Remember when Jesus Jones sang, “Right Here, Right Now”? “Know it feels good to be alive … watching the world wake up from history.”
They were such days of sunny optimism, weren’t they, the early ’90s? The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union followed quickly after and so did Apartheid. Ah, what hopes we had for the ‘Rainbow Nation’.
How’s it all worked out?
Pretty much like most ‘de-colonised’ Third World nations. While some, such as Kenya, have done remarkably well, too many others like Zimbabwe have turned into violent kleptocracies. From tribal ‘Big Men’ looting the place with a rapacity that would make King Leopold II of Belgium blink, to brutal racist repression posturing as ‘equity’, de-colonisation has too often been an even bigger enormity than colonialism ever was.
South Africa has chosen the Zimbabwean rather than the Kenyan route. The successor to Apartheid, dubbed Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), has turned out to mostly just be Apartheid in blackface, but with none of its economic nous. As in Zimbabwe, BEE has become just another sub-Saharan kleptocracy.
BEE has mostly benefited a tiny black elite while constraining economic growth, undermining the social stability it was meant to underpin.
BEE was conceived by South Africa’s largest conglomerates, six of which in the early 1990s accounted for 86 per cent of the value of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). To convince the ANC, hitherto committed to nationalising the economy, of the merits of capitalism, they needed black capitalists. So they sold discounted shares or units to ANC bigwigs such as Cyril Ramaphosa, now South Africa’s president. The ANC’s response to criticism of the policy as an elite stitch-up was the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act of 2003. The law turned ad hoc corporate atonement into a vast regulatory system.
In other words, the typical communist gambit of dressing up a rapacious nomenklatura as ‘state capitalism’ and adding a heady dash of anti-White racism.
It’s turned out about as well as you’d expect.
Firms are given points based on meeting criteria for the portion of the firm owned by black shareholders, the number of senior black staff, investment in black employees’ skills, charity contributions and purchases from black-owned firms. Firms with a low score struggle to get state contracts and licences or attract commercial partners. “Your BEE rating will determine your success in business in 90 per cent of cases,” says Deirdre Mitchell of Honeycomb, a BEE ratings firm.
As well as destroying South Africa’s economy, it’s achieved the complete opposite of the social harmony its spruikers promise. South Africa now has one of the highest murder rates in the world. While it’s true that white farmers are being genocidally targeted, black South Africans are at the same time murdering each with astonishing bloodlust.
And economic inequality is higher than it was under Apartheid. It’s just that, instead of tiny white elite hogging the wealth, it’s a tiny black elite, all nepotistically connected to the ANC.
One study suggests the gross real income of the top 10 per cent of black earners tripled between 1993 and 2019, while that of the bottom 50 per cent fell. This reflects high joblessness caused by slow economic growth. Less than 40 per cent of black South Africans of working age are in formal employment.
The looting has been on an astonishing scale. At an extremely conservative estimate, more than one trillion rand ($56bn) in assets has been pilfered by fewer than 100 people under BEE.
There’s that socialism, working this time, again.
