When watching cricket on television as youngster, I had no idea what the commentators were referring to when they said that the bowler was “coming from the Kelvin Grove end”.

Who is this man named Kelvin, I used to think?

Now that I am here with you in Newlands at the lovely Kelvin Grove Club, I more fully appreciate what the commentators were talking about. Under the full glare of the floodlights, I will attempt this evening to deliver a few yorkers and bouncers, but hopefully I won’t stray too far down leg side! Don’t worry, this will be a brief spell of play before we break for drinks.

This is a special audience of business owners, fund managers, entrepreneurs, and leaders in civil society. You are here because, like me, you value freedom.

You are joined by a star-studded line-up of FMF board members, including chair Gail Daus-van Wyk, deputy chair Neil Emerick, as well as Wilhelm Hertzog.

They each have a long and storied association with the FMF that long precedes my appointment in 2023. Their institutional knowledge and real-world experience in politics, technology, and finance have been invaluable for me to draw upon.

I want to discuss the state of play here in South Africa and offer an analysis of some of the structural policy problems that are affecting the economy.

David Ansara addressing a private audience at the Kelvin Grove Club, in Newlands, Cape Town (24 June 2026).

I will put on the table some long-standing FMF policy ideas as a remedy to these problems. I will then conclude with a brief description of the FMF’s role in the civil society landscape and why you should get behind our cause.

The Problems

This audience is surely familiar with many of our country’s “challenges” (that well-worn South African euphemism for “crises”), so I don’t need to list every issue in detail tonight. But it is necessary to say that most of South Africa’s problems are self-authored ones.

This should not be cause for despondency.

Unlike some countries, which have been devastated by natural disasters or war, South Africa has merely suffered from a series of poor policy choices. These choices stem from an antiquated socialist ideological framework that informs public policy. And these policies have in turn been devastating for the quality of life and the freedoms of South Africans.

The good news is that these choices can be reversed at the mere stroke of a pen. However, like anything in life, you can only really begin to fix the problem once you acknowledge the current reality and the mistakes that led you to this point.

The next step is to take the necessary and painful decisions to undo what has been broken in the first place. This requires accepting difficult trade-offs and seeking out novel solutions.

1. Low Economic Growth

South Africa’s GDP grew by 0.5% in the first quarter of 2026, marking a sixth consecutive quarter of positive economic growth. Year-on-year growth reached 1.9%.

Now, a little growth is better than no growth, but this slight upward tick is inadequate given the population growth rate of about 1.5% and our widespread poverty.

South Africa’s modest growth is sustained by its resilient private sector, which has produced world-class financial services, retail, and logistics firms. This is on top of strong agricultural and mining sectors, which remain the backbone of the economy as they were over the past century.

However, the growth of these sectors comes despite government efforts to interfere and control. Sub-par economic growth is mostly a function of the ever-expanding size and scope of government, funded by debt and high taxation.

Do you know what happened on 22 May?

This was the day you “stopped” paying tax, or more specifically, stopped working for the government and started working for yourself.

Tax Freedom Day (TFD) is a campaign that the FMF has run since the 1990s. In 1994, Tax Freedom Day fell on 12 April, meaning the total tax burden has risen from 30% to 38% of GDP in over three decades.

The FMF’s solution, as articulated in a paper for its Liberty First policy series: reduce the government down to its bare essentials by cutting or consolidating many of the central government’s 32 ministries, to a leaner, more efficient ten portfolios.

2. Underinvestment

In 2008, gross fixed capital formation, a measure of fixed investment in the economy, stood at 21% of GDP. This was at the height of the preparations for the 2010 World Cup. Today, that figure is down to about 14% of GDP. This means that fewer mine shafts are being sunk and factories are being built.

It is not only foreign but also domestic investors who are withholding their capital. Much criticism is levelled at local businesses for “sitting on piles of cash”, contributing to the so-called “investment strike”.

