The brighter and more prosperous the future is expected to be, the higher the level of investment in the present. Picture: 123RFWe have leaders who say they want growth, and government has policy documents that describe how important growth is.
Our tragedy is that confidence in the future has collapsed as a consequence of poor policy and worse government performance over the past two decades . The accumulated effect of each poor policy and each example of government failure now far exceeds the already-large sum of its individual parts. Concerns about power as a source of uncertainty about the future are reinforced and amplified by policy and governance failures that are equally bad in other domains.
Eskom is not the only state-owned company with a statutory monopoly in a critical industry whose operational and financial performance has deteriorated abominably.Transnet’s provision of logistics services is seen as a material risk to a vast range of economic activity.
is responsible for policy choices and their implementation, yet he consistently fails to govern in the interests of the country rather than the elite of his own party. While sometimes seeming to favour a greater role for business and markets in growth and employment, he continues to hobble market expansion. He and his government do not appreciate how markets and business function — a question of ideology and ignorance, and the result is policy failure across a wide spectrum of activity.