What the big law firms don't want South Africans to know
The opponents of economic transformation will never surrender without a fight, the author argues.
Image: Supplied
In January this year, Norton Rose Full Bright (Norton Rose), formerly Deneyz Reitz (an apartheid law firm) - recently joined by AfriForum, Solidarity (white minority NGOs), Bowmans, Werkmans and Webber Wentzel - announced their decision to legally challenge the Legal Sector Code (The LSC), that was gazetted by the Minister of Trade and Industry, and Competition.
The LSC is the BBBEE measurement framework for the legal profession.
In their challenge, Norton Rose asks the court to find that the LSC is invalid, irrational, and unlawful, the decision by the Minister to gazette the Sector Code.
Norton Rose goes on to allege that if the LSC is not set aside, they (only they and 5 other large firms) will suffer prejudice as their BBBEE level will drop significantly from level 1 to 6. This means that they will lose a lot of government legal work as a better BBBEE level rating is required for government work.
There are just over 10,000 law firms in SA. Most of these firms are in support of the LSC.
The small and medium law firms (both black and white-owned) and entities - especially those whose annual revenue is less than R5 million - are not expected to comply with the LSC since it mainly benefits them.
The legal challenge of the LSC is not entirely unexpected, especially since it seeks to disrupt the status quo, however the court application by Norton Rose actually confirms the long held suspicion that the opponents of economic transformation in South Africa, and everywhere in the world, will never surrender without a fight.
Notwithstanding this, and despite the claim by these large firms that they are "committed to transformation" - which we know they are not - there is still a lot that they do not tell South Africa.
Just to rub it in, they continue to use black faces and professionals as proxies in opposition to transformation. The senior counsel on brief in this application, for example, are mainly black males.
In March this year, for instance, coming out of a parliamentary question addressed to the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, it became clear that the so-called large law firms combined, earned more than R100 million in legal fees over the past 5 years from the state and its departments. This excludes the spend on black law firms and Advocates. The figures could be higher. There is still no account or indication of how much of this landed in black hands. Favouring the status quo
What these Law Firms also do not tell SA is that, in essence, they are in favour of a measurement framework that effectively retains the current status quo. This not only promotes white-owned firms in fostering their receipt of more legal work, but also perpetually discriminates and increases the skewed briefing patterns in the legal sector.
The LSC is the product of an inclusive, consultative, and transparent process that was aimed at giving real effect to constitutional transformation. Over seven nationwide consultations with Industry stakeholders were held.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Citizen
10 hours ago
- The Citizen
‘Is it greed or jealousy?': Ramaphosa fires back at critics of BEE, Transformation Fund
The president pushed back against the argument that BEE is a cost to the economy. President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on 16 September 2022. Picture: AFP / Saul Loeb President Cyril Ramaphosa has come out swinging against critics of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), questioning whether their opposition is rooted in 'greed' or 'jealousy'. Ramaphosa was speaking during his keynote address at the gala dinner of the Black Business Council's annual summit held at the Radisson Hotel and Convention Centre in Kempton Park, Ekurhuleni. The two-day summit concluded on Friday. National dialogue and socioeconomic challenges Delivering his speech, Ramaphosa reiterated the government's commitment to hosting a national dialogue to develop solutions for the country's pressing issues. 'Some of these challenges manifest themselves in a number of problems that people not only in our country are facing. 'Cost of living crises are widespread and they impact largely disproportionately on poor people and even middle-income households,' he said. ALSO READ: DA is crippling the government's transformation agenda – labour minister The president acknowledged that while unemployment is a global issue, South Africa is particularly affected. 'We have the worst unemployment problem, especially youth unemployment.' He highlighted the mistrust in institutions, attributing it to high levels of corruption and state capture. Economic growth through transformation Ramaphosa emphasised the potential of the government of national unity (GNU) in driving transformation. He said growth of the country's economy will happen through transformation. 'That is the reality. Transformation is vital if growth is to be meaningful and is to be inclusive as well as to be sustainable. 'There are those who say, dump transformation, dump the black economic empowerment. READ MORE: Affirmative-action measures must 'not go too far', argues DA in court 'Dump it because it is inhibiting growth and I argue that it is what happened in the past that we have to transform and to change, and we can only do so through transformation to grow our economy.' He referred to the Constitution as the foundation for transformation policies. 