ALEXANDER PARKER: Double down on reform or 30-year drift will continue

International departure halls at airports are melancholic places. Melancholy is a quiet emotion and because the halls are loud, fraught environments, it’s easy to miss it.

The fog brought on by stressed-out children and grumpy dads striding ahead to the security queue with all the passports, but none of the children, is quite overwhelming.

But if you ever have time, check it out. Whatever reason you might have to travel overseas there has to be an accompanying emotional journey, even if it is just to present some slides that really could have been done on Teams (irritation).

More often, grown-up children are leaving distraught and delighted parents for some kind of adventure, or somebody is returning home to see an elderly parent, or the whole family is piling onto an Emirates 777 to go to Bangkok or London.

There is joy and tragedy, anticipation and dread, opportunities grasped and moments lost. It’s all there.

The airlines know this. They use the appealing stuff in their advertising — perfect beaches, exotic cities and so on. They don’t lean so much on the fact that people will hop on a Lufthansa A380 to return home for a funeral, but the airlines will take anyone where they want to go in exchange for cash.

The idea that the airline might try to control what people travel for is madness — all they want is full planes.

Our lead story today in Business Day — a study from the London School of Economics (LSE) — paints a grim picture of the progress in changing our economy. If there’s one thing we should have learnt over 30 years of industrial policy and the regulation of business is that you can no more tell an economy what to do than you can tell a traveller why they are travelling; they already know.

The post-apartheid government’s attempt to co-opt the regime’s interventionalist approach has failed because the apartheid government disregarded the majority of South Africans in its planning. Corralling a small economy for the benefit of our full population was always going to be hard, and it needed to get bigger quickly.

There is little point lamenting political decisions taken in 1995. It was such a different country and what seems obvious now (go for growth and it doesn’t matter who gets rich, so long as the poor also get richer) would have seemed unseemly back then.

But have we learnt? Let’s look at this from the Reserve Bank: “Total production increased rapidly at the beginning of the economic recovery. Economic growth then faltered somewhat in the first half of [the year], largely because of uncertainties about the outcome of the political transition. In the second half of [the year] the growth in domestic product regained much of its lost momentum and strengthened at a brisk and accelerating rate when it became apparent that the new political dispensation had been established in a peaceful manner.”

This is the Reserve Bank’s economic report from 1995, and it is amazing how familiar it feels.

Since then, our various incarnations of the government have introduced the Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP), Growth Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa), the National Industrial Policy Framework and various incarnations of the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP).

Despite this, manufacturing as a percentage of GDP fell from 21.1% in 1995 to 18.4% in 2003 to 12.9% in 2023.

At the same time, as my colleague Noxolo Majavu wrote recently, Joburg house prices have stagnated at 2010 levels, a shocking expression of the flatlining wealth of the middle class in our economy’s engine room since Zuma’s lost decade began.

I get the sense that these days the big arguments about what needs to be fixed have been won. Energy, logistics, crime and municipalities all need to be addressed via capacitation of the state and through liberalisation.

It’s a simple sentence to type but a gargantuan political endeavour that President Cyril Ramaphosa is plugging away at with characteristic caution.

If the ANC and its coalition partners can pull it off — and the “GNU” would need to prevail for more than a single administration, I suspect — then I feel the upsides are huge and achievable.

Imagine this country if you could export through the ports cheaply and it was awash with dirt-cheap renewable energy and high-speed data, and detached from the over-accommodated and small minority we call organised labour. 

These distant lights at the end of the tunnel are why there is more hope for real economic transformation now than I have felt in 15 years.

Nothing is ever perfect — and there is so much detail to get wound up about — but the business community should continue its engagement with the state and continue to push the coalition government hard on walking through reforms quickly.

We are fortunate to have the opportunity, and the LSE’s report outlines what we have failed to get done.

• Speaking of departures, this is my final column as editor-in-chief of Business Day, BusinessLIVE and BDTV. It has been the honour of my career to edit this newspaper and to work with a particularly tough and resourceful team of journalists. They are the best in the business, and they work incredibly hard. Journalism is a trade, not a profession, and editors are janitors in buildings they don’t own.

I am grateful to the readers for their criticism and appreciation, and for the powerful sense of ownership they have of this newspaper. I know they will continue to demand the highest standards. It is as it should be.