The tripartite alliance needs to start working for SA’s future

My gut feel tells me that the efforts by President Cyril Ramaphosa to attract investors to plough their monies into our economy will bear fruit for South Africa in the medium to long term.

He was only elected as president in May this year and no-one could expect everything to suddenly be set right. Power is not about waving a magic wand.

The “nine wasted years” of the Jacob Zuma presidency are no small matter. A lot of damage was done to our economy and political credibility, and a lot of ground has to be covered to patch the holes.

After Zuma, South Africa has been blessed with a president who is prepared to put all his energies into restoring our hopes for the future and the future of our damaged economy, even under difficult circumstances.

He rescued a country that was on the brink of a political catastrophe, where state coffers were unashamedly raided by marauding politically connected criminals.

Good potential investors will give Ramaphosa a chance to see through the outcomes of his reforms. They will invest in the hope that, down the line, things will turn around.

The launch of an auto hub in Tshwane on Tuesday with 6,700 job opportunities being created should be the beginning of good things to come. The project is a direct spin-off from pledges made by investors during the SA investment conference held in October last year.

Business Unity South Africa executive director Dr Mazwe Majola, while not pessimistic, was keen to see more tangible results from Ramaphosa’s initiatives.

That’s what we all want to see and that’s what the 10 million unemployed South Africans yearn for.

Tito Mboweni’s mini budget painted a bleak picture of the future in terms of economic growth, and our ballooning national debt is exacerbated by the burden of state-owned enterprises and a huge public service wage bill that drains the fiscus.

Our economy is growing at its slowest pace and the unemployment rate is at an 11-year high, while Mboweni’s fiscal consolidation has not yet yielded the desired outcomes.

More needs to be done to arrest our slide into fiscal and economic ruin.

The time has arrived for Ramaphosa to sit down with ANC allies on the left to talk seriously about how they can help to rescue the country.

The intransigence of the left is not helping the situation. We cannot fight forever and continue to make impossible demands.

They must deliberate how together they can help the state function and attain some fiscal liquidity that would benefit retarded economic growth. It’s time for an economic consensus that goes beyond self and sectoral interests.

We must choose whether to go the Greece route of complete economic downfall, or take the road to economic revival exemplified by Ireland, left by fellow Eurozone countries to swim out of its economic dip.

Economists and rating agencies want drastic reforms that will enable SA to turn its economic situation around.

Unless the alliance understands the significance and role of rating agencies in determining how foreign investors think about investing, SA will not come out of this maze.

Eric Naki

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