THICK END OF THE WEDGE
PETER BRUCE: Can’t export widgets, but we can sell fun
The only way to seriously industrialise is to liberalise our immigration laws and freely allow skilled people into SA
South African industrial policy is a mess. We dream big but do zip. Perhaps it was ever thus. Certainly, the Afrikaner industrial miracle of the 50s isn’t possible now. They dreamed of self-sufficiency and built a steel company, an electricity generator and an oil producer. We no longer face the threats that made Iscor, Eskom and Sasol necessary. About all that remains useful of the apartheid industrial legacy is the arms industry where, though we might not like to admit it, we’re still pretty competitive. Given the tangible decay in our universities, chances are we are not capable now of producing the engineers the Nats did. Still, it is wonderful to hear that a black woman has opened a facility, K9 Pet Foods, to produce for Woolworths. That makes her an industrialist in my book. She’s a beneficiary of Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies’s black industrialist programme. He told Parliament this week that the programme was going well. Not only would it create 100 black industriali...
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