April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

through increased capital expenditure, enhanced support for small, micro
and medium enterprises (SMMEs) and facilitation of skills training and
institutional capacitation.
For the first several years of ANC rule, the first "way" was dominant. A rash
of "empowerment" deals between emergent/wannabe black capitalists
(most often all with close political connections to the ruling ANC) and
white corporate/finance capital took place. Best known amongst these was
NAIL (Metlife, African Merchant Bank, Theta) and the NEC (Anglo’s
Johnnic).
Black millionaires
Literally overnight, South Africa had "created" new black millionaires who
publicly paraded their new found riches and loudly claimed that this was
the start of a new dawn in which all black South Africans could share (for
example, Cyril Ramaphosa and his "people’s" Ikageng Shares). ANC
politicians lauded South Africa’s equivalent of the "American dream" and
loudly endorsed the morality of blacks getting "filthy rich". However, when
the Johannesburg Stock Exchange imploded in 1997-98, the dominant
strawman edifice of this BEE strategy came crashing down as well. What
made the exposure so politically damaging were two powerful (yet
radically distinct) charges against the ANC government that had been its
chief champion.
From the side of the wounded black bourgeoisie came the charge that
their government had not nurtured and protected them (raising parallels
with the ways in which the apartheid state had done for white/Afrikaner
capital) from hostile economic conditions both domestically and
internationally. This was coupled with the charge that the ANC state’s
neoliberal macroeconomic policy framework was inherently antagonistic to
the sustenance of an emergent black capitalist class since its core policies
were effectively facilitating the interests of domestic (white) and
international corporate capital rather than "its own".
From the side of the majority of black workers and poor -- as well as from
sections of the ANC’s alliance partners, the Congress of South African
Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) --
came the charge that the ANC government’s neoliberal policies, with BEE
at the centre, were responsible for massive job losses, increasing
impoverishment and inequality, a lack of basic services and most damaging
of all, a betrayal of the redistributive principles and vision of
socioeconomic equality of the liberation struggle. Here, it was the creation
and privileging of a small and politically connected black elite at the
expense of the vast majority of poor black people that represented ample
confirmation.
Both private capital and the ANC scrambled to "repair the damage", or at
least be seen to be doing so. The second "way" approach took over. By the
early 2000s, a range of new empowerment deals, equity programs, social
awareness plans and longer-term "empowerment" scenario planning had
been put in place/publicly unveiled by white corporate capital which was
clearly trying to preempt what they feared might well be a class and racial
backlash. For its part, the ANC state embarked on a strategic approach
that sought to "mainstream" BEE as part of an expanding "developmental"
state dedicated to the social and economic upliftment of the black
majority.
While it was stated, once again, that this would be achieved through
creating a "national consensus" that recognised, but cut across racial and
class lines, the reality was that such a strategy was nothing more than the
logical extension of the historic corporatist logic of the ANC leadership; in