An economic annus horribilis
How the ANC broke the economy
The year 2017 will go down as one that did enormous damage to the ANC, the economy and the country’s public finances
Political contestation within the governing ANC has, over the past year, made economic reform and budgeting impossible. As a result, confidence has collapsed and growth has slowed to a crawl. SA now finds itself in the throes of a fiscal crisis and risks being mired in a long period of economic stagnation. At the start of the year, President Jacob Zuma rallied his party behind an unapologetically populist message. During his state of the nation address in early February, he promised that the country was entering "a new chapter of radical socioeconomic transformation" in which government would use to the maximum all the levers at its disposal to drive the economic emancipation of black people. That he later urged the ANC to amend the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation made it clear that his vision of transformation was infused with an asset-grabbing mind-set.Within a week of his axing both S&P Global Ratings and Fitch had junked SA’s international credit ra...
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