As South Africa seeks recovery under the Government of National Unity, questions arise over genuine progress amid persistent economic stagnation and looming local elections. Adrian Enthoven’s Thought Leader lectureat the University of Stellenbosch on 4 November 2024 commanded national attention and sparked a searching conversation about whether the country has genuinely turned the corner after more than a decade of grave socioeconomic crisis. Enthoven positions himself within the camp of the optimists.
His case rests on convincing improvements in key state-controlled functions: the near disappearance of load shedding since 2023, the turnaround of critical transport and logistics systems including Metrorail, Transnet Freight Rail and Durban port, and second-order improvements such as clearing visa backlogs that had accumulated to over 300,000 skilled professionals. Then there is the Government of National Unity itself, born from the collision between the ANC’s loss of its parliamentary majority and the meteoric rise of radical populist parties EFF and MK. It has survived serious disagreements and brought relative political stability that has enabled state performance improvements and delivered growth expected to reach slightly above 1% this year.
Has South Africa, then, turned the corner from fifteen years of destruction? The question matters urgently as the country enters critical local government elections amid escalating global instability. Since Enthoven’s lecture, South Africa has faced a 30% US tariff on its exports, congressional designation as “an adversary of America”, and uncertain Agoa eligibility despite the programme’s three-year extension.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
[paywall]
Behind the progress Enthoven observes lies Operation Vulindlela. This was launched in October 2020 when, under the combined blows of the pandemic and a decade of State Capture, the country faced grave crisis. Constituted as a partnership between the Presidency and the Treasury, Operation Vulindlela was founded on the concept of binding constraints to growth – identifying the most serious obstacles to capital investment and economic activity, triaging among them to determine which removals would yield the highest payoff at the least cost, then acting decisively.
Operation Vulindlela breaks with the failed grand plans of the past: the New Growth Path, the National Development Plan, and the endless sectoral plans with sweeping long-term goals nominally owned by everyone but implemented by no one. Operation Phakisa – owned by no one and similarly implemented – gathered sector stakeholders, who argued, negotiated, planned comprehensively and moved on. Operation Vulindlela is designed to be highly operational, institutionally narrow, and focused on the short to medium term.
Critically, it was sold to Parliament and the public as a budget-neutral intervention on the ingenious if misleading argument that “structural reform costs nothing” – a political sleight of hand that concealed the reality that the initiative was gravely under-resourced and delivered little until private sector funding was mobilised in 2023. Business for South Africa – a joint venture among the Black Business Council, Business Leadership SA and Business Unity SA created in early 2020 to assist government with the Covid crisis – partnered with government to establish the Resource Mobilisation Fund. The RMF was initially endowed with R100-million, then expanded to R170-million. The fund is independently managed by Tamela Holdings, a black-owned independent investment firm, and operates through an indirect mechanism, financing initiatives such as Necom (energy), NLCC (logistics) and JICC (crime) that are aligned with and directly support Operation Vulindlela’s priorities rather than directly funding the operation itself.
[/paywall]
