I recently found myself in an exchange with a fellow business commentator about why Black-owned supply chains remain so thin, three decades after 1994.
His diagnosis was a familiar one: we failed to organise, we chased integration into white business instead of building on what we had, and government abandoned us. His conclusion: “We just cannot organise ourselves and support each other.”
I’ve heard some version of this argument for 20 years, from boardrooms to township trading stalls. I want to name it properly, because it deserves a name: Respectability Economics.
Respectability politics tells the marginalised that if they simply behave better — dress better, speak better, discipline their communities better — the system will finally let them in.
Respectability Economics is its balance-sheet cousin. It tells Black business that if we simply organise better, professionalise better, support each other better, the capital, land and supply chains we’ve been locked out of will finally open up. It relocates the fault line from the architecture of exclusion to the character of the excluded.
Organisation was never the bottleneck
The trouble is the premise doesn’t survive an afternoon of scrutiny.
We didn’t fail to organise. We organised relentlessly. Black South Africans have built one of the densest networks of business chambers, forums, associations and stokvels found anywhere in the world — much of it constructed under apartheid, when organising was itself dangerous.
If organisational density were the missing ingredient, three decades of chambers, forums and burial societies should have converted into owned wholesale, logistics and distribution infrastructure by now. It hasn’t. That’s not proof we’re disorganised but rather proof the organisation was never the bottleneck.
The hidden cost of having to build your own infrastructure
The real ledger item is what I call the aggregation tax.
Township and Black-owned businesses are routinely required to build their own collective infrastructure — warehousing, buying power, credit history, formal governance — as an unpaid precondition just to be considered for funding that incumbent businesses received pre-built, often through decades of state and financial-sector support they never had to justify.
Picture a township retailer trying to access wholesale pricing that supermarket chains take for granted: before a single rand of funding is discussed, that retailer must first organise a buying collective, formalise its governance, build a credit history with no formal credit line to build it on, and demonstrate scale it cannot reach without the very capital being withheld pending proof of scale. Incumbents inherited that infrastructure.
Township business is told to build it first, alone, for free, as the entry fee to be considered at all. That’s not a discipline gap. That’s an architecture that prices entry twice: once in capital, and once again in unpaid labour before the capital is even considered.
When the institutions meant to fund you become another barrier
Development finance itself has been part of the wall, not the ladder.
Institutions mandated specifically to fund this market have, in practice, structurally excluded it — a pattern significant enough to warrant a parliamentary submission and an Auditor-General referral.
When the institutions built to fund you exclude you by design, no amount of “better organising” opens that door. The door isn’t locked because of your conduct. It’s locked because of its design.
When ownership is trapped on paper
Land compounds the same problem.
Much of township commercial land remains encumbered by unresolved title, orphaned “mother erf” registrations, and municipal debt attached to properties entrepreneurs never incurred themselves.
You cannot leverage an asset as collateral when its title is contested or its debt history predates your ownership of it. No amount of organisational discipline resolves a title deed that was never properly transferred in the first place — that requires municipal and provincial administrative action, not better spreadsheets from Black business associations.
When informality becomes the default
And this same pattern extends into mining towns, where it wears a different name: zama zama.
Strip away the criminal syndicates that the term gets carelessly applied to, and there is a much larger population of small-scale and artisanal miners who are not outlaws by temperament — they are outlaws by administrative default.
They have applied, or tried to apply, for formal mining rights and permits, and sit stuck behind years-long backlogs at the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy and their local municipalities.
Many of those backlogs trace back to the same apartheid-era spatial planning logic that produced “mother erf” title chaos in townships: mining towns were planned as labour reservoirs, not as sites of Black ownership, so the administrative and cadastral systems needed to process Black-owned mining rights at scale were simply never built.
A miner cannot “organise better” his way past a DMRE permitting backlog any more than a township retailer can organise her way past an unresolved title deed. Both are administrative failures dressed up, when convenient, as failures of the applicant’s character.
Exclusion has a price tag most people never see
Township households and businesses don’t sit outside the financial system so much as get pushed into a shadow version of it — paying multiples more for store credit than formal credit would cost, paying for funeral cover priced at several times what equivalent life cover would cost, holding savings in cash instead of formal investment vehicles that would compound.
Conservatively, that’s tens of billions of rands a year in value extracted from Black households and businesses simply for being excluded from formal-sector pricing. That is not the cost of disorganisation. That is the cost of exclusion, priced and collected.
Integration was not simply a choice
The “we chased integration instead of building on what we had” deserves scrutiny
This claim assumes Black business had an intact, capitalised base in 1994 that we then abandoned in favour of chasing white markets. We didn’t. What existed pre-1994 was infrastructure built under active state suppression — the Group Areas Act, influx control, licensing regimes designed to cap Black enterprise at survivalist scale.
“Building on what we had” was never simply a choice Black business declined to make. It was a base that apartheid planning had already deliberately kept thin, fragmented and undercapitalised, so that “integration” often wasn’t a preference over self-reliance — it was frequently the only route to capital and markets that existed at all.
The contradiction at the heart of the argument
There’s also a contradiction sitting inside the Respectability Economics argument that’s worth pointing out plainly: you cannot simultaneously argue that government threw Black business “to the wolves” and that Black business’s own failure to organise is the core problem.
The first is a claim about state and policy failure. The second quietly turns that same abandonment into evidence of our own deficiency. Pick one. They don’t coexist.
None of this means organisation, governance and internal solidarity don’t matter — they matter enormously, and Black business bodies should be relentless about strengthening them.
But we should be honest about what better organising can and cannot fix. It cannot fix a DFI mandate that structurally excludes the market it exists to serve. It cannot fix a land title system that keeps ownership contested. It cannot fix a financial system priced to profit from exclusion rather than close it.
What better organising can — and cannot — fix
When we accept Respectability Economics as the diagnosis, we do the excluding system’s diagnostic work for it — and we let it off the hook.
The real work in front of us is structural, not attitudinal.
* DFI mandates must be audited against actual disbursement to the market they claim to serve.
* Municipalities must resolve “mother erf” and orphaned title — in townships and mining towns alike — so that land can finally function as collateral.
* DMRE processing capacity must be built to clear small-scale mining-rights backlogs rather than leave applicants permanently informal by default.
* And procurement and regulatory reform must stop pricing township and mining-town businesses out before they reach the table.
None of that is solved by another chamber, another forum, or another exhortation to “support each other.” We have done that.
What remains is the harder, less comfortable conversation about who built the walls, and who has the power to take them down.
Let’s stop asking why Black business hasn’t organised well enough to deserve inclusion, and instead let’s direct ourselves to this: Why have the institutions mandated to include us been allowed, for 30 years, not to?
* Vusi Vokwana is the Founding Director of Kasi Catalyst and Secretary General of NAFCOC (2008). She writes a weekly column for The National entitled Kasi Brief.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.