{"id":716,"date":"2025-10-27T19:28:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T19:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ecmessenger.co.za\/?p=716"},"modified":"2025-10-27T19:33:42","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T19:33:42","slug":"the-das-colour-blind-crusade-unmasking-neoliberal-sabotage-in-the-heart-of-the-gnu-opinion-piece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ecmessenger.co.za\/index.php\/2025\/10\/27\/the-das-colour-blind-crusade-unmasking-neoliberal-sabotage-in-the-heart-of-the-gnu-opinion-piece\/","title":{"rendered":"The DA’s Colour-Blind Crusade: Unmasking Neoliberal Sabotage in the Heart of the GNU-OPINION PIECE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Mawethu Ngxishe<\/div>\n
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Just a week ago, on 20 October 2025, the DA unveiled its “Economic Inclusion for All Bill”, a legislative Trojan horse designed to gut Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE), the very policy that has, however imperfectly, sought to stitch up the gaping wounds of apartheid’s economic apartheid.<\/div>\n
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This bill, masquerading as a poverty-alleviating panacea, proposes amending the Public Procurement Amendment Act of 2024 to excise race as a criterion for empowerment, replacing it with a nebulous “needs-based” framework that reeks of the colour-blind rhetoric long favoured by white liberals uncomfortable with the arithmetic of redress.<\/div>\n
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It’s not mere policy tinkering; it’s an assault on the soul of our democracy, one that inflames the embers of a debate over black empowerment that has simmered since the ink dried on Nelson Mandela’s signature in 1994.<\/div>\n
As I step in the traditions of Fanon and Biko, I see this for what it is: a brazen attempt by the DA, born of the ashes of the apartheid-era Progressive Federal Party, to rewind the clock on three decades of hard-won progress.<\/div>\n
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The party’s leader, John Steenhuisen, has crowed that B-BBEE fosters “state-sponsored corruption” and leaves “the vast majority of South Africans unemployed,” positioning his bill as a bold stroke for “genuine inclusion.” Yet, in truth, this is the neoliberal sleight of hand: pretend equity by ignoring the colour line that apartheid so meticulously drew.<\/div>\n
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It demands we forget that poverty in Mzansi is not class-neutral but racialised to its core, black South Africans, dispossessed for centuries, remain the disproportionate bearers of its burden. The DA’s fear, thinly veiled as pragmatism, exposes a deeper malaise: an enduring aversion to black agency, where true economic parity would upend the garden-boy hierarchies their forebears so assiduously cultivated.<\/div>\n
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Worse still is the ANC’s response under Cyril Ramaphosa, that erstwhile union firebrand turned GNU conciliator. In a statement that drips with equivocation, Ramaphosa has downplayed the DA’s salvo, insisting B-BBEE “applies without any dilution” and is “rooted in the Constitution.” Yet, whispers from Luthuli House reveal a willingness to “open doors to discussions” on amendments, a concession that reeks of capitulation in the face of coalition arithmetic. This is not statesmanship; it’s sabotage.<\/div>\n
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The “Thumamina” brigades, those Ramaphosa-era apparatchiks, more attuned to Davos than District Six, stand accused of betraying the very mandate that propelled the ANC to power. Were they not, one might ask, dispatched by the ghosts of former oppressors, their brief to hollow out the liberation movement from within? In yielding to the DA’s demands, they undermine the democratic process, trading the radical reconstruction of our economy for the mirage of GNU harmony.<\/div>\n
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It is a betrayal that echoes the compromises of the 1990s, when the sunset clauses shielded white capital from the guillotine of accountability. To grasp the perfidy of this moment, one must dig deeply into the blood-soaked soil of our history, where economic exclusion was not an accident but the architecture of empire. Consider the uninvited guests who arrived on our shores in 1652: Dutch settlers under Jan van Riebeeck, who planted their flag at the Cape not as explorers but as extractors, transforming a bountiful land into a fortress of dispossession.<\/div>\n
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By the time the British wrested control in 1806, the pattern was set, Khoisan and Xhosa peoples herded like cattle, their grazing lands seized for wool farms and vineyards. The mineral revolution of the 1870s, with its gold and diamond rushes, accelerated the plunder: black labour conscripted into migrant hostels, bodies broken in the bowels of the Witwatersrand, while profits flowed to London and Johannesburg boardrooms.<\/div>\n
