10/06/2026
B-BBEE is not the problem. How businesses approach it is.
That is not a comfortable thing to say. But it is an honest one.
Every year, businesses across South Africa spend money on Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) initiatives. Not because they chose to. Because they felt they had to. Fear of losing a contract. Fear of being locked out of a supply chain. Fear that a competitor who took it more seriously would take the business they could not afford to lose. That fear drives a particular kind of activity. Reactive. Pressured. Expensive. And it is a very poor foundation for good decisions.
That is not a criticism of the framework. It is an observation about the starting point.
B-BBEE was designed as a transformation instrument. It was also designed as a business instrument. The Scorecard rewards businesses that invest in people, develop suppliers, procure from empowering businesses, and build structures that reflect the country they operate in. These are not arbitrary requirements. They are a blueprint for how a business can grow its impact while growing its score.
But that only works if the business has a strategy.
Not a compliance checklist. A strategy.
A lot of businesses do not have one.
What a lot of businesses have is a reaction. They think about B-BBEE when Verification is approaching. They scramble to find spend that qualifies, and interventions that can still be counted. The result is rarely what it could have been.
A strategy works differently. It starts with an honest assessment of where the business is. Not just the current score, but the payroll, the supplier base, the Skills Development spend, and the Enterprise and Supplier Development programmes already in place. From that assessment, a realistic target level emerges. Not a wishful one. A buildable one.
From there, every element is planned. Initiatives are designed to qualify, not just to spend. Budgets are allocated to move specific points on specific elements. And the people responsible for implementation understand what is required for the spend to count, not just for it to happen.
Because spend and points are not the same thing.
The gap between spend and points is not usually a documentation problem. It is a prioritisation problem. Businesses spend on training programmes that are real, but not structured around the skills the business actually needs to develop. They shift procurement to compliant suppliers on low-risk, easily interchangeable items, where the commercial decision was always reversible. They fund Enterprise and Supplier Development initiatives that are genuine, but peripheral. They contribute to Social and Economic Development with good intent, but without taking real custodianship of the outcome. The money left the account. The commitment was real. But the choices were made without understanding what the scorecard rewards, which is not spend. It is directed spend, with the right structure, in the right places, for the right reasons.
B-BBEE is not a short game.
The businesses that struggle most with it are often the ones that came to it late, under pressure, with no runway left to make considered decisions. That experience shapes how they see the whole framework. It feels punishing because it was first encountered in a panic. But that is not what B-BBEE is. It is a long-term business decision, and the businesses that treat it that way compete for different contracts, access different supply chains, and build something that holds up over time.
The framework has not changed. The opportunity has not changed. What needs to change is the approach.
B-BBEE works when you work it correctly. It is whether your business is giving it the attention it deserves, before the pressure arrives.
