The DA is right to oppose Black Economic Empowerment. The announcement earlier this week by Federal Leader John Steenhuisen that the GNU’s second party has in its sights this tentpole policy long sold as the core of the ANC’s ‘transformation’ agenda was forthright and important.
The DA now has its six-point policy agenda, heading into the next chapter of the post-2024 GNU and the upcoming local government elections likely in early 2027 on the unapologetic pursuit of economic growth and job creation.
This is a return to the ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ momentum that saw the party overtake the ANC in popularity earlier this year, for the first time in IRR polling history. This DA lead, small yet significant, was achieved at the time of the heated VAT showdown, when the DA took a popular stance on the simple point that all South Africans, of whatever race, class, or region, care about bread-and-butter issues like how much tax they pay.
An agenda based on jobs and growth, and the upward socio-economic momentum these provide, is an agenda that can see the DA position itself more permanently as the party of bread-and-butter issues that cut through the noise and define the scope of political debate. Opposition to BEE is now uncontentious, as evidenced by the lack of journalistic pushback on Monday.
This is a promising sign that the politics of straightforward socio-economic mobility is rising in importance. Almost exactly seven years before Monday’s media briefing, on 10 August 2018, the Mail & Guardian ran the headline ‘DA’s internal woes may lead to voter backlash’. “With only a few months left until the 2019 national elections,” the first sentence below the headline read, “the Democratic Alliance this week found itself beset by a new crisis — its decision to disavow broad-based black economic empowerment.”
Yet, on Monday, the reaffirmation of the DA’s opposition to BEE triggered no media scorn in the room or talk of crisis in the coverage.
To make this even more significant as an indicator of change, it might be noted that the DA’s rejection of BEE in 2018 happened when both the party’s leader and its head of policy were black. Yet, from anecdotal moments of media acceptance of an anti-BEE premise, or from the polling data published this year by the IRR showing a majority of all voters, even ANC voters, in favour of BEE alternatives, it is clear that we are seeing a paradigm shift from the race-rigged assumptions that have underscored ANC policy for at least two decades.
Experimental decade
After a difficult and experimental decade for the DA on the issue of transformation policy, all indications are that the moment is ripe for the party to proclaim with confidence the pro-growth non-racialism at the historical foundation of the party.
The reasoning for rejecting BEE has always been sound. As a policy, it has entrenched the very problems it purportedly aimed to solve, creating an elite of well-connected beneficiaries while doing little to lift the millions still trapped in poverty.
It has removed incentives for investment and job-creation, and has made racial classification a permanent feature of law despite the repeal of the Population Registration Act in 1991. For a pro-growth, non-racial party, opposing BEE is both morally right and politically astute, especially at a time when South Africans are increasingly frustrated by an economy that rewards political connections rather than enterprise.
But opposition alone is not enough for the DA. In politics, simply being against something rarely secures public receptivity to change, never mind long-term support. It is one thing to be anti-BEE; it is another to persuade the public that there is a better alternative. And this question of the alternative is where the DA’s political challenge now truly lies.
Repealing the policy without replacing it leaves an open door for opponents to accuse you of wanting to oppose any transformation at all. This is an accusation that will stick, if no credible alternative is put forward.
Perverse Euclidean politics
The ANC’s shrewd cornering of the DA since its founding has long ensured a scepticism among black voters towards Steenhuisen’s party. In the perverse Euclidean politics of the post-1994 moment, the ANC secured this scepticism on the grounds that opposing the ANC meant opposing what the ANC opposed – in other words, supporting apartheid.
Despite the fact that the DA today is the inheritor of a political legacy of brave and isolated parliamentary opposition to apartheid, the perception problem of the DA’s bona fides about its concern for black South Africans has offered rich pickings to its more race-populist opponents.
The DA’s task, therefore, of launching a successful counter to an entrenched policy like BEE is twofold.
First, the failures of the policy must be made clear – a job that is now far easier than it would have been a decade or even five years ago, as even some of BEE’s past champions now acknowledge its shortcomings.
Second, and politically almost more important, is to address the subtext of the policy and opposing it.
Political capital is not earned or lost through clinical cost-benefit analysis in the public mind. People do not assess policy with the same forensic attention to detail as those of us in politics or policy research might wish. Like consumers choosing products, voters respond to a mix of rational and irrational cues, to branding as much as to substance. A product can be technically superior, but if it is poorly packaged, it will fail to sell.
