BBBEE: A deviation from Lusaka's Vision to dismantle apartheid's structural legacy

IN THE 1980s, ANC leaders in Lusaka envisioned a South Africa where economic justice would dismantle apartheid's structural legacy.

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The 1985 Kabwe Conference called for radical redistribution to empower the black majority, denied ownership, skills and capital under apartheid. Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, introduced in 2003, was meant to fulfil this promise. Yet in 2025, the vision falters. White households still earn five times more than black households, and South Africa's Gini coefficient stands at 0.63, among the highest in the world. Despite three decades of black-led governance, state institutions such as the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, the National Empowerment Fund and the BBBEE Commission have failed to shift structural inequality in a meaningful way.

Legacy white-owned companies exploit BBBEE's opaque metrics to achieve Level 1 or 2 status through tokenism, creating an artificial parity with black startups built from struggle. The result is a distorted system inwhich genuine ownership and control by black entrepreneurs are undermined, while entrenched companies preserve their dominance under the façade of compliance.

The Lusaka-era goal was unambiguous: transfer economic power to the black majority. Kabwe rejected gradualism, calling for nationalisation and structural change. Post-1994, however, global neoliberal pressures and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy reshaped empowerment into a market-driven project. Transactions worth between R150 and R285 billion disproportionately benefited politically connected elites, while most black South Africans saw little gain.

The 2003 BBBEE Act diluted the ownership pillar, reducing itto 25 points on the scorecard, while enterprise and supplier development commanded 40. This allowed legacy firms to achieve compliance without ceding meaningful control. Early empowerment share schemes demonstrated how limited participation could deliver high ratings, enriching a few while leaving ownership structures unchanged.