The long-awaited announcement of a national dialogue this week, to be led by a group of eminent South Africans, misses the mark by a country mile. The eminent people are, well, eminent. But they are the wrong people for the wrong job.
Early on in his first term, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised to forge a new “social compact”. His critics have been criticising him for his failure to launch the initiative, despite repeated promises in successive state of the nation addresses.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Ramaphosa states that it is “an opportunity to forge a new social compact for the development of our country, a compact that will unite all South Africans, with clear responsibilities for different stakeholders”.
As Ramaphosa notes, such dialogues are part of the “DNA” of South Africa. In the chapter on Ramaphosa in my book with Mabel Sithole, The Presidents: From Mandela to Ramaphosa, Leadership in the Age of Crisis, such dialogues are just as much in the political DNA of this savvy political leader.
He is good at process and understands its value — in forging consensus, in deflecting and defusing difficult issues, and in navigating political danger.
Ramaphosa learnt its value in the 1980s peace talks and was its leading exponent in the constitutional negotiations of the 1990s. He has deployed dialogue processes to handle tricky moments since, such as the appointment of the national director of public prosecutions and the parliamentary process to defuse the EFF’s call for expropriation of land without compensation in the first year of his presidency in 2018 — to the point that he has been derided for having overseen a proliferation of commissions, inquiries and review bodies.
Some of been very effective: the Presidential Climate Commission, as it is now known, was appointed with a bloated number of commissioners, but thanks to agile institutional arrangements and a smart group of bureaucrats, has defined the pathway to a just energy transition.
The greatest current challenge is arguably no less deep and profound than many that Ramaphosa has faced in his long career before, but it is far narrower. South Africa doesn’t need to “find itself”; it doesn’t need a “social compact”. It needs a decisive, credible and robust new economic development strategy that will deliver sustainable, job-creating growth.
This week’s announcement makes a passing reference to this imperative. But in journalistic terms, it “buries the lead”. In the middle of the statement, Ramaphosa states that “we are called upon at this moment to direct all our efforts to build a thriving, inclusive economy that creates jobs and opportunities”.
At best, Ramaphosa has four years left to deliver what would be a crowning achievement of his long career in politics: a turnaround of the South African economy
This should be the singular focus of the process. It needs to be led not by a group of the mainly venerable great and good from a bygone era, but by cutting edge economic policy thinkers who can offer fresh ideas.
As the dust settled recently on The Great Budget Crisis of 2025, one of the revelations was that the government of national unity had failed to inject any new thinking into economic policy making. The DA kept calling for a “growth budget” — a vacuous statement, unless backed by concrete, specific policy proposals, which were conspicuous by their absence.
I want The Arsenal to win the Champions League — but it's the how that matters. Clearly, the DA has discovered that government is difficult; that there are no panaceas to the stubborn economic stagnation that besets the economy. The ANC is fatigued and all out of fresh thinking, but it is not for want of trying. There are good people in and around the ANC in government that have been striving to crack the growth nut for years. Hence the need for an independently led reset.
There is plenty of good thinking around. The day before Ramaphosa’s announcement, Prof Mark Swilling addressed the members of the G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group on the subject of financing infrastructure, drawing on his work as a member of the National Planning Commission. It is ground-breaking thinking, including 14 ideas to confront what is arguably South Africa’s greatest underlying constraint on growth — the lack of investment in infrastructure — and specifically to increase Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF), which is a measure of how much is being invested in fixed assets within an economy.
A key indicator of economic health and future growth potential, the GFCF needs to be at least 30% of GDP, but is currently around 10% and tracking downwards”.
This is the process that Ramaphosa should have announced: an Independent Expert Group on Unlocking Finance for Sustainable Economic Growth. This would be step 1.
Step 2 would, indeed, require a carefully choreographed multi-stakeholder process to forge consensus on some key trade-offs — what the G20 working group conversation identified as the “political pact” that will be required to redirect capital to where it is most urgently needed.
For example, to reach the national development plan target of 30% of GDP (currently closer to 3%) public investment in infrastructure, would necessitate a strategic re-alignment of the government employees’ pension fund (GEPF), which is one of the biggest in the world but which has fallen into the bracket of “lazy capital”.
In turn, this might require a staggered reform of the rules relating to how much domestic private capital can be taken offshore.
These are the tough economic development choices that Ramaphosa should be deploying his political capital on — not Mandela-era, motherhood-and-apple pie national dialogues.
He is running out of time: at best, Ramaphosa has four years left to deliver what would be a crowning achievement of his long career in politics: a turnaround of the South African economy. The national dialogue, in its current form, is a serious misstep. It will waste whatever is left in his political tank. Moreover, it misjudges the national mood and, just as importantly, the national priority. The president needs to think again.
• Calland is director of the Africa Programme of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, which convened the leadership programme for the G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group, and visiting adjunct professor at the Wits School of Governance.
For opinion and analysis consideration, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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