Some welcome signs of reform — but action is scarily slow

Last Friday, home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi at last signed a waiver to allow foreign children to visit or leave SA, without having to show birth certificates or consent letters, while his department amends the legislation to remove the requirements altogether. The move was significant in the week of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s investment conference, Motsoaledi said, and it would help tourism as the festive season approached. It might have been less remarkable if Ramaphosa hadn’t said some time ago that the visa reforms were under way, with home affairs claiming months ago that it would no longer require the extended birth certificates. The result was tourists being turned away at the airport as recently as two weeks ago when they weren’t carrying birth certificates for their children.

The birth-certificate debacle has cost SA plenty in lost foreign tourism. Its resolution, however belated, is a welcome sign. But it is emblematic of how excruciatingly slow and contested is the process of reform, and how wide the gap can be between the changes Ramaphosa promises to boost the economy and their implementation (or not) by government departments.

At least the visa waiver was a start. And there have lately been other, stronger reform surprises — most notably the sudden, long-awaited start made by Icasa on auctioning high-frequency broadband spectrum.

An eight-year logjam on water licences was also broken ahead of the investment conference, enabling new projects in agriculture.

One mechanism that has helped is the monthly jobs summit meeting chaired by the president, which is being used to summon ministers to account for why they haven’t delivered on promised reforms. Another is a new project office that has now been established within the president’s private office to try to unblock the constraints and obstructionism within government.

But the new dawn that Ramaphosa promised is proving to be a scarily slow response to an economy in crisis. The lack of any apparent sense of urgency is costing the president much of the credibility he built in his early days.

One answer is that he needs to manage expectations better, instead of spinning the issues away. Even if all the reforms he has promised were implemented, they won’t shoot the lights out on growth, and it won’t be soon. The Treasury’s new economic strategy document suggests that if all its reforms were implemented, they would add 2.3 percentage points to the growth rate over 10 years, but would only start to have an effect after about two years.

One consequence is fiscal: a higher growth rate will not materialise any time soon to avert the crisis in SA’s public finances. A downgrade by Moody’s is all but inevitable, unless the government can magically do a deal with organised labour. Serious questions must be asked about the government’s ability to sustain its current rate of spending on social grants and services, never mind fund new ambitions such as the NHI. Hard bargaining is needed over what SA can and can’t afford. Injecting some reality into the debate could only be good.

So too would more realistic targets. SA is not about to become the Ukraine, which is vaulting up the World Bank ease of doing business rankings by pushing legislative reforms through parliament at a hectic rate. Ramaphosa, by contrast, risks a credibility-sapping miss on his target to lift SA from 84 to 50 on the World Bank rankings, given how difficult it is to get things done in government here. More reason to put the pressure on colleagues and bureaucrats to remove constraints and focus on growing the economy and new jobs, instead of growing their empires and trying to secure their own jobs. To fix the economy he needs to fix the state.

To fix the economy Ramaphosa must fix the state