More than a decade of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has spawned a few super-rich “black oligarchs”, but it has made little apparent impact on the fundamentals of the South African economy. Real economic power remains firmly under white control.

“Ninety-seven per cent of the equity on Johannesburg Stock Exchange is in white hands,” Tokyo Sexwale, a former political activist and detainee turned businessman, said recently. “The whites have never had it so good.”

White South Africans, who make up 10 per cent of the population of about 45 million, own and manage most of the nation’s big companies and assets. Among whites, only a few unskilled, mainly Afrikaner, workers appear to have lost out with the end of white rule. The others are enjoying a consumer-led boom that last week helped to push the JC Security Exchange to a record high.

Meanwhile, the bottom 30 per cent of black society — the previously disadvantaged whom black empowerment was supposed to help — are worse off today than at the arrival of democracy in 1994. Many live on less than £60 a month. They have watched with rising anger as a group of former freedom fighters with high-level connections to the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have become megamillionaires.

Mr Sexwale, one of the four big names associated with virtually every BEE deal from mining through to agriculture, argues that the attention given to the big deals has obscured the fact that much of the money has trickled down to other less privileged blacks and given birth to a rapidly growing black middle class.

His argument is strongly contested by many former comrades. William Gumede, a political author, said: “Now it is not just a few whites at the top, but a handful of new blacks joining them. This is ‘cappuccino’ empowerment — white foam sprinkled with chocolate.”

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