SA often wrongly seeks economic growth lessons from countries to whom we should perhaps not compare ourselves too closely.
Within Brics, for instance, India, China and Russia offer almost no relevant comparison due to stark differences in sheer population, size, economic composition and culture. Brazil’s economy hardly seems one we would seek to emulate, and the new Brics members also have little relevance. Lessons from the developed world are only sometimes useful, coming as they do from such different contexts and with such massively different resources.
Uzbekistan strikes me as an incredibly relevant, desirable and probably unexpected comparison. The country is booming with economic and development activity and Uzbekistan’s economic numbers read like SA’s dream.
The World Bank reports its GDP growth for 2023 at 6%, and Uzbekistan has systematically driven inflation down to a seven-year low, though it has a way to go. Investment is booming — everywhere you look in Tashkent and other cities such as Samarkand cranes are erecting new developments. The poverty rate is at a healthy 4.5% and unemployment was at 8.1% in 2023. Average real wages increased in 2023 by nearly 7.8%.
Uzbekistan’s total debt as a percentage of GDP is at 60% and declining, while ours is more than 72%. its fiscal deficit is expected to fall fast towards 3% of GDP by the middle of the decade. Our government would drool at such successes.
There are also a lot of comparisons. Uzbekistan’s population stands at about 36-million, so half of ours but far more comparable than India or China. Like us, it is primed to experience a youth dividend, with a large younger workforce emerging.
Though it is geographically only about a third the size of SA, this is not that determinative. What is more interesting is various other comparable points. Uzbekistan has traditionally also been a commodity-led economy, led by agriculture but also including minerals, coal and other mining. It entered its modern economic era and social freedom at almost the same time as SA did. In 1991 Uzbekistan broke free from the USSR (Commonwealth of Independent States); SA’s democratic era started shortly thereafter.
However, this is where the similarities end. Uzbekistan has used its recent history well — especially under new President Shavkat Mirziyoyev — to break free of issues such as excessive inflation, deteriorating currency, closed economic policies and so on. While many challenges remain, Uzbekistan is a booming economic and social example for a floundering country such as ours.
While I am no country-level expert, I would like to offer a few perspectives on lessons we could learn from Uzbekistan, reaped from my five mostly lengthy trips there from 2012-2024, during which I have lived in Tashkent, visited some of the major cities like Samarkand and Buchara, and travelled in the countryside.
Opening up
Uzbekistan’s growth has come as a result of a serious effort to open the economy and become a good economic partner in the region. The country was very closed until relatively recently. When I went there for the first time in 2012 there were no real credit or capital markets, now these have boomed, as has trade.
Uzbekistan excels in building great political relationships and then solidifying these with formal
country-level trade agreements
Modern SA has always had strong financial institutions, but our trade position is weak. Where Uzbekistan excels is in building great political relationships and then solidifying these with formal country-level trade agreements, something we seem to struggle with on both fronts.
Another matter is visas and tourism. Until recently, Uzbekistan was difficult to get into as a Westerner, international tourism was sparse, and work visas were also difficult. Based on our recent experiences, they have worked hard to improve on both, making e-visas common in the Turkish mould, encouraging tourism and opening up to more international labour.
SA’s issues with home affairs are well documented: this one department is a stuck brake pad in the wheels of our economy, especially when it comes to the scarce skills visa issue, which has choked businesses. Uzbekistan has shown the benefits of opening up more in this regard.
Security focus
Uzbekistan has always been marked for me by the conspicuous presence of a huge national guard. Every major public venue is protected by these nationally employed and disciplined young people, and they are all over the streets. In 2012, when Tashkent still felt incredibly Soviet to me, these young people in military garb seemed unpopular and perhaps a bit threatening.
Now, under a new dispensation, which is increasingly intolerant of corruption and inefficiency, they seem unobtrusive and widely accepted. This is even so during our recent trip where they were visibly armed, apparently in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Moscow. (Uzbekistan, though civilly Muslim, is a secular state after the model of Ataturk’s original Turkey, and so has been the target of hardline Islamic groups in the past.)
The point about this aspect of Uzbek society is that even though it is a natively safe and temperate society with remarkably little crime, it recognises the value of maintaining civic order at every turn. I would submit that it recognises the tendency of populations to slide towards disorder, and has nipped this in the bud.
This is best sensed on the road: Uzbeks are aggressive drivers at the best of times even in the presence of so much policing, and would be far more so without it. In addition, this deployment is no doubt a major source of employment for young less-educated people, especially young men.
