South Africa speaks often and earnestly about growth — 5% growth has become something of a national invocation, cited at summits, embedded in policy documents, repeated by leaders across the political spectrum. Yet when one examines how the state actually behaves when confronted with initiative, innovation or self-reliance, a quieter truth emerges.
We are not governing like a country that expects 5% growth; we are governing like one resigned to less than 2%.
The distinction matters, because growth is not only a function of capital, labour or commodities. It is a function of policy temperament, how a state responds when citizens and firms attempt to solve problems themselves.
A recent report suggesting that Eskom is “targeting” homeowners who have installed solar panels captures this tension perfectly. Even allowing for legitimate concerns about grid safety and registration, the framing is telling. When a country with a structural electricity shortage appears to treat distributed energy as something to police rather than something to integrate and scale, it reveals a deeper instinct.
That instinct is not growth-orientated.
Growth is an attitude before it is a statistic
High-growth economies reward initiative. Rules are designed to assume good faith. Regulation exists, but it is predictable, proportionate and aimed at enabling participation rather than deterring it.
Low-growth economies default to suspicion. They regulate first, enable later, and often punish adaptation that arises precisely because the system is underperforming.
South Africa increasingly exhibits the latter behaviour.
Households that invested in rooftop solar did not do so to undermine the grid. They did so because the grid was unreliable. They absorbed private costs, reduced pressure on public infrastructure and improved national energy resilience, all without state funding. From a growth perspective, this is precisely the type of decentralised problem-solving countries should want to encourage.
South Africa does not need fewer rules. It needs better instincts.
A 5% growth mindset would ask: “How do we standardise this safely? How do we integrate it efficiently? How do we encourage more of it where appropriate?”
A sub 2% mindset asks: “How do we register it, charge for it and ensure compliance?”
The difference may appear technical, but the economic consequences are profound.
A necessary counter-argument and why it falls short
Eskom and the National Treasury would argue that registration and enforcement are not about hostility to self-reliance but about grid safety, revenue stability and system planning. Unregistered installations can pose technical risks, complicate forecasting and undermine cross-subsidies in a fiscally stressed system.
These are not trivial concerns.
But this is precisely where growth-orientated governance diverges from low-growth instinct. A capable state solves co-ordination problems by lowering friction, not by raising fear. Safety and visibility can be achieved through simple, low-cost registration, clear technical standards and transparent incentives, not through rhetoric that frames households as compliance risks. When enforcement leads the narrative, even well-intentioned policy begins to feel punitive, and trust erodes.
China’s reported GDP growth of about 5% in 2025 has attracted global attention. No-one would argue that South Africa should emulate China’s political system. But it would be a mistake to ignore the policy mechanics behind the growth, which has been driven largely by exports, supported by deliberate market diversification and sustained industrial policy.
When domestic demand faltered, the state adjusted levers: supporting exporters, subsidising targeted consumption, backing specific industries such as electric vehicles and renewable technologies and deploying credit and fiscal instruments quickly.
This is not a defence of China’s model. It is an observation about policy coherence.
China behaves like a state that expects growth. It protects earning capacity, reduces friction where growth is generated and intervenes pragmatically, sometimes imperfectly, when momentum weakens.
South Africa, by contrast, often behaves like a state managing scarcity rather than building abundance.
Additional South African policies quietly restraining growth
Energy is only one symptom of a broader pattern:
- South Africa’s restrictive and slow visa regime actively deters scarce skills, entrepreneurs, academics and digital workers. Even modest reforms have been implemented hesitantly, despite clear evidence that skilled migration supports innovation, tax revenue, and job creation.
- Inefficiencies in ports and rail remain a major drag on exports and industrial competitiveness. Deloitte and others note that logistics bottlenecks function as a silent tax on growth, one that no incentive scheme can offset.
- Well-intentioned worker protections often translate into reduced labour absorption, particularly for young and low-skilled workers. A growth-orientated system balances protection with flexibility; South Africa too often achieves the former at the expense of the latter.
- Local content requirements are meant to support domestic industry, but when applied rigidly, they raise costs, delay projects and reduce competitiveness. Growth economies use localisation selectively and dynamically; low-growth economies hard-code it and hope for the best.
- Delayed spectrum allocation and uneven digital infrastructure rollout have constrained productivity gains in an economy that desperately needs them. In a modern economy, digital policy is growth policy.
- Restrictive zoning, slow permitting and fragmented urban governance inflate housing costs, limit labour mobility and suppress construction, one of the fastest employment multipliers available.
None of these policies alone condemns South Africa to low growth. Together, they form a dense web of small constraints that relentlessly cap ambition.
- South Africa also has a food-system policy problem. Wastage occurs across production, retail and household levels, even as food insecurity deepens. This is not only a social failure but an economic one. Weak co-ordination across departments, unclear liability rules around food donations, limited incentives for surplus redistribution and underdeveloped organic waste diversion systems all contribute to value being destroyed rather than repurposed.
A growth-oriented policy framework would treat food waste reduction as value creation, enabling safe redistribution, supporting circular-economy solutions such as composting and bio-energy and integrating waste reduction into municipal and industrial policy.
South Africa does not need fewer rules. It needs better instincts.
If we genuinely aspire to 5% growth, we must stop governing like a state managing decline. We must treat self-reliance as capacity, not defiance. And we must recognise that enforcement culture is not neutral; it either compounds failure or accelerates recovery.
Solar panels on rooftops are not a rebellion. They are a signal. The question is whether we are prepared to read that signal as an opportunity or continue mistaking it for a threat.
• Pillay is co-founder of the food safety leadership initiative based at Wits Business School. He wrote this in his personal capacity.
