ALTERNATIVES
Business at a fork in the road, and both paths lead to radical change
Amid the hubris, denialism and dreary mediocrity of many of the annual budget speeches recently in Parliament, Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel’s was a rare nugget offering a serious — "uncaptured" — glimpse of a different version of radical economic transformation from that peddled by the Gupta-sponsored, Bell Pottinger-crafted narrative that has so deformed public discourse. It was a fine speech, but alongside the deluge of #guptaleaks, perhaps inevitably, it received little attention or media coverage. This is another aspect of state capture: the good stuff gets submerged beneath the polluted surface. Noting that the Constitution was an "empowering framework … not a shoddy compromise, as some would have it", Patel offered what he described as "solid, practical radical transformation". This included his intention to amend competition law to tackle the concentrated nature of large parts of the economy so as to "require the consideration of the concentration, ownership pr...
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