Business Leadership SA CEO Bonang Mohale gives every impression of having a heart as big as his smile, and a vision for the country to match. Speaking at an event hosted by the South African Ubuntu Foundation and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, he laid out some thoughts on this vision. They’re worth taking note of.
That the Zuma era overlapped with the global financial crisis and its aftermath only exacerbated matters. South Africa has never been able to make up the ground lost and is presently a substantial laggard by the standards of comparable emerging markets.suggest that the purely financial costs in the second term of Jacob Zuma’s administration amounted to some R1.5-trillion — just under the sum of R1.8-trillion budgeted for 2019.
But what to do, specifically? Business might be able to fund some teaching posts, provide infrastructure, offer scholarships and so on. It does so already. But its ability here is practically limited, especially insofar as ensuring that millions of children — particularly millions of poor children, typically black children — receive an education that gives them a reasonable chance at socio-economic mobility and a middle-class life.
But in both these cases, whatever might be done directly by business is limited; it is certainly not the transformative action that Mr Mohale seems to be driving at. Fundamentally, these are creatures of government policy and as such will remain primarily government’s responsibility. It is to lay bare before government the consequences of failing to tackle the dysfunctions in education, even at the expense of alienating government’s powerful trade union allies.