“Welcome to the most race regulated country in the world”. That was the sentence Solidarity, a trade union, put on a billboard beside a major Johannesburg highway as South Africa prepares to host the G20 later this month. It was a simple claim with an uncomfortable implication. Thirty years after apartheid, government still maintains hundreds of race-based rules that shape hiring, procurement, licensing and ownership. Within hours the government had instructed the billboard to be torn down - ahead of the delegations’ arrival.

Why remove it? If the government truly believes these measures are the only route to justice, and therefore a moral good, it could have said so with pride. It could have told visiting leaders that its policy framework is principled and productive. It could have pointed to outcomes that speak for themselves. Instead, it acted to hide the message from global eyes.

The reflex to censor gives the game away.

It suggests the ruling establishment knows that empowerment policy has drifted far from restitution into a patronage machine. In practice, race quotas and discretionary scorecards have too often rewarded political proximity rather than promoting empowerment. They have added compliance friction to firms already struggling with electricity shortages, crime and failing logistics. They have frightened off investment that South African workers need. And they have delivered windfalls to insiders while the poor wait in queues for jobs, clinics and working schools.

There was another path.

At this newspaper we think it a moral necessity that the South African government pursue targeted empowerment policies that focus on socio-economic need. A simple means test could suffice, such as, for example, whether your parents went to university or owned property over a certain value. Qualify on those measures and the state should direct tax resources at making sure you attend an excellent school, are fully funded to study further, and have support to start a business, purchase a home, and access excellent healthcare. Investors should in turn earn empowerment credits for creating, jobs, paying tax, committing capital to new projects, and earning export revenue.

The government could have used the G20 spotlight to announce a turn toward that kind of real inclusion and thereby defending redress where it is correctly targeted and transparently measured.

Tearing down a billboard, so that world leaders cannot see it, rather gives the game away that the government has grown ashamed of its most important policy.