TONY LEON: Can Ramaphosa walk through mining's minefield?
'South Africa’s bad policies meant we missed the opportunities and investment flows which followed the commodity super cycle'
Last Wednesday, on the flight back to Cape Town from Johannesburg – the tail end of a long haul journey which commenced two days before in Sydney, Australia – I bumped into an old political acquaintance. Pravin Gordhan, the correctly heralded anti-hero of Zuma’s lost decade, asked where I had been while the great South African political melodrama – complete with a happy ending – was unfolding here.I advised him I had been in Australia when our unloved ex-president fell, noting that if I had stayed away longer perhaps the entire government might have disappeared. On Tuesday night this week, anyway, it changed its appearance, though not yet its overblown size, somewhat. In fact I spent the first and last days of my Australian visit in Perth, Western Australia, a city at the very edge of that massive faraway continent. It is so remote from the rest of the country that American writer Bill Bryson noted: “Perth is closer to Bali than it is to Sydney but it is far from everywhere.” When I...
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