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No treaty invited these marauders; no ballot box sanctioned their theft. As historian Leonard Thompson wryly notes, colonialism was “a system of conquest” that reduced indigenous economies to vassalage.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The Union of South Africa in 1910 formalised this rapine, crowning white supremacy with the Natives Land Act of 1913, a legislative abomination that confined black ownership to a miserly 7% of the land, later grudgingly upped to 13% by the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act. Imagine: the vast Highveld, cradle of Sotho and Tswana kingdoms, decreed “scheduled areas” for whites only, while black farmers were evicted en masse, their cattle slaughtered, their futures pawned to white landlords.<\/div>\n
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This was no mere zoning quirk; it was economic strangulation, forcing millions into the urban underclass as sharecroppers or mine fodder. By 1948, when the National Party enthroned apartheid, the edifice was complete: the Group Areas Act of 1950 razed Sophiatown and Lady Selborne, displacing 3.5 million souls to townships like Soweto, where “separate development” meant separate and unequal, black “homelands” (Bantustans) engineered as labour reservoirs, 87% of the land reserved for a 13% minority.<\/div>\n
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These were not abstract statutes but lived infernos. Recall the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, where 69 unarmed protesters, demanding pass law repeal, that badge of economic unfreedom, were gunned down by police, their blood staining the soil as a testament to resistance.<\/div>\n
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Or the Soweto Uprising of 1976, when schoolchildren rose against Afrikaans imposition, only to face bullets and batons, igniting a conflagration that scorched the regime’s legitimacy. Economically, apartheid was a machine of exclusion: the 1983 Tricameral Parliament feigned inclusion for Coloureds and Indians while blacks were shunted to “independent” Bantustans like Transkei, starved of investment and infrastructure.<\/div>\n
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Black wages languished at a fraction of white ones, by 1990, the average black family earned R1,200 annually against R25,000 for whites, while capital flight and sanctions bit only at the edges of white privilege. Reparations? A pipe dream. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered amnesties, not assets; land reform, promised in the 1996 Constitution, has redistributed a paltry 10% of farmland in 30 years, mired in “willing seller, willing buyer” inertia.<\/div>\n
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Enter B-BBEE in 2003, not as a gift but as a grudging corrective, a framework to leverage procurement, skills development, and ownership to claw back what centuries of theft had stolen. Flawed? Undeniably: elite capture has fattened a black bourgeoisie at the expense of the masses, with unemployment at 33% and black youth bearing the brunt. Yet to jettison it wholesale, as the DA urges, is to endorse amnesia.<\/div>\n
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Their “poverty-focused” alternative, devoid of race, ignores that 80% of the poor are black, a direct lineage from the Land Acts’ legacy. It’s the same old script: whites as universal victims, blacks as presumptive beneficiaries who must earn their scraps. To the DA, black development is not justice but largesse, a threat to the meritocracy myth that conveniently forgets how pass laws and job reservations rigged the game.<\/div>\n
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This GNU gambit lays bare the fragility of our democratic bargain. Ramaphosa’s ANC, once the vanguard of the oppressed, now flirts with dilution, echoing the 1994 CODESA sell-out that spared white pensions while saddling the fiscus with apartheid debt. The National Empowerment Fund has rightly rejected the DA’s overtures, thundering that scrapping race from empowerment is “a step backward.” But rhetoric alone won’t suffice. We, the dispossessed descendants of the Great Trek’s victims and the Defiance Campaign’s heroes, must reclaim the narrative. Let the DA’s bill founder in parliamentary purgatory; let civil society, unions, landless movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo, mobilise as they did against the 2018 Expropriation Bill dilutions.<\/div>\n
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True liberation demands more than tweaks: radical land audits, reparative wealth taxes on mining conglomerates, and a B-BBEE reborn as worker-owned cooperatives. Only then can we honour the uninvited invasion’s survivors, transforming exclusion’s scars into seeds of sovereignty. In the words of Steve Biko, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Let us sharpen ours against this latest incursion, for black South Africans, economic justice is not a debate; it’s our unfinished revolution. \u00a0#VukaDarkie<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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About the Author<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
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Mawethu Ngxishe is an independent writer, Freelancer, based in East London. He writes in his personal capacity.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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