M-Plan damaging to dynamic, unrestricted, private enterprise economy
Dr Brian Benfield
After over thirty years of failed policy initiatives, South Africa’s ongoing struggle with joblessness, inequality, and economic exclusion is well documented; it is nothing short of abysmal and deserves urgent, thoughtful responses.
The more recent report on the 2019 “Social Justice Summit” in Stellenbosch has been brought to my attention. Its proposed Social Justice “M-Plan” (https://socialjustice.sun.ac.za/projects/m-plan/), was advanced as a comprehensive roadmap to address these issues. Positioned as a policy framework to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030, the M-Plan draws heavily on the language of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the National Development Plan (NDP), with a distinct emphasis on leveraging data and legislation to enforce “fairness”.
But while the objectives may be laudable, the proposed mechanism – a technocratic, state-led model of engineered equality – warrants greater scrutiny, especially from the business and investment community. The M-Plan’s underlying assumptions reflect a worldview that is, at best, economically naïve and, at worst, damaging to the very ecosystem on which inclusive growth depends: a dynamic, competitive, unrestricted, rules-based private enterprise economy.
Social impact
At its core, the M-Plan envisages an expanded state apparatus empowered to evaluate and steer policy through a “social impact” lens. It calls for prospective assessments of all laws and government programs to ensure they advance equality. It further proposes the mobilisation of corporate and societal resources toward state-defined social justice outcomes, and even gestures at recovering offshore assets for redistribution.
This model aligns with a conception of justice that prioritises equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. It implies that markets cannot be trusted to deliver fair results and that only a data-literate, morally guided state can correct “structural disparities”.
Such thinking may resonate in academic or policy circles, but it misreads the practical limits of state power, underestimates the complexity of economic systems, and overstates the ability of regulation to engineer fairness without stifling growth.
Technocratic solutions
One of the most problematic features of the M-Plan is its reliance on technocratic solutions to what are inherently human problems. Economies are not mechanistic systems that respond predictably to policy inputs. They are complex, adaptive, and decentralised. Attempts to direct outcomes through central planning, even when framed as “impact foresight,” risk producing unintended consequences, chief among them, reduced investment, regulatory inertia, and sluggish growth.
At its core, the M-Plan envisages an expanded state apparatus empowered to evaluate and steer policy through a “social impact” lens. It calls for prospective assessments of all laws and government programs to ensure they advance equality. It further proposes the mobilisation of corporate and societal resources toward state-defined social justice outcomes, and even gestures at recovering offshore assets for redistribution.
This model aligns with a conception of justice that prioritises equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. It implies that markets cannot be trusted to deliver fair results and that only a data-literate, morally guided state can correct “structural disparities”.
Practical limits
Such thinking may resonate in academic or policy circles, but it misreads the practical limits of state power, underestimates the complexity of economic systems, and overstates the ability of regulation to engineer fairness without stifling growth.
One of the most problematic features of the M-Plan is its reliance on technocratic solutions to what are inherently human problems. Economies are not mechanistic systems that respond predictably to policy inputs. They are complex, adaptive, and decentralised. Attempts to direct outcomes through central planning, even when framed as “impact foresight,” risk producing unintended consequences, chief among them, reduced investment, regulatory inertia, and sluggish growth.
South Africa has seen this before: policies designed to redistribute or restructure economic participation that, in practice, have created compliance fatigue, distorted incentives, and fueled capital flight.
Conflicts
The M-Plan also appears to conflate corporate citizenship with quasi-governmental responsibility. The notion that private enterprise should actively co-finance state-led equality objectives may reflect moral urgency, but it conflicts with the primary function of business: to create value, generate employment, and innovate in the service of competitive advantage.
South Africa’s corporate sector has demonstrated, time and again, its willingness to engage in meaningful transformation and upliftment. But the strength of such efforts lies in their strategic alignment with business purpose, not in their conscription into ideological agendas. Coerced corporate social responsibility is not social progress, it is a tax by another name, and one that undermines both accountability and efficiency.
Equally concerning is the M-Plan’s ambition to enhance legislative capacity in the name of social justice. South African businesses already operate in a high-regulation, low-certainty environment. Layering additional compliance demands, particularly vague and impact-driven assessments, will do little to attract investment or inspire entrepreneurship or innovation.
Risks
Moreover, the proposal to “repatriate illicitly siphoned funds” raises legal and reputational risks. While combatting corruption is a national imperative, doing so through ambiguous mechanisms invites concern about due process, property rights, and political overreach, all of which weigh heavily on investor confidence.
The fundamental flaw in the Social Justice M-Plan is not its moral compass, but its economic philosophy. It sees inequality primarily as a design flaw to be corrected by policy intervention, rather than as a symptom of deeper structural issues, skills gaps, weak growth, youth unemployment, poor education, institutional fragility and overreaching regulation.
Addressing these challenges requires enabling environments, not administrative micromanagement. South Africa needs less emphasis on distributive modelling and more focus on creating the conditions for inclusive prosperity: regulatory clarity, fiscal sustainability, infrastructure investment, education reform, and labour market dynamism.
Strategies
Business leaders do not reject the values of fairness, inclusion, or shared prosperity. They know that these goals are best advanced through market-compatible strategies that unlock opportunity and reward enterprise. The real path to social justice lies not in controlling the economy from above, but in fully liberating its potential from below.
Rather than centralising the solution, South Africa must urgently invest in institutions that build trust, empower individuals and expand access, so that economic participation becomes the norm, not the exception.
While noble in intent, the Stellenbosch M-Planrisks entrenching policy uncertainty, regulatory complexity, and investor scepticism. It asks the wrong questions and offers the wrong tools. What the country needs is not a moralised bureaucracy, but a modern economy, competitive, inclusive, and open to all who are willing to contribute without having to confront unnecessary legal and compliance hurdles.
Dr Brian Benfield, retired professor, Department of Economics, University of the Witwatersrand, is a Senior Associate and Board member of the Free Market Foundation.