The Common Sense Diary

Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen told Parliament that South Africa’s government needs to “replace restrictive BEE policies with genuine broad-based empowerment” even as his own government department charges ahead with BEE in agriculture. A wandering albatross observes that this is how the Tories and the old-fashioned Republicans lost their way: told their supporters one thing and then did the opposite. Voters are not fools and they resent being lied to. Be straight with them.

The same is true of foot-and-mouth disease. The state has landed a million vaccines. Well, there are 15 million cattle to be vaccinated, and not once-off either. If the private sector had been empowered to take charge, while the state regulated, then millions more would have landed months ago. Farmers are now shooting their desperately ill animals. South Africa is not the Soviet Union of the 1950s, it is quite extraordinary that a DA minister thinks it should be.

As one door closes another opens. Geordin Hill-Lewis was by all accounts very good in the Talkin Sense podcast as he set out his views on how to fix South Africa. Watch or listen to it here.

Developers in Cape Town are reclaiming three hectares of land from the sea for new hotel and tourist and office builds around the city centre. That’s what confidence does. Compare this to Gauteng, where buildings stand empty and the city centre looks like a scene from the Somali civil war. A while back a whole street blew up. Earlier this year power was cut off for a week.

And what about Patrice Motsepe? If the route to winning is clear and the ANC can unite around that, then he is likely South Africa’s next leader. And he will likely do enough on reform to get the fixed investment rate up to 20% and therefore the economic growth rate to 3%. That would be the start of a great new age for South Africa into the 2030s. If he needs a partner, he could do no better than Hill-Lewis. Maybe this is it, then, the moment, and South Africa is going to turn around to be great. There is just that difficult question about whether his camp can see their way through the party conference with all its corruption and violence. That’s the big hurdle now between South Africa and success.

Do the Americans have a problem in the Middle East? They’ve moved more firepower into the region than before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But still the Iranians won’t budge on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Likely if that continues the US will launch limited strikes from the air and the sea. But if no concessions are then forthcoming the outlook is for war. US credibility will be seriously dented if Tehran holds out.

The US economy looks strong going into 2026. Its 2025 growth number came in at 2.2%, quite a bit below the 2.8% of 2024. But that was mainly as a consequence of the record government slowdown. As Bheki Mahlobo has pointed out, if it had not been for that, the US would have grown by 2.7% in 2025.

Trump’s raging against the US Supreme Court was fundamentally unAmerican. The court struck down the basis upon which many of his tariffs were grounded. Of course Congress should have a say on things. No kings.

That does not mean an end to tariffs and the Trump administration has more than sufficient tools to continue down the tariff road. It was foolish, therefore, for the South African foreign policy people to think that they did not need to strike a trade deal with the Americans as the court would do the work for them. Pretoria is in for a nasty surprise. Foreign policy in South Africa really is dim-witted.

China’s foreign policy is of course not. Tariff-free access to all of Africa (Eswatini does not count) without reciprocity is a big shrewd move. Just think how South Africa could have profited if its foreign policy people had been on the ball and won massive trade and investment concessions from Beijing and Washington alike. Motsepe (and Hill-Lewis) could do it.