House Chairperson, to all intents and purposes, I consider myself a child of the new South Africa. I was seven years old in 1994 and one of my earliest conscious memories was of watching President Mandela's inauguration on TV with my grandmother. That means that I have no personal experience of living under apartheid, and I can only try to imagine and empathise with the pain of the people who did. But growing up in a democratic South Africa, the continued devastating legacy of apartheid was plain to see all around.
That is why the DA supports genuine efforts to redress the skewed and exclusive structure of our economy and expand economic freedom and opportunity to millions more people, and that is why the DA supports the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Amendment Bill. This Bill is a significant step in the right direction because it outlaws black economic empowerment, BEE, fronting and commits state companies to complying with the codes of good practice uniformly. That's the item the Minister did not have time to speak about and that's a very positive point.
This Bill is, I believe, also a frank admission on the part of the ANC that their efforts at redress have thus far failed because the system has been captured by fraudsters and the super-wealthy, who keep on benefiting again and again. Under the ANC, economic empowerment has turned into a scheme for making a few well-connected individuals extremely rich. This has created a small and super-wealthy elite, with little or no benefit for most South Africans, and no fundamental change to the structural inequalities that still persist.
It has been mentioned here that apartheid was undergirded by the idea that people were members of racial groups before they were people in their own right. It is, for the record, lamentable that this Bill perpetuates those group definitions and that the governing party insisted on keeping these provisions in the Bill, despite the amendments proposed by every single other party represented in the committee. The hon James is right. There has been absolutely no backtracking in that regard; we've maintained that position consistently throughout the committee process and we do so today.
We believe that it is possible to achieve truly broad-based empowerment through redress measures which expand opportunities for the many, not reserve them for the few. That is why we support amendments to the code of good practice which rewards job creation, incentivises investment in education and prioritises people who have not yet benefited from BEE. They should be the ones to benefit first. They shouldn't be last in the queue.
We thank the chairperson of the committee for a very fruitful and mostly collegial committee process. We therefore have pleasure in supporting this Bill. Thank you. [Applause.]