HILARY JOFFE: Policy direction is promising, but it has to survive the politics
The length of President Cyril Ramaphosa's state of the nation address seemed to reflect the compromise politics behind it
About an hour and a half into the state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa was still only on task three of his "five most urgent tasks". Fortunately, he sped up and finished just shy of two hours after he began. His charm and mastery of the subject matter meant Ramaphosa's second state of the nation wasn't too tedious. And there was evidence of fresh policy thinking - two years of free and compulsory early childhood education, a new specialised unit in the National Prosecuting Authority, a plan to lift SA's ranking on the World Bank's doing-business index from 82nd to the top half of the table. There were clear commitments, too, to measures to get economic growth going again, and to rebuild key institutions. Yet the length of the speech seemed to reflect the compromise politics behind it, and the difficulty of getting the cabinet to agree on really tough decisions or trade-offs. This was nowhere more evident than in what Ramaphosa had to say about the economic issue th...
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