PHUTHI MAHANYELE-DABENGWA | From fragility to reform: SA’s new voice on the world stage

In a world fracturing along political, economic and cultural lines, retreat has become a default reflex. Many countries are pulling inward, insulating themselves behind industrial policy, strategic rivalry and domestic contestation. South Africa, by contrast, has taken a more demanding route: we have chosen to engage, to negotiate, to reform, and to remain open to partnership rather than defined by fragmentation.

The significance of that choice is easily underestimated, especially from afar. For much of the last decade, South Africa has been viewed primarily through the lens of its failures: persistent power shortages, deteriorating logistics, stagnant growth, institutional erosion, and a politics that often prized argument over execution.

Few expected 2025 to shift the narrative; fewer still anticipated the pace at which sentiment would move once tangible progress appeared.

Yet the country that entered 2025 tentative and scrutinised ended it more confident, more coherent, and more evidently willing to govern through discipline rather than event-driven optimism. Hosting the G20 did not magically repair our long-standing issues. What it did was force alignment: across government, across sectors, and across time horizons. Under pressure, co-ordination sharpened, ambiguity narrowed, and decisions that had drifted for years began to consolidate into delivery. For the first time in a long while, South Africa was not merely defending its capacity — it was demonstrating it.

The results were not theoretical. Eskom, which for years embodied national frustration, delivered more than five consecutive months without load-shedding by the end of 2025, not as a temporary reprieve but as the outcome of structured generation recovery and operational discipline. Transnet’s decision to open the rail network to third-party access finally crossed the threshold into implementation, supported by a R127bn investment plan aimed at modernising freight corridors and unclogging export routes critical to growth.

Fiscal consolidation, once dismissed as politically impossible, began to materialise in concrete numbers: a third consecutive primary surplus projected, sovereign debt stabilising, and S&P Global Ratings upgrading South Africa for the first time in over 16 years — placing the country in a small cohort of global upgrades in 2025.

If the last decade taught us that deterioration is possible even in resilient democracies, the last year reminded us that renewal is equally possible when accountability, execution and partnership converge.

These are not small signals. They are leading indicators of change, and a reminder that credibility is not rebuilt through announcements but through patterns. Progress remains incomplete, but it is no longer hypothetical.

Part of the reason the tone at the end of 2025 feels materially different is that business did not remain on the margins. Through the B20 as part of the G20 year, business leaders from South Africa and across the world developed recommendations grounded in data rather than rhetoric.

More importantly, dialogue translated into capital: the launch of a $100m (R1.69bn) digital inclusion fund, created under the B20 digital transformation task force, designed to support early-stage African technology ventures working in connectivity, skills, health and financial inclusion. The fund is proof that partnership between state and business need not stop at analysis; it can move into allocation, into scale, into outcomes that compound over time.

This, rather than symbolism, is the shift worth noticing. South Africa is learning that reform is not an event but a practice, that recovery is the sum of thousands of operational decisions rather than a singular turning point, and that partnership, when approached seriously, does not soften accountability — it strengthens it.

What it means to arrive with delivery, not just narrative

We often ask whether reform is real only when the narrative begins to shift. Scepticism is understandable in a country that has seen optimism outrun delivery before, but caution should not obscure evidence. Progress is not proven by sentiment; it is proven through the steady accumulation of operational wins, policy discipline and delivery that endures beyond a news cycle and begins to change lived reality.

That is the context in which international platforms, whether G20, WEF, IMF spring meetings, UN General Assembly, or regional economic councils such as Sadc, increasingly reflect a different kind of South African presence. We are not arriving with hope alone, but with proof points: a maturing energy outlook, logistics reform moving from policy to implementation, fiscal consolidation holding for more than a single budget cycle, and business showing up not as commentator but as investor and partner. We do not come to these forums to announce perfection. We come to express intent backed by trajectory.

That nuance matters. If the last decade taught us that deterioration is possible even in resilient democracies, the last year reminded us that renewal is equally possible when accountability, execution and partnership converge. The work is unfinished, and no serious voice should suggest otherwise. Energy stability must hold, rail reform must accelerate, education and productivity demand attention, and the investment climate remains uneven and requires continuous action.

But credibility is not earned by the absence of difficulty; it is earned by the willingness to confront it openly, systematically, and with partners who can drive delivery alongside the state.

The way South Africa now participates in the world reflects that maturity. Our value is not only our market size or strategic geography; it is our lived experience in complexity. We know what institutional decline looks like and we know what it takes to reverse it. We have learnt that dialogue, when held long enough to break through posturing, becomes a mechanism for progress rather than performance. And we understand that reform is not an event; it is a discipline.

The opportunity now is to convert this recognition into sustained reform, to turn stabilisation into growth, and to use these platforms not only to shape perception but to broker coalitions that can strengthen infrastructure, scale innovation and expand the pipeline of South African ideas in the world.

The work ahead remains demanding. Stability must hold. Reform must deepen. Delivery must scale. But the last year has shown that when policy, partnership and execution align, South Africa’s trajectory shifts, slowly at first, then perceptibly, and eventually decisively. What we do next will determine whether it widens into a decade of recovery or narrows into nostalgia.

Dialogue gave us traction. Delivery will determine our destination.

• Mahanyele-Dabengwa is South Africa CEO and executive director of Naspers and Prosus