their victimhood, if they felt any, was that they had been exiled from the beloved homeland they wanted to serve. But they have all become rich enough to visit South Africa on holidays, and to retire here at the end of their professional lives, able to live comfortable lives here because of the low value of the rand.
There are two groups of black BEE victims. The first, smaller group, consists of skilled, competent, proud, enterprising black men and women who are perfectly able to get jobs and win contracts on their own merits. BEE affects them in two ways. Those who are not politically connected will probably not get jobs or contracts. But those who do get them will be seen by everybody else, black and white, as BEE beneficiaries and looked down upon – although nobody will say this openly.
A stigma will attach to such people, filling them with resentment. BEE has the effect of draining enterprise and self-respect from black people, of tempting them to advance themselves not through their own efforts and gifts but by sucking up to the politically powerful. Some are quite shameless about this and think that the job is done once they have got the contract rather than when they have completed it. But I suspect that most are ashamed at quite a deep level and likely to feel hostile to critics.
But most black victims, by far the worst victims, are the people whose education, health, transport, housing, water supply, sanitation, and electricity supply have been harmed or even ruined because of it.
Race and political affiliation
Education is an obvious example. Under the ANC’s racial or BEE laws, black teachers were appointed partly or completely on their race and political affiliation rather than qualifications, experience and record. To promote employment equity, schools were encouraged to have 93% black teachers to match the percentage of blacks in the population at large. Control of education in six of our nine provinces fell under SADTU, the COSATU-affiliated teaching union, perhaps the ANC’s most powerful political ally.
COSATU appointed most of the teachers, whose first responsibility was to it rather than the children. The result was an army of hopelessly unqualified and unmotivated black teachers. Some of the maths teachers could not themselves pass Grade 6 tests in maths. This caused most South African children to fall at the bottom of international standards for literacy, numeracy and science.
But most South African schools did meet their employment equity targets and their BEE goals. None of the ANC or SADTU elite, including Ramaphosa and Dr Naledi Pandor, ever sent their own children to these schools. They deliberately sent them to schools where there was no BEE, no employment equity and no affirmations action, schools where most of the teachers were white, selected on merit.
On the radio, I hear ANC apologists, black and white, demanding to know: “How can BEE stop the economic growth?” I can tell them, “Start with education. BEE has produced badly educated, unskilled young people who cannot get jobs and cannot help the economy to grow. Tell me: do you send your own children to a school with BEE teachers or to schools with mainly white teachers chosen on merit?” (The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.) Education is only one of a myriad examples.
Water supply and sanitation are even more dramatic. White engineers and technicians have been kicked out of the water and sanitation departments of some of our municipalities and provinces, notably Gauteng, and replaced with BEE staff. The result is acute water stoppages and sewage in the streets, and the people who suffer most from these are poor black people in the townships.
Failure of services
BEE has caused a massive failure of services to poor people. In Tshwane, contaminated water was flowing into the Apies River. In 2019 Mr Edwin Sodi, a rich and famous BEE contractor and big benefactor of the ANC, was awarded R295 million to fix the Rooiwal Waste Water Treatment plant. He pocketed the money and did nothing to repair it. Over 30 poor black people died of cholera. Mr Sodi added to his collection of fabulous luxuries, including a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Bentley and many others. No doubt President Ramaphosa would point to Edwin Sodi as an example of the successful BEE he wants to promote.
Ramaphosa said he wants black people to “own the means of production”. But black people already own the most gigantic, most expensive means of production. They have owned them since 1994. These are Eskom’s colossal machines for generating electricity. Before 1994 Eskom produced sufficient reliable cheap electricity to provide for a growing economy. The ANC staged an aggressive BEE programme at Eskom, kicking out white engineers in the name of transformation and demanding “equity targets” at every staff level. The result was that we ran out of electricity in 2007, and subsequently had years of crippling blackouts. This stunted our economic growth and increased unemployment, especially among black people.
In much of Africa, foreign companies are not allowed to invest in the country – to build hospitals, roads, factories, and so on – unless they pay a big bribe to the ruling party.
In South Africa, BEE is just a legal variation of this. You want to invest in technology in South Africa to benefit poor black people? Very sorry, you cannot do so unless you pay a BEE bribe of 30% to the ANC.
Elon Musk could bring Starlink to South Africa to provide poor black people in the rural areas with modern communications but the ANC would not let him unless he forked out the 30% bribe. Now it seems they will allow him to do so providing he helps develop the local community – or something like that. “Helping the local community” usually means paying a fat bribe to the local chief so he can tell his subjects to vote ANC. This concession has caused uproar among “progressive” quarters. The ANC is caving in to Musk! They’re allowing him to develop our technology without paying a bribe to the rich elite!
Died of malnutrition
In the first paragraph, I mentioned the 155 children who have died of malnutrition this year at our public health facilities. These disintegrating hospitals have BEE hospital managers and BEE contractors supplying medical equipment. Without BEE, the hospital would be able to buy the best equipment at the lowest prices. With BEE, it must pay much more for much worse equipment. This leads to morbidity and death among poor black patients. NHI is nothing more than an attempt to steal the money that private patients now pay to medical aid schemes and use it to enrich the deployed cadres and BEE bosses who would take over the private hospitals, reduce them all to the dysfunctional level of the present state hospitals, and make a further fortune for themselves.
I was appalled at Ramaphosa’s address to parliament on BEE. His utter contempt for ordinary black people and his massive dishonesty has risen to fiendish levels. He has become a monster of hypocrisy and callousness. But I was almost as dismayed by the dismal response by the opposition parties. They were quick to fall back on apologetic hand-wringing and white guilt. “Yes, well, we all agree that we must have redress for the injustices of the past, but you know … “. Stop it! BEE will not redress the injustices of the past. It will perpetuate them; it will make them worse. Inequality has grown under the ANC. BEE has helped it to grow. The gap between Cyril Ramaphosa with his colossal wealth and the 155 children who starved to death is now wider than ever.
Don’t tinker with BEE. Get rid of it. Free all of our people, especially poor black people, from the racist chains and shackles of the ANC and allow them to trade and do business freely among themselves without regard for race. Restore pride and self-reliance to ordinary black people. Allow them to develop their own genius and enterprise, and work together with their white compatriots for the good of all the people in South Africa.
Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal
This article was first published on the Daily Friend.