The government is moving too slowly on key decisions for business at a time when it needs to be more flexible to save the economy, says Nick Holland, CEO of Gold Fields.
Adding his voice to a growing chorus of business leaders urging the ANC-led government to move quickly and decisively on investor-friendly actions to save the economy after a battering of nearly five months during the hard lockdown, Holland said in an interview with Business Day that his main concern was the lack of urgency to make the necessary changes.
He raised a point similar to that voiced by other executives, namely that unless big business became involved actively in driving the process to ensure economic change, it was unlikely to happen.
Business for SA has produced a strategy document the government could use to unlock the economy and which business leaders argue will create investment and jobs after an estimated 3-million people were put out of work during the lockdown as companies closed and tax revenues shrank.
"It’s an important document. It’s about creating the right regulatory environment to make us more investor-friendly, it’s about a social compact between business, labour and government. It’s about infrastructure projects being put in place because that’s a constraint," Holland said.
"It’s critical we put our country in a better position. We’ve got to get behind this, and business leadership, the Minerals Council SA, Business Unity SA and so on to drive this because if we don’t, it’s not going to happen," he said.
The economy was struggling before the government declared a national state of disaster and locked the country down at the end of March, gradually easing restrictions since then.
Ratings agencies had downgraded SA to junk status and warned that measures proposed by finance minister Tito Mboweni shortly before lockdown were unlikely to be enough to rescue the economy.
"The government realises that in the post-Covid era we’ve got even more work to do. We had a lot to do before Covid.
"If no-one saw this as urgent before, they must sure as hell see it as urgent now. I think our president is keen to drive this, so everyone sees the need ... I think it will happen," he said.
"It might take longer than we like, but it will happen," he said.
"We’ll get there, but it’s taking too long. We need to try to do things a little quicker."
Business was resilient and would find a way to keep going, he said. "It will be easier if we get the government and organised labour behind us.
"Organised labour is seeing things are becoming really tough, and we’re seeing a small shift change from organised labour in the right direction."
Holland’s peer, Neal Froneman, CEO of Sibanye-Stillwater, the world’s largest supplier of platinum group metals, has been relentless in criticism of the government’s handling of the economy.
"I think we’ve gone past that tipping point. You can’t go through an underperforming economy pre-Covid, then go through a downgrade, then this Covid lockdown, and now there’s this indecision on restarting the economy," Froneman said in mid-May.
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