‘SA has no economic policy’

SOUTH Africa lacks a coherent economic policy and government departments are failing to work together, Naspers chairman Koos Bekker has said.

“South Africa has no economic policy,” said the 62-year-old Bekker this week.

“We have four or five departments within the economic cluster that do not talk to each other and have no commonality in their approach.”

Naspers is now valued at R749-billion, making it the largest company with a primary listing on the JSE.

Bekker, who became CEO in 1997, resigned last year and took a year-long sabbatical to travel and look for new opportunities.

INSIGHT: Koos Bekker

He has now returned as chairman.

His flagship deal, and the one largely responsible for Naspers’s 18% rise in share price this year, was its purchase of shares in China’s Tencent.

The government needed better co-ordination on delivering its economic plans, Bekker said.

“If foreign investors are welcome, we need to put out the message consistently . . . and you can’t have discordance on the topic.”

South Africa was expanding slower than other African countries such as Kenya — which is set to grow 6.9% this year — and it displayed some negative traits associated with more established markets, he said.

“We have more of a sense of entitlement, of comfort, and not quite the hunger that you would have expected [for an emerging market],” he said.

“South Africa is in an odd situation because in many respects we ought to be an emerging market but we display some traits of a mature market.”—