AFRICA FIRST — WORKBENCH

AFRICA FIRST — WORKBENCH

Notes for the record

The pseudo-economic policies of BEE are made to disguise a lack of hunger for transformation. They function like political makeup: enough to look like progress, not enough to become progress. Because real transformation is not a slogan. Not a tender. Not a summit. It is structural. It touches what holds power.

Rather than touching the land, rather than touching the pivotal economic structures, rather than strategising and rebuilding SOEs as strategic instruments, you chose to have BEE policies that hold big business hostage to your discretion. That is the pivot. You did not choose transformation — you chose leverage. You did not build an economic liberation programme — you built a gatekeeping regime: a politics of permission, where proximity is rewarded and capability is postponed.

This is why BEE, as practised, can produce headlines and still produce no country. It can produce compliance departments without producing competence. It can produce transactions without producing industries. It can “transform” boardrooms while townships remain consumption zones and rural areas remain waiting rooms.

A people cannot eat procurement.

A nation cannot build power on symbolic policy. You cannot rename the same structure and call it liberation. You cannot keep the machine intact — owned elsewhere, directed elsewhere — and act surprised when the outcomes remain unchanged.

You chose not to focus on black human development, black business development — instead, you chose to play gatekeeper with white business. And the tragedy is how normal this has become: the same photo-op economics — smiles above, starvation below — while unemployment deepens, education collapses, and the economy stays structurally un-African in ownership, production, and direction.

If you were serious, the centre would be capability: education that actually educates, not just passes; skills that compound, not certificates that decorate; infrastructure that works, not budgets that vanish; industrial strategy that produces, not speeches that perform; financing for black enterprise that is patient, technical, and ruthless about growth — not funding that rewards closeness and punishes competence.

And SOEs rebuilt as strategic instruments — energy, rail, ports, water — because sovereignty is not a feeling. It is logistics. It is electricity. It is functioning systems. A state that cannot move goods, power homes, and secure water cannot speak about “transformation” with a straight face.

For too long, we have waited; for too long, we have hoped; for too long, we have grown tired — tired of the irrelevance of BEE to society at large. Tired of policy language that claims moral legitimacy while producing economic stagnation. Tired of being told the country is changing while lived reality remains the same: opportunity rationed, inequality hardened, and the majority trained into patience.

Don’t bother anymore with revolution. You killed it.

Because revolution is not a chant. Revolution is institutional courage repeated for years, against the interests of the comfortable. And what you built was not courage.

It was convenience — draped in liberation language.

On state spine

This is the pattern: substitute-policy in place of structural power. BEE becomes discretion instead of development. Procurement becomes a feeding system instead of a building system. SOEs become ruins instead of instruments. And when the state refuses real economic reconstruction, the army of unemployment grows — not by accident, but by design.

By “design,” I do not mean conspiracy. I mean incentives: cadre deployment over competence, procurement as patronage, industrial neglect, and the deliberate survival of gatekeeping in place of ladders.

And we must stop speaking about this “army” like it is metaphor. In Q3 2025, South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at 31.9%, with about 8.0 million people unemployed.

The South African-born child is left to grow up in a country with no spine: no symbol to fix his gaze daily on defiance — and no credible path to success. No deterrence. No backbone. Yet the army grows:

1 million.

2 million.

3 million.

4 million.

5 million.

6 million.

7 million.

8 million.

And still the ANC lectures us about “order,” while the DA arrives with “balanced budgets.” Order without work is a threat. Budgets without dignity are just accounting.

The hierarchy is clear: the ANC is the custodian of state failure; the DA is the technocratic consolation; and the market-liberal class is the ideology that tells the poor to be patient with their own exclusion.

You cannot spreadsheet your way out of a national humiliation. You cannot audit a hungry stomach. You cannot “stabilise” a nation that is structurally excluded from production, ownership, and dignity.

My nation lives on the fringes of its own country — and the market-liberal class lectures us on “democracy,” as if voting is food. As if rights are rent. As if paper can protect you from poverty.

Paper rights don’t feed people.

This is the great insult of the settlement: it gave us a legal language of freedom, but left millions inside an economic architecture designed for their absence. A constitution can restrain the state — but it cannot, by itself, build a capable state. It cannot manufacture industries. It cannot deliver electricity. It cannot create work. And when institutions fail, rights become a poem recited over poverty.

The ruling party has consolidated power for 30 years — emptying billions upon billions, entrenching patronage networks, turning procurement into a feeding system, and ungoverning the people. Not failing accidentally — failing profitably. Not collapsing by mistake — collapsing by design, because dysfunction became a market and the state became the inventory.

The ANC has outlived its liberation. What remains is a power-preservation machine — to the detriment of our rise. A machine that survives on proximity, faction, and controlled scarcity. And that is why the land question stays a question and not an answer: because land is power — and power is the one thing the thief never returns.

When we shout “Amandla!” the Constitution answers — not with songs, but with standards:

Land cannot be administered by thieves.

Justice cannot be executed by cowards.

Our leaders enter public office carrying the promise of the Freedom Charter yet return not our land, not apologies, but our confusion. They return commissions. They return memorial speeches. They return “consultations.” They return endless process — because process is how you delay a people without having to deny them openly.

ANC. An impediment to the becoming of the people — a political body that is spineless, money-hungry, and filthy.

ANC: the contamination of our future. The disease in our long walk to freedom.

And here is the hardest sentence — the one that exposes everything:

You cannot preach “order” to a nation you have economically disarmed. You cannot demand patience from the people while stealing their time. You cannot ask for respect when you have made dignity a luxury.

So yes — we will interrogate BEE. We will interrogate procurement. We will interrogate land. We will interrogate the fiction that democracy is complete when the economy is colonised in structure. We will interrogate the lie that policy is transformation when the majority remains trapped outside the levers of production.

Because Africa First is not interested in costumes. We are interested in construction.