Chief Economist at Efficient Group, Dawie Roodt says while President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address was reflective of past achievements since the democratic dispensation, it did not adequately provide solutions for the current economic challenges facing the country.
This after President Ramaphosa emphasised that the reforms initiated by the government and the work underway will end load shedding, improve the logistics system, achieve water security and ultimately create jobs.
Roodt argues that the President failed to paint a realistic picture of the current state of affairs in the country or take accountability.
“The President is so completely and totally out of touch about the reality in South Africa. I think he must be living in another country, and there’s nothing about the complete collapse of the local authorities or a complete disintegration of the state-owned enterprises, the fiscal accounts. And the President reckons everything is just going hunky dory and everything is being fixed, and we are making progress of just about on every level. That is completely untrue.”
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‘More still needs to be done’
Meanwhile, Caz Coovadia, CEO of Business Unity South Africa, says the successes cited by the president in tackling the energy and logistics crisis and corruption are the result of working with the private sector.
Coovadia concedes that there’s no doubt the country has improved since 19994, but says more work still needs to be done.
He says the President must test the constitutionality of the National Health Insurance (NHI) bill as it would not be advisable to sign it in its current form.
“The achievements that the president talked about in energy, in logistics, in crime and corruption are all as a result of, in our view, government opening up space for the private sector to get involved to partner government and to use the private sector skills and capacity. But we have a problem to consistently say that we have increased the number of people on social grants to consistently say that we have increased the number of people on child grants. That’s not something we should be aiming to do. We should be actually aiming to reduce those numbers because we have grown the economy and people have jobs.”
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