Award-winning exploitation: South Africa's sustainability façade unmasked

Mail & Guardian

5 days ago

Rural people are dispossessed and displaced by companies that collect awards for ESG credentials, corporate social investment and sector excellence.
(Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
In October 2022, I attended a three-day retreat with professionals responsible for environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices from South Africa's leading mining, banking and agribusiness companies at a luxury venue. They were candid, even embarrassed. They admitted ESG had become a game, a box-ticking, scorecard-manipulating charade.
'We give our best advice, but it's never acted on because ESG professionals are not core to the business,' one said.
That moment haunts me. It showed how polished corporate reports and PR hide uncomfortable truths beneath a veneer of responsibility.
This year, I heard those harsh truths firsthand. In Citrusdal in the Cederberg and across the Matzikama municipality, families are illegally evicted after decades of working the land. In Grabouw, I walked through Lebanon, a forgotten plantation village where forestry dwellers live with raw sewage running down streets, no title deeds or tenure security. Companies profit from the land while people suffer. In Riebeek Valley in the Swartland municipality, farm workers and dwellers lack running water and legal protection. Those who speak up risk being targeted, fired and evicted.
These stories expose the harsh reality behind the veneer of corporate 'responsibility'. This system sacrifices people for profit. These are not exceptions and they reveal the hollow meaning of responsibility when profit comes first.
At the Surplus People Project, we work with rural communities dispossessed and displaced by companies that collect awards for ESG credentials, corporate social investment (CSI) and sector excellence. This gap between public praise and lived experience shows a profound failure.
Corporate South Africa has cycled through corporate social responsibility, corporate social investment, stakeholder engagement and now ESG reporting. Each rebrand promises ethical business and social progress, yet behind the labels lies the same extractive behaviour. It is polished and packaged, but it exploits rural people all the same.
Across corporate, civil society and state institutions, CSI, ESG and related frameworks often serve as reputational shields rather than tools for real change. They manage reputations instead of transforming systems that respect humanity and protect our ecological heritage.
The myth of responsible business is not only misleading, it is dangerous. It cloaks structural harm in the language of progress, keeping those most affected invisible. Most ESG reporting focuses on easy-to-measure metrics such as carbon emissions, board diversity and community donations. These numbers, although important, are limited and have become proxies allowing businesses to tick boxes without confronting systemic change.
Meanwhile, the state routinely fails to enforce laws. The departments looking after agriculture, land reform and rural development and the employment and labour department allow illegal evictions to continue unchecked. Equity schemes collapse. Laws such as the Extension of Security of Tenure Act exist only on paper. This failure exposes a state unwilling to challenge entrenched economic interests maintaining inequality.
For many middle-class urban South Africans, these rural realities are invisible. Yet our food systems, wine and fruit exports, pension funds and shopping habits are tangled in supply chains sustaining rural worker exploitation. If you have bought a bottle of wine, eaten supermarket fruit or invested in a 'responsible' fund, your money is part of this story. You are complicit in exploitation.
Corporate social responsibility, corporate social investment and ESG are not enough unless they become frameworks for justice, redress, dignity and genuine stakes in the benefits of workers' labour. Anything less reproduces slave-like conditions.
Corporate South Africa will not fix this with statistics or awards. Empty gestures, hashtags and glossy reports won't cut it. We need a decisive break from extractive practices and an end to symbolic benevolence that conceals exploitation.
We do not need charity disguised as innovation. We need justice rooted in policy, practice and governance that honours dignity, equity and meaningful participation by those affected.
The state already has legal frameworks, albeit limited and skewed towards business interests, and the budget to act. Laws protecting farm workers and dwellers exist, as do policies for land reform and labour rights. What is missing is the political will to enforce these protections. The deliberate refusal to uphold the law in rural areas is a conscious choice that serves corporate interests over vulnerable people.
We are told progress takes time. That may be true, but it is easy to say from boardrooms far removed from fields where workers face harmful pesticides, where women labour long hours without toilets and many live in legal limbo and are denied unemployment benefits. For these people, progress is decades too late.
Without genuine enforcement to uphold laws and policies that should protect workers and ensure accountability, ESG's promises of accountability ring hollow. It does not heal; it deepens the wounds corporates pretend to address.
Charity soothes the wound. Justice closes it. Don't just do good. Dismantle what causes harm.
Brian Adams is the chief executive of Surplus People Project.