Will the honeymoon breathing space of optimism that the worst corruption is over and that more business-friendly policies and better public spending behaviour be utilised or wasted? With new reports of the ANC’s national executive committee setting wheels in motion to recall Zuma as president, it is important to note that acting against Zuma would still not set enterprise friendly policies in place.
South Africa’s post-apartheid ANC policies and strategies dealing with enterprise development have been largely driven by an increasingly unfriendly framework for established businesses as well as an anti-growth premise. In the final gasps of December 2017, the ANC Conference even took unanimously policy positions that makes mockery of Ramaphosa’s utterances of making growth the priority.
The decisions to endorse Zuma’s announcement on free tertiary education and to change the Constitution to enable expropriation without compensation, provide ample proof the ANC doesn’t understand what is required to ensure growth and to step back from the fiscal cliff.
EOSA 