There are clearly parallels between the Broederbond strategies to enrich themselves and give jobs and tenders to their pals and the ANC policies of black economic empowerment, crony capitalism and cadre deployment. One big difference is that the Broederbond invested heavily in education, training, conferences and workshops to enhance skills in order to prepare their “deployees” to do their jobs properly. “Superb organisation, strict discipline and determination” were key.
But perhaps the biggest difference is that volkskapitalisme had a genuine aim to benefit more than just the few that got very rich. Unlike BEE, it spread the wealth a little.
Something that one Kevin Lester spoke to me about years ago. The Volkskapitalisme model focused on education, and then built it up from there. A paragraph from this Wiki page does show common pitfalls of both Volkskapitalisme and BEE.
Volkskapitalisme strived to improve the economic conditions of the Afrikaners who in general at the time were less well-off than the English-speaking whites in South Africa. In practice the program consisted of utilising the Afrikaner capital into new and existing Afrikaner businesses. Although volkskapitalisme managed to develop some Afrikaner businesses, such as Sanlam and Volkskas into corporate giants that still have a central role in South African economy, in the end the economic benefits for the majority of the poor Afrikaners were slim.
But, as du Preez observes, the results of Volkskapitalisme were far more significant than BEE
By the 1970s, Afrikaners owned a substantial chunk of the South African economy with successful companies like Sanlam, General Mining, Rembrandt, Perskor and Nasionale Pers, all dominated by Broeders. The civil service (and the SABC) was run and staffed mostly by Afrikaners and the South African Railways was used to provide employment to unskilled and uneducated Afrikaners. By the 1980s, Afrikaner capital was dominant and the overwhelming majority of their number were members of the comfortable middle class.