Many years ago, during a rare meeting I asked then businessman Cyril Ramaphosa whether he thought black capitalists would behave differently to white ones. He emphatically said that they would, the implication being that they would be more sympathetic to the plight of the poor and more sensitive to the scale of inequality in SA. Black business would be different.

That was more than a decade ago and of course we are still waiting for evidence that he might be right. The facts suggest otherwise. Like their white counterparts, black capitalists do what all capitalists do and that is to try to take the shortest route to the maximum profit for themselves. ..

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