SA’s child malnutrition crisis exposes economic and moral failure – IRR

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) warns that South Africa’s economic and moral crisis is laid bare by two alarming figures: non-financial companies are holding a record R1.8-trillion in cash, while 21% of South African children under five are stunted due to malnutrition.

Says John Endres, Chief Executive Officer at the IRR: “These figures are a stark indictment of South Africa’s policy environment. Companies are not hoarding cash out of greed – they are responding rationally to policy uncertainty, collapsing infrastructure, crime, and burdensome race-based regulations that make investment risky. The result is corporate paralysis and frozen capital, while millions of children go hungry.”

Endres continues: “The government cannot coerce businesses to invest by punitive taxation or expropriation. Capital is skittish. It responds to confidence – and confidence depends on clear, reliable, and growth-oriented policy.”

The IRR points to its Blueprint for Growth papers as a roadmap for restoring confidence and enabling investment by

• Securing property rights;
• Repealing expropriation without compensation;
• Scrapping race-based empowerment laws that deter investment;
• Deregulating energy and transport;
• Professionalising the civil service, and
• Protecting the rule of law.

“Where investment flows, the economy grows; where employment rises, malnutrition falls. Growth is the only sustainable feeding scheme,” Endres notes. 

Between 2020 and 2025, malnutrition was listed as a factor in the deaths of nearly 4,500 children under five. The IRR stresses that stunting is not merely a statistic. Malnourished children face permanent cognitive and physical impairment, undermining South Africa’s future workforce and economic potential.

“Business cannot be blamed for protecting its balance sheet when government policy undermines the business case,” Endres says. “Yet, while we work to restore growth, feeding programmes run by companies, NGOs, and communities must expand to save lives. The state, in turn, should redirect spending from ineffective transformation schemes and bailouts to target child nutrition directly.”

The IRR concludes: “South Africa’s economic failure is a moral failure. A government that drives away investment drives its own people into hunger. Until confidence is restored and growth rekindled, R1.8-trillion will remain frozen in bank accounts, while the nation’s children go without. Nothing could be more unconscionable.”

Media enquiries:

Anneke Burns

IRR Public Relations

+27 71 423 0079

anneke@abpr.co.za