The DA said, “This marks a major step in reforming South Africa’s approach to empowerment policy”, understating the importance of what it has done. A major step? Its Bill is more than that. It is the single most significant policy shift introduced in South Africa’s Parliament in 30 years.

Empowerment policy is the foundational policy of South Africa’s democracy, as it dictates how the country will deal with its past and build a prosperous future. All other policies of economic and social significance take their lead from the drift of broader empowerment policy.

But, as the DA goes on to point out, “After 30 years, BEE [black economic empowerment] has failed to deliver meaningful inclusion. Instead, it has enriched a politically connected few, while millions remain locked out of real economic opportunity.[…] The Economic Inclusion for All Bill offers a credible alternative. It shifts the focus from compliance checklists and paper-based ownership deals to measurable outcomes that expand opportunity in the real economy.”

Right on. Why does South Africa’s economy grow so slowly? And why is unemployment so high? President Cyril Ramaphosa would have you believe, as he did last week, that the answers rest with slavery and colonialism, and the remedy lies in reparations. In other words, a grift. The pattern at work is exactly what the empowerment policy practised by his government became. Invoke an actual historical wrong in the hope that the accused party will give you some money. That might be how he accumulated a vast personal fortune, but it is no foundation upon which to build a modern economy.

The answer to why that economy has not been built and why it grows so slowly is that the grift serves to tax both investment and state spending. Investors who wish to commit capital to South Africa need to pay a share of that as a tax, or they’re told to go elsewhere (perhaps to India, as the spokesperson for the African National Congress [ANC] most recently suggested to our friend Michael Sham on his excellent YouTube channel, in an exchange deserving of the Pulitzer Prize). It’s crazy, and exacerbated by the fact that, on the procurement side, the public purse pays a premium to empowered suppliers. The effect is to make South Africa fundamentally uncompetitive, which can in turn be read into its very low fixed investment rate.

Stopping and reversing the grift is a first and necessary step to staging a South African economic recovery. Fail at that and the recovery is impossible.

Good on the DA, then, when it writes, “At its core is the reform of public procurement, one of the most powerful tools for driving inclusion, given the state’s R1.2 trillion procurement budget. […] The Bill replaces race-based procurement rules with a simplified, outcomes-driven preference-points system that prioritises value for money and genuine economic inclusion.”

“Under this model, companies are rewarded for what South Africa needs most: Creating jobs, investing in infrastructure, developing skills, supporting small businesses to grow.”

This newspaper could not put it better than the excellent DA policy director Mat Cuthbert did when he wrote, “Crucially, this approach recognises a simple truth: there is no meaningful empowerment without economic growth. By aligning empowerment with investment and job creation, the Bill seeks to drive inclusive growth that expands opportunity, rather than concentrating it in the hands of the few.

The politics are also good.

The DA has made an offer to the country that the ANC, its partner in government, has the choice to accept or reject. That’s a much better dynamic than much of the Government of National Unity to date, which has seen DA ministers act more like admin clerks, rubber stamps in hand, stamping away in support of dated ANC ideas that have no prospect at all of turning the economy around or improving the lives of people.

Now they are setting the pace – and on the country’s most important policy.

If the ANC goes against the Bill, as its instinct may tell it to do, it should understand that the public is with the DA. This newspaper tested that in a national survey conducted in late 2025. In that survey, respondents were presented with the DA proposal to replace BEE with an empowerment policy that uses poverty, not race, to determine who needs upliftment, and were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the policy. Among all voters, 67% said they agreed with the policy and 25% said they disagreed, meaning a strong majority of South Africans are in favour of reforming BEE. The most striking finding sits inside the ANC’s own base. Among ANC supporters, 61% agreed, while 28% disagreed, with the DA’s proposed BEE reforms.

If the ANC wonders why it became a 40% party, and why it is polling at 30% in Johannesburg, it will find some of the answers in those data. Its own voters, “our people”, as it was once confident to call them, are now more inclined to agree with a lanky chap called Cuthbert from the DA than they are with the ANC itself on the best way to rectify the wrongs of apartheid and grow a better economy for all the country’s people. It is a staggering change in the balance of power.