I should say that if investors wish to sit on piles of their own cash that is their right to do so. They are the best people to judge what to do with their money, not the government or anyone else.

However, any businessperson worth their salt would ideally want to deploy their capital to generate greater returns. Despite this, investors are also sensitive to risk and crave security over their assets. Funders and corporates are reluctant to seriously invest out of longer-term uncertainty over where South Africa is going.

In a recent column for The Common Sense newspaper, I noted that investors only care about one thing: making a profit. Investors don’t need a conference hosted by the government to encourage them to invest in South Africa, I said. They need the ability to make money and to keep it.

“South Africa is not special,” I wrote. “The world doesn’t owe us anything. We must compete or be left behind. Until that penny drops South Africa will remain an unattractive investment destination.”

3. Unemployment

Official unemployment sits at 32% (with the youth unemployment level hovering at 46%).

Commentators disagree on the causes of this. While skills and productivity play an important role, the FMF’s diagnosis is that South Africa’s high jobless rate is due to its restrictive labour policies.

The late Minister of Finance, Tito Mboweni, once complained about the “sins of his youth”. He was referring to the various laws that he himself implemented while serving as Minister of Labour in Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet in the 1990s.

Many of these “sins” are still with us, including the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Labour Relations Act, and the Employment Equity Act. These and other paternalistic laws such as the National Minimum Wage Act are ostensibly designed to “protect” workers.

Tragically, these laws effectively lock millions of poor people out of the labour market and make it illegal for the poor to earn a living – even a meagre one.

To fix South Africa’s high unemployment, the FMF has long proposed a job seeker's exemption certificate (JSEC).

First put forward by Eustace Davie, who now serves as president of the FMF, a JSEC would enable first-time jobseekers to voluntarily exempt themselves from South Africa’s restrictive labour policies.

As FMF policy officer, Zakhele Mthembu argued in another recent paper for the FMF’s Liberty First series that the JSEC would be a temporary, non-renewable measure that would enable first-time entrants to the job market to learn on the job through lateral skills transfer, thus improving their future employment prospects.

Eligible applicants would have to demonstrate that they have been unemployed for six months or longer to qualify, and the certificate would be valid for two years.

The beauty of the JSEC is that it would not require a wholesale revision to South Africa’s onerous labour law legislation (although that would be even better).

The JSEC is but one example of how FMF policy ideas go beyond mere criticism to providing concrete solutions. We were heartened to see a version of this policy proposal appear in the Democratic Alliance policy manifesto ahead of the 2024 elections. We hope one day to see the JSEC on the statute books.

4. Empowerment Policy

The FMF is not afraid to challenge holy cows.

One of these holy cows is South Africa’s black economic empowerment (BEE) policy. Some might argue that BEE is well-intentioned, but poorly implemented. I would encourage those people to follow Thomas Sowell’s advice and to judge the policy not by its intentions but by its outcomes.

The FMF attempted to calculate these outcomes in a research report conducted alongside the Solidarity Research Institute (SRI).

A joint research team consisting of economists, lawyers, and policy analysts calculated that BEE compliance had contributed to a reduction of 2% to 3% of economic growth, costing roughly four million jobs and R5 trillion in lost revenue. This was a conservative measure, and purposefully excluded opportunity costs, which are impossible to quantify.

BEE’s pernicious effects have been seen throughout the economy.

Take, for example, the mining sector, where empowerment requirements and the nationalisation of mineral rights have resulted in diminishing mining competitiveness and underinvestment – this in a country with one of the greatest resource endowments on earth.

Prof William Gumede of Wits University School of Governance has bravely documented the cost of BEE in his own research, in which he estimates that up to R1 trillion in value accrued to approximately 100 beneficiaries.

Prof Gumede also came across a leaked report conducted by the then-Chamber of Mines in 2015, which revealed that in the 1990s a mere 46 politically connected individuals benefitted from 60% of all mining BEE deals, accruing vast fortunes overnight. The remainder went to community structures (29%) and employee share ownership plans (11%).

