SA’s drive to bring the long-excluded majority of its people into the mainstream of its economic life is paying healthy dividends. It is pushing the growth rate — nearly 5% last year — on to a higher trajectory. It has helped the 12-year-old democracy move ahead of India as a destination for foreign direct investment. It was a factor in the 47% total return on equities traded on the JSE last year.

Broadly defined, the black economic empowerment strategy hammered out between
government and business is helping fuel an economic and social revolution as millions start to enjoy disposable income and upward mobility for the first time. This is making SA an exciting place to do business and one that holds the promise of long-term stability.

How real is the transformation? Consider this. Just over 20 years ago, SA’s most famous newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, closed because its readership was increasingly black and of no interest to advertisers. Today, SA’s most successful newspaper is the Daily Sun, a three-year-old start-up targeted at the black working class. Its circulation is 450000 and rising, and advertisers are clamouring for space. Nearly half a million black adults moved into the middle income bracket last year, according to the South African Advertising and Research Foundation. The number of black people in the upper brackets grew 30% and the proportion of blacks in the top income bracket is now 20%, up from close to zero a decade ago. The rise of black consumers can be seen in surging sales of consumer goods, financial services, property, cars and tourism. This is strongly tied to empowerment. Factors driving it include the rapid increase of black people in white-collar public- and private-sector jobs and the growth of black-owned business.

There has been understandable criticism that empowerment in its narrowest form — the encouragement of business to put a more representative share of ownership and control in black hands — has in some instances simply served to enrich a small elite. This was perhaps inevitable as businesses scrambled to find what they considered to be bankable and “connectedâ€