Corporate South Africa Must Rethink its Western Reflex

For more than a century, most big South African companies have instinctively looked West. That habit was shaped by colonial foundations, Western commercial law, and corporate culture, and the fact that fixed investment stock in the country long came mainly from Western Europe and North America.

Those ties survived apartheid, and were carried into the democratic era in 1994, when the old order fell but the corporate map still pointed largely to London, Frankfurt, and New York.

The geopolitical period that followed reinforced that orientation. After 1989, the world settled into unipolarity. The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union disappeared, and the United States stood dominant while China’s rise was still only imminent. Western governments and institutions also played an important, and often forgotten, role in pressuring Pretoria to abandon apartheid. With their Soviet rival gone, and their influence at a peak, Western norms and advice naturally retained their hold over South African boardrooms.

Three decades later, that context has changed. The world has tilted from a unipolar to a multipolar order and China’s economic and military reach now challenges American primacy in visible ways. Supply chains, capital flows, and technology standards are increasingly contested terrain. South Africa trades heavily with both East and West and is a member of formal groupings such as BRICS, alongside China, India, and Russia, while still depending on Western markets and finance.

In this environment it is no longer safe to assume that Western policy advice automatically aligns with South Africa’s interests. Climate and equity agendas promoted in Europe and North America often impose high costs on energy-intensive and middle-income economies that try to adopt them wholesale.

Western donors and allied non-governmental groups have spent vast sums promoting these ideas in South Africa’s policy debate, even as the same ideas are applied more cautiously at home. China, India, and Russia have not built their own growth paths on such doctrines and have resisted the most intrusive elements of them. That reality suggests that Pretoria should weigh economic policy advice from Beijing and Moscow as seriously as that from London and Brussels, and that Washington’s counsel must be judged on its merits rather than on sentiment.

Market dominance by Western brands in South Africa is also no longer guaranteed. The shift under way in the car industry, where Chinese and Indian manufacturers are rapidly winning share, could foreshadow broader change. In areas from telecommunications equipment to consumer electronics, and fintech, Chinese technological advances now match or exceed those of many Western competitors. Local consumers and fleet buyers are already voting with their wallets.

This newspaper has previously argued that South Africa’s unity government should pursue a non-aligned foreign policy anchored only in national interest. Such a stance, focused on maximising trade and investment gains for South African households rather than on liberation nostalgia or bloc loyalty, remains the morally, economically, and strategically sound course for the state to follow.

The same principle should apply to the country’s corporate sector. South African firms can no longer rely on inherited loyalties or comfortable assumptions about who will dominate global finance, trade systems or security alliances in 20 years’ time. They should review their external alignments, diversify their political and commercial exposure, and build relationships across all major centres of power. That means being able to work with Washington and Brussels, but equally with Beijing, New Delhi, and other emerging capitals, without tying the company’s fate to any one of them.

No one can say with confidence how global power balances will shift or what shocks might reorder them. South African corporations that recalibrate now, put national interest first, and avoid hard alignment with any single camp will be better placed to navigate whatever follows. In a world of moving plates, it is wise for South African business to make and keep as many friends as possible while it still has the room to choose.

Pierneef was one of South Africa's greatest artists, known for his paintings of South African vistas. This column named after him aims to do something similar - sketch the broad vistas of South Africa's domestic landscape.