MICHAEL MORRIS: Economy doesn’t always have to be on brink of collapse - Business Day

Michael Morris
You sometimes can’t help thinking that one of our biggest problems is that if, in the customary idiom, things are always “falling apart”, we never actually seem to reach the point where they do, finally, fall apart.

Not that I wish it, though it’s often said things have to get worse before they can get better.

The difficulty isn’t deciding how much worse things have to get or how much longer we have to wait for things to become bad enough. The problem may be misappreciating why it is we haven’t fallen apart and why, out of stubborn endurance, we put up with always being on the brink of collapse.

The truth is, we are wasting precious time (not only time, but goodwill, prosperity and even health) and missing priceless opportunities.

I have written before about the virtue of SA not being much of a revolutionary-minded society. For all the occasional bouts of burning and smashing and soiling, most South Africans are just far too sensible or reserved to let their emotions run away with them. Sometimes, as I suggest above, you can’t help wondering if the rewards are dubious. On balance I don’t think they are; I think we are a saner, more stable society than is generally thought to be the case.

That’s a benefit and it shows in the daily striving that is everywhere visible, from moms in township and suburb getting their children off to school in good order, and home again, and fed, and steered well, to entrepreneurs, large and small, finding a telling advantage and a clever way to make the most of it, to clerks and shop attendants, and the legions who work the mines and factories, farms and warehouses.

None of us belongs to a special class of heroic citizen, but this fairly stoical, long-suffering assembly is a society that has defied the doom many considered long ago inevitable.

Yet there is good reason to be discomforted rather than affirmed.

Writing in these pages last week, my senior colleague, Institute of Race Relations CEO John Endres, drew attention to a deeply troubling contrast between an apparently unlikely pair of data points: the revelation from the Reserve Bank that non-financial companies “are holding a record R1.8-trillion in cash, the largest hoard in the country’s history” and the alarming figure from Business Day reporting “that 21% of SA’s children under the age of five are stunted because of malnutrition”.

These numbers, he wrote, “reveal the scale of SA’s economic and moral failure”.

“That R1.8-trillion is not a sign of corporate greed,” he went on, “but of corporate paralysis [arising from] policy uncertainty, collapsing infrastructure, crime and a tangle of race-based regulations [that] have made investment dangerous.

“The tragedy is that this same paralysis leaves millions of parents too poor to feed their children adequately … Behind every malnourished child there is a parent unable to feed them, causing permanent injury to the child’s potential. Malnourished children grow up shorter, weaker and cognitively impaired. A nation that allows one-fifth of its children to be stunted is a nation sabotaging its future workforce before it even begins.”

The responsibility for all this lies squarely with the government and policymaking.

“The only path out”, Endres advised, “is to rekindle confidence, restore growth and let capital do what it does best: turn savings into jobs and jobs into nourishment.”

If we could just make this demand one of our stubborn habits, we’d likely become much less tolerant of things always falling apart.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-10-20-michael-morris-economy-doesnt-always-have-to-be-on-brink-of-collapse/