"There's not much to say about the Sona," said one business leader when approached for comment on Friday following President Cyril Ramaphosa's fifth state of the nation address. "Shall I just say the same as I said a year ago?" asked another.
It was a reflection of the lukewarm response to a speech in which the president did some serious spin on his economic recovery plan - but failed to convince the market that the promises in the plan were going to be delivered with anything like the required urgency, if at all.
But there were some welcome announcements, particularly Ramaphosa's explicit commitment to making it easy for companies to generate their own electricity - enabling as much as 5,000MW to be added to SA's ailing power grid in the near term.
And businesspeople welcomed the president's acknowledgement that the private sector is a pivotal driver of economic activity, as well as his attempt to narrow his areas of focus to just four, two of which dealt with accelerating economic recovery and implementing reforms to drive jobs and growth.
Ramaphosa also reiterated the four "priority interventions" of his October plan, which include a massive rollout of infrastructure, a massive increase in local production, an employment stimulus and a rapid expansion of energy-generation capacity.
"It was an honest assessment of the challenges facing the country in very difficult circumstances and the actions and the need to focus on a limited number of interventions that could have disproportionate consequences," said Business for SA's Martin Kingston, though he noted that all of the interventions in the October plan hinged on private participation and leadership.
Business Unity SA CEO Cas Coovadia said many of the measures should have happened three years ago and in those three years SA had deteriorated. While there were indications of action on energy, the question was whether these would happen in the time that was promised. The requests for proposals for the long-awaited Bid Window 5 of the renewable energy programme has yet to go out, but Ramaphosa said a request for proposals for 2,600MW of wind and solar would be issued "in the coming weeks" followed by another bid window in August.
He cited Eskom's estimates that there would be a supply shortfall of between 4,000MW and 6,000MW over the next five years without new capacity, and said the government would soon announce the successful bidders for 2,000MW of emergency power that closed in December, as well as amending regulations to allow municipalities to buy from independent producers.
He promised that the government would amend schedule 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act "within the next three months" to increase the licensing threshold for embedded generation - the process in which companies generate electricity for their own use.
Ramaphosa said little, however, on the long-awaited auction of broadband spectrum. And though he said the government had developed "an infrastructure investment project pipeline worth R340bn in network industries such as energy, water, transport and telecommunications", businesspeople said there is as yet no evidence of such projects in real life.
Trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel's preoccupation with localisation was much in evidence in the speech, with Ramaphosa saying business, labour, the government and community had agreed to work together as part of a social compact to reduce SA's reliance on imports by 20% over the next five years, and 42 products have been identified that could be sourced locally. Coovadia said, however, that these were just indicative targets.
Though Ramaphosa had said in October that his employment stimulus package would provide job opportunities for 800,000 people, he reported this week that by the end of January over 430,000 opportunities had been "supported" through the stimulus, with a further 180,000 in the recruitment stage.
Ramaphosa also said the revised list of scarce skills would be published within one week for public comment.
Intellidex head of capital markets research Peter Attard Montalto said the list of key skills and the electricity preferred bidders were key topics to watch for now.
"Overall we see this speech solidifying the path back to low potential growth, rather than raising where long-run potential growth will be," he said.
Investec economist Kamilla Kaplan said the speech provided little in the way of indications of government spending priorities ahead of the February 24 budget.
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