'DA's Ideological Ambition to Erase Race from the Grammar of Justice'

Zamikhaya Maseti

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has released its economic policy document, "The DA’s Plan to Turbocharge the Economy," which is widely viewed as an antithesis to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and a sharp ideological departure from the ANC’s developmental policy framework implemented over the past thirty years.

The document advances a liberal economic thesis grounded in deregulation, market openness, and fiscal restraint. 

Yet beneath its managerial confidence lies a deeper ideological ambition, to redefine transformation by erasing race from the grammar of justice. This essay argues that while the DA’s model may accelerate efficiency, it risks reproducing the structural inequalities that have haunted South Africa since 1910.

It situates this argument within the intellectual interventions of Moeletsi Mbeki, Duma Gqubule, and William Gumede, whose analyses reveal the moral, structural, and political failures of BEE.

South Africa’s political economy remains caught between two imperatives, redress and growth. The ANC, now a principal player within the Government of National Unity, continues to defend the developmental state model it has pursued since 1994, a vision anchored in state-led inclusion, industrial policy, and redistribution.

The DA, conversely, advances a liberal market agenda that seeks to diminish state intervention, amplify private enterprise, and restore investor confidence through deregulation and fiscal prudence. Beneath these competing paradigms lies a fundamental question: can growth and equity coexist, or must one triumph over the other?

It was Moeletsi Mbeki who, long before the current policy debates, warned that the BEE project had degenerated into an elite pact between the political class and established capital.

He argued that BEE had failed to alter the productive structure of the economy, instead entrenching dependency and enriching a politically connected minority. For Mbeki, empowerment became an instrument of pacification, designed to create a loyal black middle class through shareholding rather than industrial ownership. 

In this analysis, empowerment alienated the very communities it sought to uplift: the Africans, the People of Colour, the People of Indian origin, and the Khoisan People. This was because it offered representation without production, ownership without agency, and consumption without creation. BEE, he contended, transformed liberation into patronage and deracialisation into dependency.

Mbeki’s critique was not a rejection of empowerment itself but of its architecture. He warned that the state’s substitution of structural transformation with transactional participation would fracture solidarity and reproduce apartheid’s economic DNA under democratic colours.

By neglecting industrialization, technology, and the ownership of productive assets, empowerment became a theater of symbolic inclusion rather than a program of economic liberation. This warning now echoes prophetically as the DA’s market orthodoxy seeks to dismantle what little redistributive infrastructure remains.

Duma Gqubule enters this debate from a reformist vantage point. He concedes that empowerment has been corrupted by rent-seeking, fronting, and elite enrichment, but insists that these distortions must be corrected, not abandoned. For him, BEE was never meant to be a compliance ritual but an engine of transformation.

His call for an Empowerment 2.0 envisions a restructured model based on worker ownership, community trusts, enterprise development, and productive investment. Empowerment, in Gqubule’s argument, must move from paper to plant, from consumption to production, from symbolism to substance. He reminds us that deracialisation is not a luxury of democracy but its economic foundation.

William Gumede deepens the indictment through empirical clarity. His research estimates that over a trillion rand in BEE deals benefited fewer than a hundred politically connected individuals. He exposes how empowerment became a mirror image of apartheid privilege, exclusive, captured, and insulated from the real economy.

For Gumede, transformation must return to its productive roots, building skills, funding small enterprises, and diffusing technology. Without these pillars, redistribution remains statistical theatre.

The synthesis of Mbeki, Gqubule, and Gumede points to one conclusion: the failure of empowerment lies not in its intent but in its divorce from production. It has polarised communities and alienated those it was designed to liberate. For the African worker, the Coloured artisan, the Indian entrepreneur, and the Khoisan farmer, empowerment remains a distant policy, not a lived reality. 

Worse still, it has generated a new parasitic class, the Compradorial Bourgeoisie and Lumpen Bourgeoisie, who thrive not by producing value but by mediating between capital and the state. These intermediaries have become custodians of a rentier economy, preying on public contracts and trading on political proximity. 

The recent revelations of the Madlanga Commission have laid bare how this predatory nexus has been exploited by criminal syndicates whose greed has hollowed out vital institutions. The mayhem at Tembisa Hospital stands as a classical example of how empowerment without ethics degenerates into criminal accumulation, where public procurement becomes the site of moral decay rather than economic renewal.

It is in this context that the DA’s Plan to Turbocharge the Economy positions itself, presenting colour-blind growth as a corrective to race-based reform. Yet its neutrality conceals a return to market fundamentalism, where history is treated as an inconvenience and inequality as efficiency’s collateral damage.

The DA’s clarity is intellectually appealing to the proponents of the free market. It speaks fluently to investors, global financial institutions, and technocrats versed in the grammar of GDP and fiscal prudence. It promises a predictable, rule-based environment, a streamlined bureaucracy, and a disciplined state. But its social imagination is anaemic.

It mistakes efficiency for equity and assumes that growth will trickle down, where history has proven it trickles upward. Its model, elegant in theory, is socially hollow. To build a future on the erasure of race in an economy born of racial dispossession is to institutionalise injustice through neutrality.

 If implemented without structural correction, the DA’s Plan to Turbocharge the Economy will yield progress in metrics but regression in meaning. It will deliver stability without solidarity, fiscal health without social cohesion, and competitiveness without transformation. It risks constructing a technocratic republic where the market is sovereign, but the people remain marginal. Progress divorced from justice is regression disguised as reform. 

Any socioeconomic policy that does not assist in resolving the National Question in South Africa is an antithesis of economic transformation. We must accept that the South African economy is characterised by Two Nations, a thesis advanced by President Thabo Mbeki during his tenure, describing the coexistence of one affluent, largely white nation and another impoverished, largely black nation separated by structural inequality. 

It is therefore imperative to build a staircase between these two nations, to bridge the gulf between privilege and poverty, and to recognise that this historical reality cannot be ignored. South Africa’s challenge is not to choose between efficiency and inclusion but to weld them into one project, growth as the language of justice, and justice as the architecture of growth.

Empowerment must create producers, not clients, factories, not share certificates, innovators, not dependents. Without that moral and structural synthesis, the DA’s vision will not modernise South Africa’s economy; it will merely polish its inequities and repackage inequality as progress.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst and holds a Magister Philosophiae (M.Phil.) in South African Politics and Political Economy from the erstwhile University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), now Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.