The DA’s alternative to BEE: DEI and global governance

In a recent press conference, the somehow simultaneously dour and effete Matt Cuthbert revealed their alternative to BEE. We all know the main critiques – it’s racist, it doesn’t benefit the poor, and it has facilitated political corruption. But the solution appears to be entirely unserious on the one hand, and sinister on the other.

On the plus side, Ramaphosa has dismissed this policy out-of-hand, and it will end up in the dustbin with the other 50 or so bills the DA have tabled in Parliament in the past 20 years (strangely, they never try to pass anything of substance in the Provincial Parliament, which they control). So the DA’s timewasting and money-wasting behaviour is just a signalling exercise, and given their 4% share of the black vote, and the tediously detailed nature of their policy, unlikely to affect anything.

But it teaches us a lot about the DA itself, and so it is worth looking at – the most notable aspect is that they have the power to abolish BEE in practice without changing any laws, and yet they adamantly refuse to try.
 

“The centre”

The DA positions itself as the “real” face of redress and redistribution, and invited a swathe of left-wing journalists to ask questions, which were easily batted off by Cuthbert’s appeals to their sincere left-wing ethics, which they frame as “centrist”:

“I think also just to be categoric, we are a centrist party. I wouldn’t consider President Trump’s Republican party to be a centrist party. And as Dr. Meyer said, we have a number of key principles and values such as non-racialism, diversity, redress which we are firmly committed to as a party. It’s why we are the most diverse party in South Africa and we remain true to those particular values. We are not trying to copycat some rather conservative policies which have been taken in the US and which have been done in a political context in which there’s been a backlash against too much state involvement. And I think it’s important never to think that the Democratic Alliance is synonymous with the Republican party.”

This is rather strange, since the main critique of Trump in terms of these kinds of policies has come from his administration’s opposition to racially discriminatory hiring processes and the use of Critical Theory as the basis for training and policy. His immigration and economic policies have borne a great deal of similarity to Bill Clinton’s, and rhetoric aside, have in practice been somewhat more liberal.

Which raises the question, what is “centrist” in the DA’s mind? What is “the centre”? The centre is always a relative term, and within a South African context, the ANC is the centre, flanked by progressive liberals to the right, and hardline racial socialists to the left. But the DA calculate the “centre” differently – their voters are the right wing, and the ANC is the left wing, and they drag their constituency towards the ANC. As Helen Zille said herself in 2012, they are hugely in favour of the ANC’s programme, and would ideally fuse with them after the departure of the EFF and their radical constituency.

In more concrete terms, the centre appears to be the green-socialist-liberal fusionism of the United Nations and their public-private central planning doctrines. The world government is the centre, but having no enforcement capacity of its own, the DA wish the South African state to enforce its policies on their behalf.

The bill in question seeks to reform South Africa’s procurement system by substituting BEE’s race-based criteria with an alternative model aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For years, the DA has tried to sell a “tweaked” version of BEE to its voters which codifies the UN SDGs in law, and the SDGs have been the core of the party’s manifesto for years now. Even now, the policy retains core elements of state-directed resource allocation, expands bureaucratic requirements, and imposes mandatory compliance on private companies, making it more complex and costly than BEE in some ways.

The DA’s bill is rooted in the party’s broader Sustainable Economic Justice framework, outlined in their 2020 policy document. The philosophy of the SDGs mirrors the Fabian Society’s Third Way model
formulated by Antony Giddens, which was adopted by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Thabo Mbeki (and much of the rest of the Western sphere of influence) in the 1990s. It is a synthesis of socialism and capitalism, promoting public-private partnerships (PPPs) to steer the private sector toward state-defined goals while eliding critiques of state-ownership of the economy. It calls itself “centrist”, in the sense that it is a compromise between Reagan’s America and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.
 

The model

The DA’s bill explicitly aligns procurement with the UN SDGs, including targets for poverty reduction, gender equality, reduced inequalities, climate action, and Keynesian make-work schemes. The DA argues that BEE has “failed dismally” due to its focus on race, elite enrichment, and rigid checklists, leading to fronting practices and corruption. Instead, they propose broadening economic inclusion beyond race to encompass gender, disability, low-income communities, and social development impacts.

The goal is to “advance the empowerment of disadvantaged South Africans, the majority of whom are black”, to achieve “a society where race is not a determinant of opportunity […] An economically just society is one in which economic opportunities are available to all.” Fine and dandy, though the cribbing of the ANC’s rhetoric is very noticeable.

The shift from equality of outcome via race (BEE) to equality of opportunity via SDG compliance is the central concept here. But this is a semantic fudge – true equality of opportunity can only be measured by equality of outcome – after all, if your society is unequal, it must be unfair, and so you have to redistribute more and more, even if equality is fundamentally unattainable due to the laws of nature. And so over time, all such efforts will always trend towards the unjust levelling of society by hobbling those who achieve anything.

South Africa is unequal, but much of this is due to a complete absence of industrial development, which the countries of East Asia have long since recognised as the primary engine of what would now be called “inclusive” growth. China and Vietnam, who still follow this path, focus on the development of major and supporting industries rather than the promotion of Western abstractions that would in any way be better achieved through their more nuts-and-bolts approach.

