Last week President Cyril Ramaphosa and the leadership of South Africa’s business community got together to again promise South Africans that they would fix the economy by 2030. Few believed them and government and big business alike are finding out what the consequences of that will be.

In 2012, when the government and business jointly launched the National Development Plan, their promise was to turn the economy around by 2030. At the time, the position on the ground was as follows: the economic growth rate was 2.2%, the unemployment rate was 24.9%, and the fixed investment rate was 19.5%. They pledged that by 2030 growth would average over 5%, unemployment would be 6%, and the investment rate would be near 30%. Today, however, the growth rate is 1.1% – half of what it was when government and business launched their plan. The unemployment rate is 34% – up almost 10 percentage points. And the fixed investment rate has fallen to below 15% – a drop of around a quarter.

Last week, they promised that by 2030 the growth rate will average 3% and that one million new jobs will have been created. The jobs number sounds impressive, but this newspaper did the maths. Even if the target is reached, accounting for population growth and the likely rise in the labour market participation rate, which measures what share of the working-age population is either employed or looking for work, the unemployment rate will remain at around 30%. (The labour market participation rate lifts when an economy starts to grow faster, and South Africa’s rate is far below comparable countries because economic growth has been so weak that many people have stopped looking for work.)

The reality on the ground in 2026 is so much worse than it was in 2012 because the original plan, and every plan since, including the plan last week, does not address the reasons the economy is failing South Africans.

The economy fails the people because empowerment policy taxes capital on arrival in South Africa, expropriation policy threatens to seize investments for less than their market value, affirmative action policy prioritises social engineering over merit, green energy policy prioritises ideology over refitting the coal fleet and exploiting South Africa’s oil and gas fields, and foreign policy prioritises grandstanding over striking or taking advantage of actual trade and investment deals – whether with Washington or Beijing.

None of that was addressed last week. On the contrary, there was a doubling down on much of it, from the empowerment policy commitments to the green energy commitments.

The country was told that business leaders had signed new pledges to invest more, as if economies grow from pinkie promises. A 500km stretch of new power lines will be built. That is an operational tactic, a thing you do in pursuit of a policy or strategy. But where is that policy or strategy to refit the coal fleet, which is the only way to lift peak daily baseload electricity production by the 50% needed to put South Africa quickly within reach of a long-term 4% to 5% growth track? The government does not have one, let alone a strategy to pump the oil and extract all the gas that is the ultimate catalyst for a South African industrial recovery. And business won't push for one because it is too deep down the hole of greenery.

Tourism will be prioritised – was it not before? There will be a focus on fixing Johannesburg. The state’s administration of mining rights will be improved – when what needs to be done is that mineral rights are returned to the private owners from whom they were expropriated.

Or read this line lifted verbatim from an accompanying document: “Youth employment is both a dedicated workstream and a cross-cutting outcome pursued across every focal area” – what does that even mean?

These guys, government and business alike, are letting South Africans down badly. Scrape social media responses to the latest plan and they are scathing and angry. To be a CEO prominently associated with any of this is now damaging for your brand.

That South Africa’s people continue to be let down is why earlier in the week AfriForum and March and March got together to see what plan they could make to start fixing conditions on the ground. That is the prevalent tendency, the biggest trend shaping South Africa: people are forming parallel structures that usurp the role of the state.

As for big business, the same is happening too, as the spiralling illicit economy from the construction mafia to the illegal mining industry to the fake alcohol industry shows.

It’s a predictable thing. The state fails the people so badly that they create their own “state”. Big business fails the people badly too, so they create their own “big business” – where actual jobs and services and goods and opportunities are on offer. This will continue, and it will not stop until there is a new leadership at the top of the government and new leadership at the top of the business community too.

The joint government and business delegation ended their public announcement of the new plan with this: “Detailed delivery plans and metrics for each focal area will be announced in the fourth quarter of 2026. These will form a standing agenda item at the partnership’s quarterly meetings with the president, and the partnership will report publicly against them – on progress and challenges alike.”

The people are not going to wait around to hear what these new metrics, let alone the challenges around them, might be.