![]() ![]() Business participation is being sought in electricity, rail and water against the wishes of some of the government’s biggest allies - labor unions. With an election next year and polls indicating that the ANC may lose its national majority for the first time, the party is leaning even more on the private sector to do the government’s job in a bid to stay in power. And for a while, it did.īut three decades on - while many ANC leaders still cling to that vision, referring to each other as “comrades” and trotting out the trope of “White Monopoly Capital” when they talk about business - the government’s role as a provider of basic services is virtually non-existent in large swaths of the country. When the African National Congress came to power in South Africa in 1994, Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation” held out the promise of an efficient state-led economy that would uplift the downtrodden Black majority. Read More: Africa’s Richest City Is Crumbling Under Chaos and Corruption and a former deputy central bank governor, said in April. “We are indeed, as many have said, running the risk of becoming a failed state because we’re already on borrowed time,” Daniel Mminele, chairman of Nedbank Group Ltd. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Theft of everything from copper cables to solar panels are common, and crime has soared to such an extent that the private security industry now employs more people than the police force and military put together. Poorly maintained state schools are keeping a whole generation from access to a decent education. Water in some communities is unsafe to drink. A dilapidated sanitation system triggered a recent cholera outbreak near the capital, Pretoria. Outside of some national highways, paved streets have more potholes than road. ![]() Power cuts of as many as 12 hours a day have driven schools, hospitals and businesses to generators. Government incompetence, corruption and policy paralysis have left critical infrastructure in Africa’s most-industrialized nation in tatters, forcing companies to step into areas that are within the purview of the state in most countries. ![]() “You can’t run a successful private business in a sea of chaos.” “It’s not altruism,” said Lungisa Fuzile, chief executive officer of the South African unit of Standard Bank Group Ltd., the continent’s biggest lender. ![]()
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