Various scholars who investigated the extent to which the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy has contributed to an equal society in South Africa have described what was supposed to be a hope bearer for a despondent nation as an “abject disaster”
Critically escalating the discourse of BEE and its strategic intent, Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies at the University of Limpopo (UL), Dr. Metji Makgoba, recently published an article in which he says it is misleading to associate BEE with the concepts of transformation and social justice.
Titled “Constructing Black Economic Empowerment as a Neoliberal Project in South African Mining”, the article investigated how BEE perpetuates and reproduces the socio-economic status quo of neoliberalism through the Mining Charter.
He says that BEE has nothing to do with the empowerment of black people and the transformation of the political-economic structure that produces race-specific modes of marginalisation and exploitation.
“What the policy has done since its inception was to naturalise neoliberalism and compound racial injustices in South Africa,” he notes.
He adds that the problem is not that BEE has failed, “the problem is that BEE was never meant to benefit black people.”
“The Mining Charter reduces the political processes of transformation and empowerment to the managerial practices of technical scoreboards, targets, and auditing processes as well as economic participation at the microcosmic level,” Dr. Makgoba says.
Employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the article investigates how the government expresses neoliberal agendas through the Mining Charter and further examines how mining corporations respond to these agendas through their annual reports.
The article highlights how the government discursively sustains and reproduces the socio-economic status quo and the ideology of neoliberalism by appropriating anti-colonial and anti-apartheid discourses to legitimise its tokenistic and managerial remedies in the South African mining sector.
“The government discursively uses the Charter to advance the ideology of neoliberalism by privileging and constructing the free markets as the means of advancing the government’s empowerment and transformation agenda. It is worth mentioning that BEE studies tend to approach and construct BEE as a structurally disruptive and radically redistributive policy and proceed to measure its implementation processes and outcomes,” Dr. Makgoba elaborates, who is a UL graduate.
In consequence, Dr. Makgoba found, this ideologically reduces the discourse of transformation and empowerment to cultural recognition – highlighting that blacks suffer oppression – and surface reallocation of resources.
“This reductionism displaces the restructuring of this political-economic structure of mining capitalism as the remedy for racial injustice and the aim of political struggle despite centering BEE around the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid discourses,” he critiques.
This article contributes to BEE debates by displacing and rejecting attempts to construct BEE as a radically transformative, redistributionist, and structurally disruptive programme. Dr. Makgoba strongly endorsed Govenden and Chiumbu (2020)’s assertion that the BBBEE strategy has not changed the racial character of the economy, and fundamentally resulted in the co-optation of a small black elite into the wealthy white capitalist elite inherited from the apartheid era, where the “power relationship” reminiscent of apartheid still exists and white privilege intersects with other forms of subordination such as gender and class.
The article was published in the Journal of Public Administration with the following citation:
Makgoba, M. 2021. Constructing Black Economic Empowerment as a Neoliberal Project in South African Mining. Journal of Public Administration, (56)3:410-429.
By Moses Moreroa