Boxing champion Mike Tyson once observed that: “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. The African National Congress (ANC) might want to heed Iron Mike’s wise words as it embarks on its latest ten-point economic recovery plan, launched earlier this week.

Despite over three decades in power, the ANC seems unable to learn the lessons from failed plans of the recent past. After being repeatedly punched in the face by economic reality, the party now presides over a stagnant economy with declining levels of fixed investment and the highest formal unemployment rate in the world.

The list of ANC plans is long: the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of the 1990s, the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) and the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA) of the 2000s, the National Development Plan (NDP)and the New Growth Path of the 2010s, and the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan of the 2020s. These are in addition to the countless initiatives, partnerships, industry: "master plans", and other compacts that have come and gone over the years.

More statism

This latest plan is a laundry list of dirigiste schemes, which will only exacerbate the current problems.

These include using taxpayer money to: “rebuild” (read: subsidise) the chrome and manganese industries, big spending on infrastructure and public employment programmes, and supporting small business through development financing.

The plan hints at encouraging private sector participation in ports and rail, although this is contradicted by the desire to: “improve the state’s capacity in managing projects.” Here the government wants private sector support without relinquishing control. Other proposals are either vague in the extreme (“enabling the growth of provincial economies outside main urban centres”) or simply naïve (“diversifying trade partners”).

As many analysts have correctly pointed out, the one thing the ANC gets right is its diagnosis that South Africa is experiencing an: “economic emergency”. However, the ANC portrays this emergency as an exogenous natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake that came out of nowhere and ruined what would have otherwise been a strong and steady economic performance.

Even the actual pandemic that South Africa experienced five years ago was used to justify all sorts of coercion and intervention by the state – like the prohibition on the sale of tobacco, or the introduction of new social grants – the financial impact of which is still being felt today. Renewed talk of establishing a: “war-room” is ominously reminiscent of the failed lockdown experiment.

Alas, the emergency is entirely self-inflicted. It is the consequence of the ANC’s failed socialist policy paradigm, of which the ten-point plan is the latest iteration. In fact, all the problems the plan seeks to address were created by previous plans.

Holy cows

One of the reasons this latest plan is doomed to fail is the ANC’s refusal to touch – let alone slaughter – any of its holy cows.

Speaking at the close of the Special ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting on Monday, Cyril Ramaphosa noted that the NEC: “reaffirmed our commitment to broad-based black economic empowerment (BEE) to ensure that we correct the injustices of our past and end the inequality of the present moment.”

Without a doubt, BEE has contributed to South Africa’s current malaise. As revealed in a June 2025 report jointly undertaken by the Free Market Foundation and the Solidarity Research Institute: “broad-based” BEE compliance is (conservatively) costing the South African economy up to R290 billion per year. This is equivalent to approximately between two and four percent of GDP, or up to 192 000 lost jobs annually.

BEE has enriched a small elite, vastly inflated the costs of state procurement and worsened the inequality that Ramaphosa moans about. If he was sincere in his attempts to revive the economy (he isn’t), Ramaphosa would scrap BEE entirely (he won’t). The billionaire president is arguably BEE’s greatest beneficary, after all.

Other holy cows that need to be sent to the policy abattoir include Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC) and National Health Insurance (NHI), both of which are intrinsically hostile to individual freedom, and seek to place the state at the centre of all economic and social relations. The notion of: “labour protections” in our economic circumstances must also be strongly re-evaluated.

At their core, these policies are premised on ever more state interference by a government that is not only incapacitated, but also malevolent. Simply tune in to the livestream of the Madlanga Commission to see how criminally compromised our state really is.

Taking the Zen approach

These plans share a flawed assumption, which is that a heterogeneous society of 60 million people with divergent interests can be planned from the top down at all. No amount of tweaking and recalibrating the plan will make it work better.

Our woes are not caused by a lack of planning, but too much of it.

To achieve more, the government should do less. It needs to get out of the way and let ordinary South Africans get on with solving their own problems. They can do this through the market, which is the most efficient mechanism for allocating resources.

The path to economic prosperity has already been charted, which is why my colleagues and I have unveiled the Free Market Foundation’s Liberty First policy agenda. Unlike the government’s many expensive and complicated plans, our proposals are premised on drastically reducing the size and scope of government and maintaining strict adherence to the rule of law.

Here is a short selection (ten, in fact) of our long list of constitutionally compliant proposals to enhance economic freedom in South Africa:

• Cut down the size of the cabinet to ten portfolios;
• Privatise Eskom, Transnet, Denel, the Post Office, South African Airways, and the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa;
• Unconditionally open the field of electricity production, distribution, and transmission to private sector competition;
• Allow the unemployed to opt out of onerous labour laws through a Job Seeker’s Exemption Certificate;
• Amend the Labour Relations Act to prevent bargaining council agreements being extended to non-parties;
• Shelve the Expropriation Act and adopt legislation that rejects the paradigm of redistribution and places renewed emphasis on the principle of restitution;
• Implement a moratorium on new or increased tariffs;
• Eliminate apartheid-era foreign exchange controls;
• Adjust the inflation target from the current range of between three and six percent down to between zero and three percent; and
• Scrap NHI and enable private health insurers to offer low-cost benefit options.

All of this works and creates prosperity wherever and whenever it is tried. The evidence is on our side.

It’s time for the government to take action before economic reality punches it in the face yet again.

Ansara is CEO of the Free Market Foundation.