So much of the government in SA functions suboptimally that there’s a tendency to overload any successful part of it with ever more mandates.
The new administration has added three more areas to the list of priority reforms that Operation Vulindlela is tasked with fast-tracking. There is pressure, too, to add further focal areas to the three-item list of priorities that the partnership between business and the government is tackling.
That there’s appetite for these two initiatives to do a lot more is testament to the success they’ve achieved in breaking through some main barriers to economic growth, and doing so relatively swiftly. But it’s important to remember that a key to the success in both cases has been the targeting of just three to five priority areas. They did not try to do everything for everybody, despite SA’s multiple and urgent challenges. They selected targets that had the greatest potential to drive economic growth. And they picked those that lent themselves to this kind of intervention — by an agile delivery unit in Operation Vulindlela’s case, and a carefully crafted partnership between business and the government.
No doubt some of that success can be replicated. But their work is very far from done. All sides should be careful about loading them up with more mandates that could dilute their focus on the priorities they already have, or spread their limited resources too thinly.
Operation Vulindlela deserves support and encouragement, as well as sympathy, as it expands its reform efforts into fixing SA’s ailing municipalities, dysfunctional cities and public digital infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the business and government partnership is sticking for now with the three big crises weighing on economic growth: energy, logistics and crime. It has agreed to consider taking on more, but only if there are the resources and capacity on both sides of the partnership to do so. It is right to insist on this. As the partnership’s report-back this week shows, its model is really starting to show results, particularly in energy. But it is only just making a start on the joint effort to tackle crime and corruption, where business is working with the government to get SA off the greylist by fast-tracking prosecutions, and to boost law enforcers’ forensic capacity.
And there is still a very long way to go to turn around SA’s ailing rail and port networks, which have in the past couple of years become as much of a constraint on growth as electricity has been. The presidency’s Rudi Dicks this week highlighted Transnet’s still very low levels of performance and urged that “we need to be far more ambitious”.
Business and the government didn’t tolerate it when Eskom said it would only end load-shedding in 2025, and the result of their joint efforts is that SA is now on the cusp of ending load-shedding officially. SA’s economy can’t afford to tolerate it either when Transnet does no more than stabilise rail volumes — which remain far below the levels of five years ago, risking more job cuts, especially in mining.
A priority for the business and government partnership must be to work with Transnet to step up the pace on the efficiency front, as well as on reforms to bring in competition on rail and in the ports.
But just over a year into the partnership, the momentum is clearly there. So is the commitment from the government and from business to keep working together to get SA growing again. All good for confidence, and for the country.
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