SA lacks a ‘coherent’ economic plan – Bekker
SOUTH Africa lacked a coherent economic policy and government departments were failing to work together, said Koos Bekker, the chairman of Naspers, the internet and media group.
“South Africa has no economic policy,” said Bekker in an interview last 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.”
Electricity shortages in Africa’s most industrialised economy are restricting production in the mining and manufacturing industries, which last year were hurt by strikes that curbed economic growth to its slowest since a 2009 recession.
It is also facing policy delays on issues ranging from shalegas development to renewable fuels and telecommunications.
South Africa was expanding slower than other countries on the continent such as Kenya, which might grow 6.9 percent this year, and it displayed some negative traits associated with more established markets, said Bekker.
Still, its economy was more than 10 times the size of Kenya’s and its powergenerating capacity 10-fold that of Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy.
“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 a very odd situation because in many respects we ought to be an emerging market, but we display some traits of a mature market.”
South Africa lacks the ambition and determination of some other emerging markets such as India, China and Nigeria, according to Bekker.
While the country has Africa’s biggest capital market, almost a third of its people live below the extreme poverty line of R290 a month and 16 million people, or almost one in three of the population, receive welfare grants, according to official data.
South Africa’s National Development Plan seeks to lift average economic growth to 5.4 percent through 2030.
Growth was constrained by “the sluggish global economic recovery”, Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene said last week in Parliament .
Phumza Macanda, a spokes- woman in the Treasury, did not respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.
The government needed better co-ordination on delivering its economic plans, Bekker said. “The problem is that each department now acts autonomously.”