This is why the label “Black Economic Empowerment” has been such an enduring subtextual advantage for the ANC. Whatever its actual results, its packaging signals a moral purpose. The superficial judgement, the instant impression, is that opposing it means opposing the empowerment of black South Africans.
The DA’s historical hesitance to take a clear stand against BEE, a hesitance it has only shed in earnest in the last few years, was rooted in this political reality. By rejecting BEE now, the party positions itself correctly in policy terms, but unless it also fills the symbolic gap with an alternative that signals genuine empowerment and upliftment of all, particularly black South Africans, the position will remain vulnerable to attack.
A way forward
This is where the IRR’s newly published Freedom From Poverty Bill offers a way forward. It translates into law the IRR’s policy of Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED), a non-racial, merit-based alternative that targets disadvantage itself, not the racial proxies used by BEE. The Bill proposes repealing or amending every race-based empowerment law and provision, banning any future scheme that seeks racial demographic targets, and ensuring that all such measures are replaced with ones that advance the disadvantaged by promoting growth, investment and employment. It sets out a framework for empowerment that is transparent, measurable, and focused on outcomes, and explicitly forbids the use of racial criteria.
One of EED’s most transformative proposals is the creation of a national voucher system for schooling, healthcare and housing, funded from existing budgets and administered by provincial governments. These vouchers would be redeemable with accredited public or private providers, allowing disadvantaged South Africans to choose where and how to obtain essential services.
Public-private partnerships would be encouraged to ensure quality and value for money, with clear accreditation rules to prevent exclusion based on race or political favour. Individuals eligible for vouchers could use them flexibly, switching suppliers if service is poor, or combining them with complementary tax-free savings accounts for co-payments, upgrades or future needs.
To maintain integrity and public trust, the Freedom From Poverty Bill establishes a Non-Racial Empowerment Compliance Unit (NECU) to monitor implementation, investigate fraud or collusion, and intervene in provinces that fail to administer the system effectively. Transparency provisions require annual public reporting, independent audits, and the publication of standard fees and service schedules by all suppliers.
Offences such as falsifying data, defrauding voucher programmes, reintroducing racial criteria or diverting funds for personal gain would carry penalties including fines, imprisonment, and exclusion from the voucher system for up to a decade.
Reviewed and replaced
Crucially, the Bill also deals with the transition away from race-based empowerment. It gives an 18-month window for all existing BEE-type schemes to be reviewed and replaced by EED schemes, with mandatory replacement where corruption, inflated pricing or other abuses are found. Once enacted, it would override any inconsistent legislation other than the Constitution, ensuring that the principle of non-racial empowerment is embedded across the economy.
For the DA, adopting this Bill, or one like it, would do more than provide a policy answer to BEE’s failures. It would neutralise the “anti-transformation” smear by demonstrating that the party is not against empowerment, but against corruption and racial division. It would align well with the DA’s pro-growth philosophy by rewarding job creation, skills development, and investment rather than political connections.
It would speak to voters’ frustration with an economy that locks them out, offering a credible, practical plan to expand opportunity. And it would show that the DA is capable of governing with both principle and pragmatism: replacing empty slogans with a concrete programme for lifting people out of poverty.
BEE is a failed policy that has dominated the market for far too long. The DA is right to take it off the shelf. But politics, like business, demands that you replace a flawed product with something better – something that meets not only the technical need of the searching consumer (or voter), but also signals a values-based subtext appealing to the public. The Freedom From Poverty Bill is that better product: morally sound, economically credible, and politically potent.
Real and fake transformation
The fact is that South Africans, particularly those locked out of economic opportunity and participation by the injustices and legacy of apartheid, desperately desire transformation. Yet the realisation at the core of the DA’s chance for a breakthrough on the issue of economic transformation is that there is a difference between real and fake transformation. Fake transformation, with BEE as its mascot, has failed.
Substantive non-racial, pro-growth, job-driven transformation is up for grabs as a piece of political real estate. If Steenhuisen and his team can carpe this diem, the reality of a DA on the way up to a sustainable 30% meeting an ANC on the way down can materialise nationally as early as 2027.
[Image: Clint Post from Pixabay]
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