The price of privilege: Why Gary Player's BEE criticism rings hollow

SOUTH African golf legend Gary Player's recent and pointed critique of modern South Africa, specifically his condemnation of the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Act and his bleak description of the country as a “land of squatter camps”, has sparked justifiable outrage.

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His observations, delivered from a perch of enormous privilege, betray a fundamental lack of historical introspection, raising the unavoidable question: how can a man who benefited so immensely from the very system that created the nation’s wounds now feel entitled to lecture about its ongoing recovery?

Player's argument is clear: BEE is inefficient, corruption is rife, and infrastructure is failing. Yes, corruption is rampant and the government has largely failed its people over the past 31 years. But this critique is delivered without recognising that the economic inequality he now laments, the very existence of sprawling informal settlements is the direct, intended legacy of the apartheid regime that gifted him his career.

To demand the removal of mechanisms like BEE, which are indeed flawed but remain an attempt to redress historical economic exclusion, is to ask the country to stop treating a wound he never suffered, a wound his own success implicitly endorses.