Former Business Leadership of South Africa chief executive officer Bonang Mohale has described the World Bank’s new forecast for South Africa’s economic growth as sad, tragic and regrettable. This after the World Bank’s decision to cut South Africa’s economic outlook to below 1% for 2020 due to electricity concerns.
The bank now forecasts the growth at 0.9% this year from 0.7% in 2019. However, some economists have warned that this is too optimistic for South Africa to realise.
Eskom has downgraded its stage 2 load shedding to stage one from 6 o’clock on Friday morning to 11 o’clock Friday night. On Thursday the power utility implemented stage two load shedding throughout the day.
Mohale who is now an independent non-executive director at Bidvest, says although the performance of South Africa’s economy is at its worst, the solutions are clear.
“What seems to be killing us is the fact that we are unable to execute, especially when one considers South Africa’s potential and our actual performance which is so low. Therefore, all our problems are self-made, with self-harm and self-inflicted. Eskom we knew in the seventies that we were going to run out of generation capacity. The government of the day said but we are going to privatise, it will be a problem of the private sector,”says Mohale.