Trump and others have belatedly realised the benefit of these approaches, but it’s likely too little too late, and much of the West is declining as it de-industrialises. But the de-industrialisation of the economy is good for global labour arbitrage by transnational capital, and the compensating welfare state and redistribution favours left-wing economic populism and the proliferation of state bureaucracy, all benefitting foreign companies, the finance sector, NGOs, welfare-dependents, and civil servants. The use of welfare and free services also promotes rapid urbanisation without the economic development, raising property prices and benefitting the wealthy over the middle class. So ultimately this is a massively extractive model which concentrates wealth and economic power even more, justifying further egalitarian intervention.

We can see some of this at work in Cape Town, whose unsustainable model the DA are so proud of. Skyrocketing property prices, middle class flight to outlying commuter towns, the most extensive squatter camps outside of Durban, and an economy entirely dependent on sectors like construction (temporary, dependent on continual mass migration), finance (rent-seeking) and tourism (evanescent, not contributing to economic development).
 

The policy

The policy briefs published alongside the bill are festooned with all the language of the height of woke progressivism, interspersed with borrowed ANCisms. You can read them here:

•  “Economic Justice: A Sustainable Development Goal Model”
• Public Procurement Amendment Bill

The bill itself introduces a weighted evaluation system for public tenders, replacing BEE’s standalone scorecard with an integrated 80/20 formula:

• 80% value for money (price, quality, functionality)
• 20% Social Development Goals Impact Score

Tender bids would be evaluated simultaneously on both criteria, so that even if a company could provide value for money, they would still have to submit extraordinarily detailed documentation proving SDG alignment, including:

• Job creation, skill development, and enterprise support in low-income communities
• Direct measurable contributions to national development objectives
• Human development and economic empowerment
• Environmental sustainability
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Corporate contributions to SDGs via PPPs, NGO partnerships, and policy alignment

This creates an empowerment index for listed and non-listed companies, mandatory for all tender participants, and quite expensive to produce, empowering the international consulting companies which provide this superfluous make-work service, effectively creating a state subsidy for KPMG and the like. Implementation would apply without thresholds, affecting even small suppliers. For example, a little five-man lighting supply company fitting bulbs in municipal offices must still somehow find the money to get SDG alignment documentation.

The DA’s favoured system expands to subsidies for NGOs and other vectors for ideologically-driven activism and timewasting. NGOs are an amazing vector for political influence and lawfare by foreign states and allied capital, as the German-backed environmentalists have shown, by hobbling our energy sector while the Germans buy up our coal exports. The Open Society Foundation, which Helen Zille worked for for 13 years, funds land invasion advocates like Ndufuna Ukwazi, SRERI and Reclaim the City. Western globalists like these organisations because they preserve foreign influence over domestic affairs, hence their inclusion in the SDG framework.

What the DA are ultimately proposing is an infinitely expanding privatised bureaucracy, forcing all private companies to implement SDG planning, disadvantaging SMEs and emerging businesses. The ruling clarifies that neither the Constitution nor the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (PPPFA) requires preferential policies; the “apparent requirement is political, not legal,” enabling entities to bypass both BEE and SDG impositions.
 

But its necessary

The thing is, they could do far more damage to BEE without attempting the expensive folly of proposing national legislation. BEE is enforced only at two points – scorecards, and public procurement, and the ConCourt has poked a big hole in the enforcement of the latter, the DA just ignore the opportunity, on purpose.

Companies are forced to register for a BEE score, recording ownership and employment stats. This score is also based on the stats of the companies with which those companies in turn contract with. Then, the state, which comprises over 1/3rd of the economy, mandates certain BEE scores to do business with the state. This means that in order to business either with the state, or any company that does business with the state, which is the vast majority of the economy, one must have a high-ranking BEE score, giving away at least 1/4 of one’s company to freeloaders, usually through what is called a “wrong-way risk” loan in financial circles. The company lends the money to the black partner to buy shares, and the shares are the loan’s collateral. The company loses both its money and its ability to contract with the bulk of the economy if the partner defaults.

A landmark 2022 Constitutional Court ruling won by Sakeliga empowers state entities to prioritize value for money over preferential policies like BEE, allowing immediate reform without new legislation. “Ptiority” is the key word here. Nobody needs to have any kind of BEE score to contract with the state, just demonstrate that they provide better value for money to the state, and if they are refused despite winning on these grounds, they have legal grounds to sue.

The DA could just chose to operate on this basis, effectively abolishing BEE in practice. But they don’t, not anywhere they govern. In fact, their procurement policies are stricter on gender and disability criteria than the state mandates, and no more lenient on race.

The Sakeliga report reinforces that such transformative goals under section 217(2) of the Constitution are optional, not mandatory, and must yield to the primary duty of value for money under section 217(1), as affirmed by the Zondo Commission: “Ultimately in the view of the Commission the primary national interest is best served when the government derives the maximum value-for-money in the procurement process.

The Sakeliga report highlights that such expanded criteria contradict the 2022 Constitutional Court order in Sakeliga v Minister of Finance, which limits the national government’s ability to prescribe procurement policies to state entities, including by BEE. This ruling, effective from February 2022, prompted new preferential procurement regulations (effective 16 January 2023) that omit BEE and local content references, allowing entities to opt out entirely.