Jackals and Hyenas: False promises of ‘economic inclusion’

Every morning on South Africa’s shop floors, in hospitals, schools and municipalities, workers wake up to the same reality: they labour hard, but the fruits of their work are eaten elsewhere.

I have walked those floors, listened to those voices, and seen how the promises of 1994 have been quietly buried beneath the rubble of greed and betrayal.

Power and wealth remain locked in the same hands that held them before democracy. The faces on the posters have changed, but the structures of ownership have not.

So when the Democratic Alliance (DA) tells us that the real problem is Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE)and not the system of racial capitalism it was meant to dismantle, we must call it what it is: a carefully crafted declaration of war against Black economic emancipation.

Betrayal of the liberation promise

We, the workers and the poor, are under no illusions about the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC has betrayed the principles of B-BBEE.

They handed it over to a parasitic elite their friends, families, and cronies who turned empowerment into a personal wealth scheme. A handful of politically connected individuals became billionaires while millions of workers remain in shacks, debt and unemployment.

This is not transformation; it is capture in designer suits. The liberation promise has been traded for tender opportunities and board-room seats. It is a profound betrayal of the millions who marched, bled, and died for true economic freedom.

But the solution cannot be to hand the country back to the architects of our dispossession.

The DA’s race-neutral fantasy

The DA’s “Economic Inclusion for All Bill” dresses up an old apartheid fantasy in new liberal language.

By replacing “race” with “poverty,” it pretends that inequality is an accident of the market rather than a legacy of history.

Let us be clear: South Africa’s economy has a colour, and that colour remains white.

Let’s look at the facts:

• Over 70% of JSE-listed company ownership remains in white hands.

• The top four banks – all historically white institutions – control nearly 90% of the financial sector.

• In mining and agriculture, vast tracts of land and capital assets remain concentrated among a small minority of white families.

These are not coincidences. They are the direct results of centuries of colonial and apartheid policy. To now claim that a “race-neutral” policy will correct this injustice is not just naive it is a deliberate act of historical erasure.

The DA’s model does not attack the root of inequality. It treats poverty as a random event rather than a design. It targets the symptoms while protecting the disease. This is not inclusion; it is repackaged exclusion, sold with a smile and a policy document.

Exploiting mining communities

Nowhere is this clearer than in the mining belt the land of broken promises. Across Limpopo, North West and Mpumalanga, communities sit atop gold, platinum and coal, yet live without water, jobs or dignity.

The Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA), which was meant to democratise mineral ownership, has instead become a legal tool of dispossession. It allows the state often in collaboration with multinational corporations to extract in the name of “development” while communities are pushed aside and impoverished.

Multinational mining giants, in partnership with politicians and even some compromised trade unions, have reduced the people’s God-given right to the land and its resources into a patronising form of co-ownership. They offer a few hundred jobs or token community trusts while exporting billions in profit.

That is not empowerment; it is theft wrapped in legality.

Communities are rising up not for charity, but to reclaim dignity stolen in the name of progress. The struggle of the mineworker and the villager is one – both are trapped beneath the same mountain of greed.

The wolf in sheep’s clothing The DA calls its approach “non-racialism.” But what it really offers is a comforting lie to those who still benefit from racial privilege. It wraps the wolf of white economic dominance in the sheep’s clothing of “fairness” and “inclusion.”

Behind the polished phrases lies a clear political agenda: to bury the language of race so that we can no longer name our oppression. To silence the vocabulary of justice while keeping the architecture of inequality intact.

This is why their “Economic Inclusion for All Bill” must be understood not as reform, but as the restoration of economic control to the same forces that have never accepted the meaning of our freedom.

Reclaiming B-BBEE

Our duty is not to discard B-BBEE, but to reclaim it from the elites and return it to the workers and com-munities who were meant to benefit from it.

A genuine, worker-centred B-BBEE must:

1. Criminalise Fronting with Jail Time: Fronting is economic fraud it must be punished as such.

2. Empower Workers and Com-munities: Ownership stakes must go to worker trusts, community cooperatives, and mining villages not politically connected individuals.

3. Enforce Transformation: Regulators must have real teeth to take on banks, mines, and agribusinesses that defy transformation targets.

4. Link to Industrial Policy: Use B-BBEE to build Black-owned industries in manufacturing, renewable energy, and technology breaking the chokehold of old monopolies.

We are not asking for charity; we are demanding justice. Economic transformation must mean more than changing faces at the table – it must mean changing who owns the table itself.

The struggle continues

South Africa stands at a crossroads.

On one side are the betrayers of liberation, who turned empowerment into personal enrichment. On the other side are the defenders of white monopoly capital, who cloak their power in the language of “inclusion.”

Workers and communities must reject both. Our fight is not for token seats in boardrooms, but for real ownership and control of the economy.

They stole our land. They stole our labour. They stole our minerals. But they will not steal our future. Aluta Continua – the struggle continues, this time for true economic liberation.

* Maepa is the Secretary-General, Public Service & Commercial Union(PSCU) and founder of Resistance Against Impunity Movement (RAIM)NPC.