“Nobody owes you anything. Build your own wealth.”
Every South African debate about race, wealth and opportunity eventually arrives at that sentence.
There is truth in it.
There is also a dangerous omission.
The argument assumes everyone began from roughly the same place, and that today’s outcomes are explained mainly by today’s effort.
That assumption is inconsistent with most of what economists know about wealth.
Three questions are routinely confused in this debate. How much of wealth inequality is explained by inheritance?
How many rich people inherited their wealth?
And how much advantage comes not from inheritance itself, but from the privileges wealth creates – good schools, professional networks, stable families, financial security, social capital?
Across advanced economies, economists comparing France, Spain, Britain and the US estimate that inheritances and gifts alone account for roughly a quarter to a third of wealth inequality.
Add family background – parents’ education, occupation and social position – and the combined contribution ranges from more than a third to almost half.
In these economies, between a third and a half of the differences in wealth are linked not to what individuals create in their lifetime but to advantages from previous generations.
In 2023 billionaire study, UBS found that new billionaires had inherited more wealth than they had created.
And on Forbes’ 2024 global rich list, every billionaire under 30 inherited their fortune.
‘ADD APARTHEID’
South Africa adds another layer. Most countries wrestle with inheritance. We wrestle with inheritance and apartheid.
Apartheid did not merely determine who earned higher incomes. It determined who could accumulate productive assets at all.
Property.
Businesses.
Pensions.
Investments.
Commercial farms.
Urban land.
Those assets did not evaporate in 1994. They passed, as wealth usually does, from one generation to the next.
Researchers at the London School of Economics, working through probate records, estimated in a 2024 study that 45% of white South African adults hold inheritable wealth of at least R250 000, compared with 3% of black adults – and that the gap narrowed only modestly between 2009 and 2019.
That is not simply history. It is history continuing to earn compound interest.
Of course, inheritance is not destiny. Fortunes are squandered within generations.
Entrepreneurs build extraordinary businesses from modest beginnings, and South Africa has seen real black wealth creation since 1994 – in mining, finance, technology, property and the professions. A growing black middle and upper class is one of democracy’s genuine achievements.
Inheritance is the parent who pays the university fees, the family friend who secures the internship, the neighbourhood where the school functions, knowing how banks, lawyers and universities work.
None of it appears in a will. All of it compounds.
The child who inherits R5 million starts ahead of the child who inherits nothing; so does the child who inherits no money but grows up where opportunity is ordinary.
Which brings us, unavoidably, to the three letters that end most South African dinner parties: BEE.
I spent years in the auditor general’s office. I know what a gamed compliance regime looks like, and BEE as practised has too often been one.
Fronting. Ownership that exists on paper and nowhere else.
When the state’s own department reviews the framework because empowerment has become associated with cronyism, the critics are not inventing things; they are describing them.
A 2026 study by the Black Management Forum and Henley Business School Africa, surveying more than 500 managers, returned the same weary verdict: the principle of transformation broadly accepted, the practice experienced as a compliance exercise.
The policy’s fiercest opponents no longer dispute the diagnosis. They dispute the prescription. That is not a small concession. It should be the starting point of the national conversation, not a footnote.
It is also why “scrap it all and let the market decide” is not the neutral option it sounds like. Markets do not erase history.
They compound it.
A colour-blind economy built on colour-coded assets does not produce a colour-blind outcome.
So the honest question is not whether South Africa needs redress.
The honest question is what redress would look like if it were designed for the child at the back of the queue rather than the consortium at the front of it.
SOLID SUGGESTIONS
Four tests suggest themselves.
Count assets, not certificates. A policy meant to correct an asset gap should be judged by assets transferred, businesses built and balance sheets created – not points scored.
Reach people who will never see a boardroom. Title deeds for the 1.2 million state-built houses the government itself admits it still owes. Schools that function. Worker ownership that actually vests.
First-generation capital for first-generation entrepreneurs. Empowerment that requires proximity to a tender is not empowerment; it is rationing.
Not everyone began the race at the same starting line. Not everyone who finishes first cheated. And not everyone who finishes last lacked effort.
A mature society should be able to hold all three of those truths without embarrassment. Then it must do something harder: act on the first without dishonouring the other two.
We can rename BEE. We can reform it. We can abolish it tomorrow morning. What no parliament can repeal is the balance sheet apartheid left behind.
Until that balance sheet is closed, history will keep earning its interest. And the only question is who pays for it.
– Themba Dlamini is a pastor and chartered accountant. He is also the author of ‘Village Boy: A Memoir of Fatherlessness’.
– This article was originally published by The Daily Maverick.
