After speaking for almost two hours, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address failed to present a plan to grow the economy, reduce unemployment and end power blackouts, which should have been the priorities during an election year when the ANC could lose its majority.
Instead, he provided an analysis of three decades of democracy that tortured the statistics until they confessed to ANC propaganda, and added fake news about a range of topics from black ownership in the mining industry to state spending on its gender-based violence action plan.
The economy had trebled in size, Ramaphosa said, using a bizarre statistic that appeared to have been distorted by the exchange rate and not adjusted for inflation. The truth is that GDP per capita increased by only 22% from 1994 to 2022. The comparisons — over the same period and in local currencies — are China (783%), Vietnam (337%), Ethiopia (315%), India (285%) and Poland (215%).
Ramaphosa has the worst record in terms of GDP growth of any president since 1994. There was 2.7% average GDP growth under Nelson Mandela (from 1994 to 1998), 4% under Thabo Mbeki (1999 to 2008), 1.9% under Jacob Zuma (2009 to 2017) and 0.5% under Ramaphosa (2018 to 2023). If one excludes two years of lockdowns — his favourite excuse — there was GDP growth of 1.1% a year. By comparison, according to the IMF 155 emerging economies grew by an average of 4.1% a year over the same period.
Ramaphosa used Tintswalo — democracy’s child — to show ANC achievements. He said employment had doubled since 1994 but failed to mention that the labour force had more than doubled. In 1994 there were 4.7-million people who did not work and the unemployment rate was 35%. Today, 11.7-million do not work and the unemployment rate is 41.2%.
In 2023 SA had the highest unemployment rate in the world, according to the World Bank. Djibouti, the West Bank and Gaza were in second and third positions. SA also had the world’s second highest youth unemployment rate, with 6.8-million unemployed Tintswalos and 8.7-million who were not in employment, education or training.
The period since Ramaphosa became president in 2018 accounts for 95% of the energy Eskom has shed since 2007. The period under Zuma accounted for only 3.4%. In July 2022 Ramaphosa announced an energy action plan to end power blackouts, and last year he appointed an electricity minister. After 19 months, it is clear that the plan and the minister have failed. Eskom shed more energy last year than the previous 16 years from 2007 to 2022 combined.
SA was plunged into stage 6 power blackouts at midnight the day after Ramaphosa said: “The end of load-shedding is finally within reach.” The collapse of Transnet also started after 2018. Ramaphosa was supposed to fix Eskom and Transnet, which were the primary sites of state capture, but six years later the two companies are in a worse situation. Now South Africans are supposed to celebrate when this administration says it has introduced reforms to fix two companies it has destroyed.
The IMF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development have forecast SA GDP growth of about 1.1% a year for 2024 and 2025. This means the number of unemployed people could increase to almost 13-million from 11.7-million. With no end in sight to the blackouts, the country’s economic outlook is bleak, and it is a matter of time before the political situation explodes.
We cannot continue like this. But Ramaphosa and the ANC don’t seem to care about the election. Perhaps the plan is to fail. At the end of its recent lekgotla the ANC said: “To stimulate sustainable growth in the long run there is a need for a national industrial strategy that will form the core of our growth strategy. This will find expression in the ANC’s 2024 manifesto.”
This is what the party has been saying for 30 years.
• Gqubule is research associate at the Social Policy Initiative.
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