ABSTRACT
For the past 50 years, through the system of apartheid and separate development, economic policies favouring the white majority interacted to form an economy characterized by serious structural weaknesses. Equally, these deficiencies created a deep divide between the affluence of a privileged few alongside the extensive poverty and social deprivation of the majority. The dominant interests of the apartheid period were the small number of large corporate groups, most with roots in the mining industry. Until the early 1990s, four mining groups controlled 80 per cent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with AngloAmerican Corporation and De Beers owning half the value of shares quoted (Overseas Development Institute 1994b). The ANC asserts that the economic legacy of apartheid featured levels of ‘inequality, unemployment, economic disempowerment of the majority and the concentration of ownership by large conglomerates’ (African National Congress 1994b). Therefore, it sought to ‘transform’ the economy and numerous resolutions were passed at its 1994 national conference, including promoting black economic empowerment, developing a policy on direct investment and engaging in a policy of fiscal discipline, all of which was couched in the language of the RDP (ibid.: 24).