'The heart of our Constitution is around the equality clause, which says that steps and measures and laws must be made to redress the injustices of our past and we will not get away from that,' the president told delegates. 'It is what happened in the past that we must never forget, for it must inform what we need to do now, and it must inspire what we should do in the future. That's what we need to do and it's not limited to a few laws, policies or regulations.' Watch Ramaphosa's speech below: Ramaphosa defends BEE Ramaphosa stated that legislative frameworks like the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) and the Employment Equity Act are crucial tools for driving transformation. Despite progress in narrowing the equality gap, the president pointed out that significant disparities remain – with the average income of white households still nearly five times higher than that of black African households. READ MORE: Employment Equity Bill has 'shortcomings' Ramaphosa appeared to take a swipe at the Democratic Alliance (DA), which is challenging the Employment Equity Act in court. 'Quite often they are the ones who complain about employment equity, black economic empowerment and you often wonder, what is it? 'Is it greed that is driving them or is it jealousy because it should be prosper thy neighbor that should drive them. They should be applauding. 'Yes, people are also moving up the scale and they are often the very first to complain and even to take government to court.' Transformation Fund Ramaphosa called for the ownership, management, and control of key industries, such as construction, to reflect South Africa's demographics. 'We cannot separate our drive for inclusive growth for the drive for economic empowerment. 'And I stress this because the noises that continue to be made against empowerment and transformation are worrying.' Addressing criticism of the Transformation Fund, Ramaphosa reaffirmed the government's commitment to its implementation. 'We suddenly heard negative voices about the establishment of the Transformation Fund and we have said we are forging ahead with the establishment of this fund and we are going to allocate money.' READ MORE: What problem does government want to solve with R100bn Transformation Fund? He emphasised that access to finance remains a key barrier for black-owned businesses: 'We therefore as government must make sure that there is access to funding for black-owned businesses.' Ramaphosa also pushed back against the argument that BEE is a cost to the economy. 'There are those who say it is costing the economy much too much. And when you ask them in what way it is costing the economy, they are not able to explain. We need to demonstrate that it is an investment in the economy.'
IOL News
2 days ago
- IOL News
AfriForum and the Criminalisation of Black Memory
After losing its hatespeech bid to silence the liberation song Dubul' iBhunu, AfriForum has recast itself as a victim on a Washington roadshow—proof that South Africa's culture wars now trade on transAtlantic markets. Image: IOL The legal campaign by AfriForum against Julius Malema for singing Dubul' iBhunu exposes a deeper problem in post-apartheid South Africa: the refusal to recognise Black historical expression as legitimate political speech. The case becomes a proxy for a wider battle—over how trauma is voiced, who owns remembrance, and whose narrative the law protects. Even though the Constitutional Court ruled in March 2025 that the chant does not constitute hate speech and refused AfriForum's final appeal, the group continues to push a cultural logic that seeks to erase African memory and symbolic resistance. In the wake of that defeat the organisation's leadership flew to Washington, DC, courting White-House-aligned conservatives and evangelical pressure groups. There they resurrected the discredited 'white genocide' myth, recasting their legal loss as a global human-rights emergency and lobbying for US intervention. Through laundering a local culture war into trans-Atlantic respectability AfriForum weaponises the language of victimhood to criminalise Black grief on an international stage. The chant in question gained prominence through the ANC Youth League in the 1980s, where it boosted morale, unified activists, and encoded a shared narrative of resistance. It resurfaced during Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall, accompanying toppled statues, confrontations with institutional power, and the mobilisation of a generation unafraid to connect past to present. Framing it as a Malema issue ignores the collective histories it carries. Struggle songs such as Dubul' iBhunu emerge from moments of crisis, mourning, and confrontation. They are ritual expressions forged in the crucible of generational trauma. The word dubula is not a literal instruction. It channels defiance, spiritual rage, and unresolved loss. Bhunu became a cipher for the apartheid state's armed wing—those who brutalised, detained, and executed under racial law. AfriForum chooses a narrow, decontextualised reading. Its interpretation deletes the cultural logic of African expression and dismisses the long tradition of symbolic resistance found across pre-colonial