At the same time that Angelo Agrizzi details the cost of bribes allegedly paid by his previous employer Bosasa in his testimony at the Zondo commission, the lost opportunities involved in the state capture project are being lamented 8,000km to the east in New Delhi.
With President Cyril Ramaphosa due to arrive on Friday on his first state visit to India, an entourage of ministers and business people in tow, much is being made of the “warm” and “historic” relationship between the two countries. He will be “chief guest” at India’s Republic Day celebrations on Saturday — marking its 70th year of independence from British colonial rule. Ramaphosa becomes the first South African president since Nelson Mandela in 1995 to be bestowed with the honour.
The invitation to Ramaphosa is partly inspired by the fact that 2019 also marks the 150th birth year of Mahatma Gandhi, who lived in SA for many years, leading peaceful protests to win more rights for people of Indian origin, before returning to India in 1914. Back home, he led the Indian freedom struggle, becoming one of the most revered political figures of the 20th century.
More importantly, the invitation forms part of India’s strategy to strengthen its long-established relationships on the African continent, where it has been outplayed in recent years by China with its deeper pockets.
Bilateral trade between SA and India remains below 2014/15 levels, partly due to lacklustre commodity markets and a sluggish SA economy, while new investments have been few and far between. Naspers, which sold its 11% stake in Indian online retailer Flipkart in 2018 at a cool $1.6bn profit, is the outlier, leading investment rounds of nearly $1bn in food delivery group Swiggy and online education group Byju in 2018.
The loss is SA’s. India, with a population of more than 1.2-billion, is expected to overtake the UK in 2019 to become the world’s fifth-largest economy. With GDP growth rates forecast to stay well above 7% a year for the foreseeable future, India remains the world’s fastest-growing major economy. The World Bank expects it to become a high-middle-income country by 2030.
For SA business, this means not only a huge potential market for goods and services, but also a significant source of investment. Indian companies’ current direct investment holdings in SA of about $9bn are a fraction of the $155bn they hold abroad, according to the latest data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) World Investment Report.
Getting a bigger slice of the pie will be crucial to increase SA’s growth rate, which will struggle to reach 2% a year.
Speaking to officials in New Delhi, there are two key stumbling blocks hampering trade and investment relations between the two countries.
The one is visas — work permits and investment-driven visas are difficult to get, and for all practical purposes impossible to renew — and the second is the lack of direct flights between SA and India.
Those who have been following the Zondo commission’s work closely would need no reminding that it was due to political interference on behalf of the Gupta family that SA Airways (SAA) scrapped its popular Johannesburg-Mumbai route in early 2015, seemingly to benefit Indian airline Jet Airways, which filled the slot.
Resolving these two issues will be crucial to truly benefit from the historic, warm relations that will be highlighted ad nauseam by politicians over the next two days.
Visas should be the easier one to fix, but as the ongoing debacle with tourist visas has demonstrated, nothing is quite as it seems.
Getting direct flights going again will be much trickier. Both SAA and Jet Airlines, a private company that is listed in Mumbai, are in deep financial trouble. Similar to SAA, state-owned Air India has been kept alive with taxpayer money in the form of government bail-outs, so they won’t be able to come to the rescue either.
These issues will be top of mind when the politicians and their officials meet at the weekend, but the solutions will remain elusive.
But at least it could offer something to do for Ramaphosa while he enjoys the pomp and ceremony this weekend. He might contemplate the number of tourists who never visited SA because they weren’t keen on a 4am departure flight or a five-hour layover in Dubai; the IT experts who were sent to the US rather than Cape Town; the businessmen who never set up shop because the visa rules made long-term planning impossible; the jobs that never got created because his party was so fixated on keeping the Zuptas happy that everything else simply fell by the wayside.
• The writer is visiting New Delhi as a guest of the Indian government.
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