COMPANY COMMENT: Building companies seek answer to stasis
Look to JSE-listed construction and engineering companies’ trajectory for answers
South African Nobel prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer saw fit to quote Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci in her famous musings about living in SA’s "interregnum" in the early 1980s. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms," the founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, who was later imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s fascists, once said. Gramsci’s pithy brilliance perfectly describes SA’s situation. Apart from a honeymoon period just after April 1994, the country is again in stasis, characterised by ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions. SA is both the most advanced country on the African continent and a relic of the past. But an answer to the crisis may have been found in the trajectory that JSE-listed construction and engineering companies Murray & Roberts, Aveng, WBHO, Stefanutti Stocks, Raubex, Basil Read and Group Five have unequivocally taken. In a deal with the government, the...
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