EDITORIAL: Ramaphosa’s 2-trillion empty investment promises

President Cyril Ramaphosa speaks during the South Africa Investment Conference in Joburg on Thursday April 13 2023. Picture: BLOOMBERG/WALDO SWIEGERS

President Cyril Ramaphosa crows that his government has raised R1.5-trillion in investment in the past five years, exceeding his initial R1.2-trillion target by plenty. But if that’s really happened, where exactly is this money? If all this cash is flushing around the system, how come unemployment is rising, the country’s economic capital is slowly becoming one gaping pothole, and the economy is projected to stutter to little more than 0% growth this year?

Part of the answer is that these were simply pledges — the sort of substance-free, feel-good champagne talk the ANC specialises in. Talk is that less than R400m of this actually resulted in tangible investments. , those targets were just colourful theatrics. Essentially, that R1.2-trillion over five years meant Ramaphosa was looking for fixed capital formation of just R240bn a year — less than 5% of our GDP, and far less than many other countries are getting.

Yet Ramaphosa is undaunted, and has now shifted the target to R2-trillion. Why not — if this is all Monopoly money anyway, why not make it R10-trillion or R20-trillion? Who’s auditing this, anyway?

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