BEE created black billionaires in South Africa, but it did not create black prosperity
Billionaires Africa | 09.03.2026 03:41
When Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison on Feb. 11, 1990, he stepped into a country whose economy had been deliberately engineered to exclude most of the people who lived in it. Black South Africans, who made up roughly 80% of the population, owned almost nothing of consequence — not the mines under their feet, not the banks that held their wages, not the farms on which their grandparents had labored. That was not an accident. It was policy, and it had been policy for decades.
