Barely a day goes by in South Africa without an eye-catching headline with the letters BEE – shorthand for black economic empowerment, the government’s policy for giving blacks a meaningful stake in the economy. A few signal a heartwarming story, say of miners or farm labourers who have gone into business with their old bosses.

But to the exasperation of the architects of BEE, many more do not and rather pander to the idea of the government’s critics that BEE has to date done little more than enrich an elite with good connections to the ruling African National Congress. In perhaps the most eye-catching recent saga, one of South Africa’s most prominent black businesspeople, Danisa Baloyi, dubbed the “Queen of BEE”, had to resign from the board of ABSA bank over her links to Fidentia, an asset management group embroiled in one of the country’s biggest financial scandals in years.