MICHAEL MORRIS: Economic turnaround hinges on addressing core issues - Business Day

Michael Morris 
One of our choicest ironies is that the most optimistic South Africans are those who believe the best hope for the country lies in what we are not doing.

That’s not entirely right though. The drift of not insignificant political and economic activity (coalition government, the tentative embrace of public-and-private-sector partnerships, fiscal resolve) has given the hopeful among us things to point at when we speak of a turnaround as a credible prospect.

Without doubt there are things to cheer, but as the plain final line from a recent The Economist article expressed it: “If South Africa is indeed going to turn a corner, it had better get a move on.” (“The case for optimism in South Africa”, January 27).

And I suppose that is the voice of the optimists I have in mind; impatient realists, not sugary patriots given to right-sounding sentimentalism.

I feel sure this is also the voice I heard in last Thursday’s Daily Friend Show, in which colleague and podcast host Nicholas Lorimer exchanged thoughts with Centre for Risk Analysis executive director Chris Hattingh, on that Economist piece.

It’s clear both Hattingh and Lorimer can visualise the turnaround, but as a potential outcome, an “if, then …” proposition.

As Hattingh put it, it was possible that a “cascading effect” could be achieved — investment, more spending — “if you just get some of the processes right and right-skilled people into the right positions”. But the real test was the scale of fixed investment, “assets you can’t take out of the country”.

For this you needed security of property rights, a conviction that anyone guilty of crime or corruption would be “held to account and punished without fear or favour”, a public service that was open and predictable, especially in the awarding of tenders, for example, and as few disincentives as possible along the lines of onerous BEE requirements.

These were all core “politically sensitive” policy questions that, Hattingh observed, “I don’t see being addressed”. Putting it slightly differently, he added: “A few quarters of GDP uptick do not tell me these core policy and ideological issues are being addressed and resolved.”

The risk — most immediately for the ANC, but of course for the rest of us too — is that, as Lorimer predicted, the biggest party in the coalition “is going to be so consumed by internal stuff that I don’t think we are going to see really big changes going forward”.

Yet optimists really do see at least the chance of making a different future, given the fundamentals about who we are and where we live.

‘Sense of urgency’

There’s our economic and social potential, everything from the mineral trove under the ground, to the people who just never give up. There’s all the research we can draw on. I commend the South African Institute of Race Relations’ own Blueprint for Growth reports, which set out straightforward, inexpensive ideas for an assured turnaround.

Mainly, though, it’s what people think that’s impossible to ignore — even if it doesn’t quite equate yet with that magical democratic thing, the “will of the people”.

The penultimate line of The Economist’s piece, a good partner to the line quoted above, warns that political “uncertainty” about the direction of coalition politics “makes it all the more important for reformists to show a sense of urgency”.

Umpteen opinion polls over the past year have shown that this is true not just for a handful of hard-nosed optimists, but for a thus-far heroically patient populace that self-evidently needs no convincing that the country is on the wrong track.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-02-02-michael-morris-economic-turnaround-hinges-on-addressing-core-issues/