societies. Among the Xhosa and other Nguni peoples—including Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele—war dance was political dramaturgy, signalling readiness without declaring bloodshed. Choreographed movement, chanting, and regalia combined into displays of spiritual authority and communal strength. These traditions preserved dignity, summoned ancestral guidance, and often prevented violence through symbolic confrontation. The Khoekhoe and ǀXam (San) held equally intricate cosmologies of performance and protest. For the ǀXam, trance dance was healing. It was also social memory and boundary. Khoekhoe resistance rituals used song and oral invocation tied to land custodianship and lineage, later suppressed by missionaries and colonial administrators who labelled them chaotic or threatening. Under settler rule, performance was criminalised; suspicion replaced meaning. Similar traditions surface worldwide. The Māori haka projects strength, summons ancestors, and faces power, often in peacetime assertion rather than wartime aggression. Indigenous nations across the Americas and Australia use ritual chant and dance as spiritual-political speech—warning, remembering, dignifying in the face of settler encroachment. Colonial authorities never grasped this. Ritual was 'primitive'. Song was 'subversive'. Expression itself became a crime. That legacy lingers in how courts treat African performance today. While Dubul' iBhunu is condemned and policed, Die Stem remains sacrosanct—its lyrics celebrating settler conquest and Christian dominion. Its presence in the national anthem shows how power still accommodates the spoils of conquest while rejecting the memory of the conquered. Settler symbols are validated by law; Black resistance is sanitised or prosecuted. The demand is reconciliation without responsibility, visibility without history. The aftermath tells its own tale. On Human Rights Day (21 March 2025) EFF supporters sang Dubul' iBhunu in Sharpeville; AfriForum threatened contempt but had no legal foothold. Two months later the lobby group turned to new litigation, filing papers in the Gauteng High Court to strike down the 2025 Expropriation Act as 'part of a genocidal land-grab'. Simultaneously, Washington rewarded AfriForum's alarmism: a special refugee track has begun admitting small Afrikaner cohorts, and an executive order now withholds USAID funds until Pretoria tackles so-called 'farm murders'. President Ramaphosa has condemned the campaign as 'disinformation diplomacy' and lodged a protest note with the US State Department—but the propaganda has already taken flight. The unresolved question is whether the National Prosecuting Authority has the mettle to deem AfriForum's trans-Atlantic lobbying an act of treason against the republic.
Daily Maverick
3 days ago
- Daily Maverick
Words that wound — ‘Kill the Boer' is legal, but not wise for a fragile South Africa
In March 2025, South Africa's Constitutional Court upheld a contentious ruling that the slogan 'Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,' a liberation-era chant, does not constitute hate speech under South African law. This judgment followed an appeal by AfriForum against a previous judgment. The civil rights organisation argued that the slogan incited violence and hatred, particularly against white South Africans and especially farmers. The court found, however, that the phrase, when understood in its historical and political context, did not meet the legal threshold of hate speech. That said, it is argued here that while the slogan may be constitutionally protected, its deliberate use in contemporary political settings is not merely provocative, it is profoundly unwise. In a society still grappling with the legacies of apartheid, endemic inequality and fragile race relations, words carry weight far beyond their legal definitions. It is within this context that the South Africa Social Cohesion Index (Sasci), developed by the Inclusive Society Institute, has drawn timely attention to a worrying decline in societal cohesion by providing critical insights into why the continued use of divisive slogans serve only to jeopardise the country's progress toward unity and social stability. The Constitutional Court's reasoning The Constitutional Court's dismissal of the appeal by AfriForum was grounded in legal and historical nuance. The justices concurred with the 2022 Equality Court ruling that the chant should not be taken literally but as a symbolic relic of the anti-apartheid struggle. It was not, they emphasised, a call to actual violence against individuals or groups. There was also insufficient evidence linking the use of the slogan to specific acts of harm or incitement, which is a requirement for speech to be classified as hate speech under South African law. This decision reaffirmed the robust commitment of the South African judiciary to freedom of expression, one of the bedrock rights enshrined in the post-apartheid Constitution. It recognises that a democratic society must allow space for emotional, political and even uncomfortable speech. But freedom of speech is not equal to freedom from consequence. Social cohesion under strain According to the 2024 Sasci, South Africa is treading a narrow ridge between cohesion and fragmentation. The index, which measures solidarity, fairness, trust, identity, civic participation and respect for