BEE has been a useful vehicle for the politically connected elite to generate patronage and maintain its grip on power. It is extractive cronyism in the garb of redress, and we should not be afraid to call it what it is.

Those who are serious about advancing black people’s legitimate economic aspirations should start by rejecting the policy of BEE. Free markets have lifted millions of people out of poverty around the world. It will work here too.

I am greatly encouraged to see the Overton window shifting on BEE. Civil society groups like the FMF, together with Sakeliga and the Institute of Race Relations, were early critics of the policy at a time when it was unfashionable to do so.

Today, the DA has proposed its own “Economic Empowerment for All” Bill, which offers a non-racial alternative empowerment framework. I welcome this development, although I would urge the DA to go further and seek tangible ways to undermine BEE where it is in office.

This demonstrates why civic groups like ours are so important for generating alternative ideas and building pressure for change to eventually occur.

How We Work

The FMF engages in its work in a variety of ways.

We leverage our diverse network of writers and associates, who share our commitment to liberty, to produce countless articles, videos, and social media content. This enables us to effectively scale our media presence without incurring significant overheads.

Our network also gives us the ability to assemble teams of researchers, economists, and lawyers for specific projects, or to assist us with parliamentary submissions.

We recently submitted comment on National Treasury’s Draft Capital Flow Management Regulations, which seek to introduce draconian controls on the holding and trading of cryptocurrencies.

The FMF also filed a submission on proposed amendments to the Prevention of Illegal Eviction (PIE) Act. In both cases, we worked with specialist lawyers and industry experts who added technical expertise to our principled arguments.

While research, media advocacy, and submissions to Parliament are necessary, they are also not sufficient for preserving liberty.

Sometimes we are compelled to litigate against bad policy through the FMF Rule of Law Project. We will be back in Cape Town in August to appear as friends of the court in litigation against the Expropriation Act.

While we fight to protect private property in the courts, the FMF also works to extend private property rights to low-income South Africans through its Khaya Lam project. We are proud to boast that Khaya Lam has successfully facilitated the transfer of over 23 000 title deeds from municipalities to homeowners since 2010.

This is unusual work for a policy think tank but demonstrates our commitment to strengthening the private property rights of all South Africans.

The Role of the FMF

The FMF is an independent, non-partisan policy organisation. Our sole mandate and focus is the preservation of individual liberty in South Africa.

For over half a century, since 1975, the FMF has advocated for the cause of individual liberty, private property rights, limited constitutional government, and the rule of law.

Last September, FMF staff, board members, and our broader network of friends and associates gathered in Johannesburg to celebrate the Foundation’s Golden Jubilee.

Here we heard from FMF luminaries who reflected on the institution’s remarkable contributions, including to the private property rights clause in the Constitution in the 1990s and its tireless campaigning for informal traders.

At the end of the evening, I made the following remarks:

“The FMF is no ordinary think tank. We are not merely concerned with policy choices, as important as these are. We are also not content to watch from the sidelines as freedom comes under assault. We see ourselves as combatants on the front lines of the battle of ideas. Sometimes that means becoming more assertive, taking unpopular positions, saying what others are too afraid to say. If that is the cost of independence, then so be it. This is not a popularity contest.”

If you share our conviction that more freedom makes South Africa a better place for all who live in it, I encourage you to back our cause by contributing financially to our work.

South Africa has no shortage of intelligent people, but what it lacks is courageous people.

The FMF has a consistent fifty-year track record of bravery, clarity, and honesty. These attributes are our most precious asset. The FMF is prepared to do the hard work to preserve freedom during this critical time for South Africa, but we cannot do it alone.

We need businesspeople like yourselves to invest in freedom. This is important not only for economic prosperity, but for preserving the values and the way of life that we so cherish.

Ansara is CEO of the Free Market Foundation.