Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment is all about creating a new economic landscape by supporting entrepreneurs through investment in enterprise skills. The DA's focus on 'poverty as a proxy for disadvantage' addresses an entirely different need.

While the debate currently raging in the country is ostensibly about the utility of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE), the subtext reveals broader scepticism about the necessity of affirmative action itself.

To be sure, the B-BBEE programme, in its more than 30 years of existence, is not exactly covered in glory. For instance, its model for the development of small and medium-sized enterprises, which are acknowledged creators of good jobs in communities, has been rigid and sometimes self-defeating. An example of this is the requirement that loan applicants contribute a percentage of their own funds to demonstrate their skin in the game. This is onerous to the point of forcing many aspiring entrepreneurs to give up, having failed to find the required money. Those who manage to raise the needed money often do so by surrendering a disproportionate share of equity in the prospective business. Surely there are other ways of doing this.

And then, of course, the B-BBEE programme is replete with examples of shoddy quality, which results in supposedly completed jobs having to be redone at significant cost, a blatant abuse of taxpayer money. The landscape is dotted with abandoned construction sites, housing developments, road repair works that...