The price of privilege: Why Gary Player's BEE criticism rings hollow

South African golf legend Gary Player’s recent and pointed critique of modern South Africa, specifically his condemnation of the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Act and his bleak description of the country as a “land of squatter camps”, has sparked justifiable outrage.

His observations, delivered from a perch of enormous privilege, betray a fundamental lack of historical introspection, raising the unavoidable question: how can a man who benefited so immensely from the very system that created the nation’s wounds now feel entitled to lecture about its ongoing recovery?

Player’s argument is clear: BEE is inefficient, corruption is rife, and infrastructure is failing. Yes, corruption is rampant and the government has largely failed its people over the past 31 years. But this critique is delivered without recognising that the economic inequality he now laments, the very existence of sprawling informal settlements is the direct, intended legacy of the apartheid regime that gifted him his career.

To demand the removal of mechanisms like BEE, which are indeed flawed but remain an attempt to redress historical economic exclusion, is to ask the country to stop treating a wound he never suffered, a wound his own success implicitly endorses.

This blindness to systemic causation is the essence of his hypocrisy. For a stark contrast, one need only look at the life and career of Sewsunker “Papwa” Sewgolum.

Papwa was a golfer of world-class talent, a genius with a reverse grip whose potential was acknowledged globally. Yet, because he was classified as Indian under apartheid, his career was brutally suffocated.

Papwa’s story serves as the moral measure against Player’s privilege. In a single, defining incident at the 1965 Natal Open, Papwa, having just won the title ahead of Player, was forced to receive his winner’s trophy outside the clubhouse in the pouring rain because the law forbade a person of colour from entering the whites-only premises.

He stood dripping wet, clutching a bottle of champagne, a visual indictment of the system that simultaneously celebrated and crushed him. While Player was jet-setting across the globe, competing on the world’s most lucrative tours and returning home to play on pristine, segregated courses, Papwa was routinely barred from competing in his own country.

Papwa’s talent was undeniable, but his skin colour was his ultimate handicap, a handicap Gary Player, by virtue of his race, never knew.

Player was not merely allowed to play; he was the poster boy of a state that actively ensured his supremacy by kneecapping his non-white competitors. His global platform, wealth, and ability to travel and compete internationally were fundamentally underwritten by his racial status in apartheid South Africa. His success was not in spite of the system, it was enabled by it.

He enjoyed access to the best courses, the best training, and crucial international exposure — all denied to the Papwas of the sporting world.

To then use the enormous wealth and fame derived from this unearned advantage to bemoan the state of the post-apartheid nation, without meaningful acknowledgement of that initial advantage, is not patriotism; it is moral evasion.

Player speaks of “squatter camps” as a modern failure, yet fails to accept that the very laws of the National Party he tacitly supported, or at least failed to meaningfully oppose, were designed to create precisely the economic and spatial inequality that produced those settlements.

In demanding that South Africa “get rid of BEE”, Player asks the nation to abandon the difficult but necessary work of economic decolonisation, a process made necessary by the benefits he accrued.

For his criticism to carry any moral weight, it must begin with recognition of the original sin and an understanding of the lives and careers — like Papwa Sewgolum’s — that were destroyed so that he could flourish.

Until then, his voice remains merely the echo of privilege, ringing hollow in a nation still wrestling with the very inequities that once lifted him to greatness.