institutions, paints a picture of partial resilience and underlying volatility. Solidarity sits at 61.3, indicating moderate willingness to care for others regardless of identity, but still vulnerable to racial and economic fault lines; Perception of Fairness, however, is a weak point, at 42.7, reflecting widespread public sentiment that South Africa's socioeconomic systems remain unjust; Intergroup Trust is alarmingly low – just 41% of black and white South Africans express some trust in one another; and Identification, that is, the sense of belonging to a shared national identity, is strong at 72.2, and is the glue that is holding the nation together. But this is susceptible to erosion under divisive rhetoric. These findings underscore a society still recovering from historical trauma, where the social glue is thin and brittle. Therefore, it is in this context that the use of a slogan such as 'Kill the Boer' must be evaluated, not in a courtroom, but in the court of public morality and nation-building. The political weaponisation of memory Chants such as 'Kill the Boer' are more than mere slogans. They are symbolic vessels, carrying the memory of past struggles, but also the potential to stir contemporary fears. So, with this in mind, it follows that the historical justification of the chant, which is rooted in anti-apartheid resistance, does not automatically make its current use, politically or socially, justifiable. In today's South Africa, invoking such slogans, especially during political rallies or in highly charged public platforms, is often a calculated act. It is a way of stoking populist sentiment, galvanising political bases and appealing to historical loyalties. But this comes at a steep cost: the polarisation of society, the re-traumatisation of communities and the erosion of hard-won intergroup solidarity. The Trump factor and global amplification The domestic controversy over 'Kill the Boer' took on international significance during South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's visit to the White House in May 2025. In a meeting with US President Donald Trump, the slogan once again found itself at the centre of a geopolitical flashpoint. Trump, resurrecting claims he first made in 2018, alleged that white South African farmers were the targets of a 'genocide'. He presented images purporting to show images of murdered white farmers. President Ramaphosa firmly rejected Trump's assertions, defending South Africa's constitutional land reform process and reaffirming the courts' dismissal of the 'white genocide' narrative. Yet, the damage had been done because Trump's global platform amplified fringe narratives and served to validate domestic fear-based politics within South Africa. This episode demonstrates how international rhetoric can dangerously reinforce internal social divisions, skew the global perception of South Africa's challenges and undermine the legitimacy of its reconciliation and land reform processes. Why legal speech can still be harmful Even if the courts are correct in finding that 'Kill the Boer' does not legally constitute hate speech, it is crucial to understand that legality does not equate to wisdom, unity or responsibility. In a country with such deep wounds, where race, land, identity and violence intersect in volatile ways, rhetoric matters. When political figures or public activists invoke this chant in the present day, they must consider: The historical trauma it reactivates for many white South Africans; The fear it induces among farming communities; The backlash it sparks from domestic and international actors; and Most importantly, the distrust and division it fuels between already polarised communities. Words, especially in political arenas, do not exist in a vacuum. They shape social perception, inform behaviour and influence whether people feel safe, respected and included. What leadership requires Leadership in a democratic society does not simply involve defending rights; it involves exercising them responsibly. South Africa's path forward depends not only on constitutional fidelity, but on a moral and social imagination capable of transcending inherited grievances. Political leaders and public influencers must ask: Does this speech unify or divide? Does it heal or harm? The question is no longer about what is legal, but what is nation-building. This is by no means a call for censorship. It is a call for ethical and moral restraint and for choosing reconciliation over rhetoric. And for choosing unity over provocation. It is possible to honour the past without weaponising it. It is possible to demand justice without alienating communities. It is possible to seek equity without amplifying enmity. Conclusion: The test of nationhood South Africa's journey from apartheid to democracy is often lauded as a global symbol of reconciliation. But symbols can become brittle. The Sasci's data tell us that the social cement is cracking and the slogan controversy is one fault line among many. If left unaddressed, such fissures can widen into fractures. The Constitutional Court has spoken on what the law allows. Now the burden falls to civil society, political leaders and ordinary citizens to determine what wisdom, justice and reconciliation demand. In a country where speech has the power to harm or to heal, the future will not be built by shouting into wounds, but by speaking into hope. DM
