By doing BEE top down has actually made inequality worse. The right way would be to focus on building (and retaining) skills, something that is being done as an afterthought.
Let me give and example of something I've seen played out lots of times:
BEE has actually made white South Africans richer by incentivizing them to start their own businesses. Previously a lot of white folks were absorbed into the public sector. A lot of them were either retrenched or coerced to leave in the new dispensation.
When they leave, they leave with their knowledge intact and their existing networks intact. This lead to an explosion in the private sector of consultancy and other firms which "support" government functions, since the government can no longer perform some duties themselves. In fact, even things like budgets are being outsourced to consultancy firms because some of the departments no longer have the necessary skills (or people willing to use their skills) to do the work. So more money flows into the private sector "white" owned businesses.
The ANC is now trying to push back on that by adding more draconian BEE rules, but honestly, all they are doing is pushing up the cost of doing business. It adds a new layer, where a few "black" players have become insanely rich in a short time by being partners, directors, fixers, intermediaries, etc. They add a layer of costs, since they need their slice of the pie (and sometimes don't do anything for it), but that doesn't make the intrinsic cost of providing the service lower, so the extra costs are just passed onto government. That's how R 100M projects become R 1B projects.
The dirty little secret? A lot of "white" businesses don't mind being beholden to "black" businesses that outsource the work they got from government. Money is money.
A concrete example where I was involved very recently: I did work as a subcontractor on a project. I billed R X to my client, BEE level ?4? mostly "white" company. My client in turn billed R (X + Y) to a BEE level 1, mostly "black" company. The BEE level 1 company then charged a SOE R 2 (X + Y). The SOE in turn charged a government department R 4 (X + Y). The end result: I get my slice of the pie. My client got their slice of the pie. The BEE company got a nice slice of the pie for doing "project management". The SOE got an even bigger slice of the pie for doing "procurement" and the government paid through the nose. I didn't complain.