Thirty per cent, and two sectors without a side door
The US ask on BEE is narrower than it sounds: let telecoms and mining use the equity-equivalent route other sectors already have. Open it to everyone once, publish the deals, then lock the Mining Charter.
South Africa lets multinationals in most sectors meet black-ownership rules without selling shares. In telecoms and mining, which are the two sectors Washington cares about most, that option is mostly shut. A licence holder under the Electronic Communications Act must be at least 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups. The 2018 Mining Charter sets the same 30% for new mining rights, and an equity-equivalent benefit can stand in only for the 5% host-community slice, plus up to 5 points of the entrepreneur share for approved beneficiation.
This week South Africa's ambassador in Washington, Roelf Meyer, told Semafor that empowerment rules in mining and telecoms "still leave room for further adjustments," and that the government is discussing changes internally and with companies that want to invest. That is narrower than it sounds, and more doable. The US ask, in Ambassador Bozell's own Daily Maverick op-ed, doesn't say scrap the 30%. It says equity-equivalent programmes, already open to other sectors, should be open to telecoms and mining: "Allow them to participate too." In telecoms the minister already agrees: Solly Malatsi's December 2025 policy direction asked ICASA to align its ownership rules with the ICT Sector Code, which recognises them. ICASA's position is that the Act itself has to be amended, Parliament's communications committee agrees, and the Electronic Communications Amendment Bill leaves the ownership rule untouched. Starlink's stalled R500 million, 5,000-school equity-equivalent offer depends on that same change.
The instrument already exists. As SA Policy Space's EEIP expansion idea sets out, the Codes let a multinational fund approved programmes worth 25% of the value of its South African operations, or 4% of its annual South African revenue, instead of selling equity. Approved programmes passed R8 billion by February 2022. What's missing is a public register of approved programmes and their outcomes, and any published data on how long approvals take. That makes it hard to argue, in either direction, that extending the instrument is a giveaway.
The deeper frame is Chapter 5 of the textbook (Mining and the Minerals-Energy Complex). One of its Tier 1 reforms is a Mining Charter stability commitment: a legislated or negotiated pause on Charter revisions, of perhaps ten years, so investors can plan while the existing transformation targets stay in force. Meyer's opening points to the smart order of moves. Make one last, published revision that opens the equity-equivalent route to every investor (he was right to tell Daily Maverick in July that "we can't make an exception only for one country"). Pair it with a public dtic register so the deals can be checked. Then lock the Charter. Done that way, the US pressure becomes a reason to stabilise the rules instead of another round of rewriting them.