What is B-BBEE?
The 2003 B-BBEE Strategy document defines B-BBEE as
”
an integrated and coherent socio-economic process that directly contributes to the economic transformation of SA and brings about significant increases in the number of black people that manage, own and control the country’s economy, as well as significant decreases in income inequalities”
In the decades before South Africa achieved democracy in 1994, the apartheid government systematically excluded African, Indian and Coloured people from meaningful participation in the country’s economy.
South Africa’s policy of B-BBEE is not simply a moral initiative to redress the wrongs of the past. It is a pragmatic growth strategy that aims to realise the country’s full economic potential, while helping to bring the black majority into the economic mainstream.
B-BBEE aims to equalise the South African economy’s weakest point: inequality. No economy can grow by excluding any part of its people, and an economy that is not growing cannot integrate all its citizens in a meaningful way.
As such, this strategy stresses a BEE process that is associated with growth, development, and enterprise development, and not merely the redistribution of existing wealth. Black economic empowerment is an important policy instrument aimed at broadening the economic base of the country and at stimulating further economic growth and creating employment.