While many of my liberal colleagues would balk at such a notion in SA, let us undertake an optimist’s thought exercise in imagining such a national guard here, well trained, disciplined, properly led and well deployed. (Again, yes you may give me endless reasons why we’d never get this right, but be a John Lennon and imagine.)
This would not only go a long way to reducing our catastrophic youth unemployment levels and provide a variety of relevant training for participants, but the system would pay for itself through the reduction of a plethora of social ills, including excessive road deaths and accidents (which absorb a huge portion of our national wealth), crime, gender-based violence, vandalism and theft, especially of critical infrastructure, and more. Copper theft alone is a major inhibitor yet it suffers from lack of monitoring.
In SA we have cobbled together necessary private security as a substitute. However, it’s clearly not working. In Johannesburg, my family are afraid to visit Emmarentia Botanical Gardens, even though this stunning park is half a block away. Cresta seems a lot scarier after an armed gang ravaged it and shot it up a few weeks ago. Though security companies tend to be good community citizens, their first job is to protect the lives and properties of their mostly private clients, which they cannot always do, if the Cresta experience is anything to go by.
Security companies cannot and do not adequately cover the civic layer that needs it: roads, infrastructure, and the like. In a perfect world, national guards people would cover every substation and transformer, every base station and tower, every mall and park, every train and bus station everywhere and at all times — as they do in Uzbekistan — and start to eliminate the nonsense.
Educational partnerships
While older generations of Uzbeks learnt Russian at the feet of their Soviet imperialists, younger generations are serious about learning English. Travelling in an Uzbek city you rapidly lose count of the many English academies swarming with young people eager to learn the language as an extramural activity.
They recognise that English is not only key to a lot of careers, especially with the opening of the economy, but many Uzbeks hope to work abroad too. This eagerness and availability to learn the global language of business is going to serve their economy well. We do not emphasise this in the population, and our illiteracy is primed to poison us.
Another notable feature of the educational landscape is the rapid expansion of many new universities and other tertiary learning institutions in recent years. Uzbekistan has opted for a partnership model, rather than the sort of closed model SA maintains. To be fair, many of our best institutions kept pace with the best international tertiary models for decades before the long slide began. But, we have hardly grown the serious tertiary sector, maintaining almost the same number of universities and technical and vocational education and training colleges for the past decades.
Uzbekistan has recognised that it needs to leapfrog and grow capacity quickly, and welcomed a variety of international partners to open universities, including Westminster and other British poly-tech-level providers. While it may need to take a second look at quality and content in the future, I would submit that the oversubscribed applications at SA tertiary institutions with the commensurate turning away of tens of thousands of matriculants is a failure of capacity that needs to be dealt with first.
Public transport
Don’t even get me started. We all know that public transport in SA is spotty at best. The major Uzbek cities have remarkable public transport options, especially the gorgeous underground metro system in Tashkent. We could probably never do this here: our cities are too spread out. But we can do creative things. When Tashkent expanded its metro, the city ripped up the above-ground tram system and moved it lock, stock and barrel to Samarkand. What more could we do here to help our populace get around in an era of spiking petrol costs and crippling taxi expenses for too many of our poorest?
Corruption
Look, we all know that SA seriously needs to klap corruption or, more importantly, corruptors. My writing this is not going to add anything to the debate.
Uzbekistan used to be well known for allowing a widespread system of patronage, bribery and so on, an environment well known to us. However, the new dispensation under Mirziyoyev seems to have improved on this. Key members of the previous dispensation were not only removed from power but conspicuously jailed for corruption. Reputedly, public officials are now doing their jobs on time without one hand being held out, under strict sanctions if they do not meet their obligations.
Uzbekistan has partnered with the UN Development Programme, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and regional trade partners in a wide variety of anti-corruption initiatives. All this has seen its score in the global corruption monitor index (where higher is better) rise every year for a decade, from a terrible 17 in 2013 to a far better 33 in 2023. Transparency International now rates Uzbekistan the 121st least corrupt country of the 180 nations it monitors.
To be fair, SA is rated better than this, at 83rd. However, trajectory is what matters in these things. SA’s scores and ranks have worsened over the past years; at best we have made no headway. We would do well to learn from a country that, albeit coming off a low base, has rapidly improved on its corruption issues.
Uzbekistan is by no means a modern day Shangri-La. It has serious issues such as remaining corruption, residual economic weaknesses, a problematic human rights record, smothering pollution in the winters and a population that is rapidly embracing US-style consumerism and eating habits, which come with all the attendant problems.
However, that’s not to say that a troubled little country on the southern tip of Africa cannot learn from the best things this remarkably analogous Asian land can teach.
• Lee is an associate professor at Wits Business School.
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