Fixing South Africa is Simple But Not Easy

Last night, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered this year’s State of the Nation Address (SONA). I have a confession: I didn’t listen to the speech. Like you, I will read about what he said on the pages of The Common Sense (my preferred news platform).

I am a little jaded by these affairs, where politicians dress up in ballgowns and tuxedos and parade down the red carpet like Hollywood celebrities clapping like seals at the platitudinous pronouncements of the President.

The long list of proposals, projects, initiatives, and interventions that characterise the SONA gives the impression that governing South Africa is terribly complicated and can only be done by a byzantine bureaucracy led by our wise political masters in Pretoria.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Fixing South Africa is actually quite simple, but politics has a way of making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Self-inflicted wounds

South Africa is suffering from some very serious problems – but most of them are entirely of our own making.

Unemployment is still high at 31.9% (as of the third quarter of 2025), and that is just on the narrow definition. When using the expanded definition – which includes people who would like to work but who have given up trying – the rate sits at 42.4%. Put another way, out of a total economically active population of 25.1 million people, only 17.1 million were employed and a whopping 8 million were unemployed.

To have this many people without a job is crazy considering South Africa is a middle-income country with a far more diversified economy than any African country. In a time of global population collapse, South Africa enjoys a demographic dividend of young people eager to work, but more than half of them sit at home without a job.

As the Free Market Foundation (FMF) we have frequently argued that high unemployment is a choice. This is simply because the existing labour regulatory regime benefits the already employed at the expense of the unemployed.

I have written before about the FMF’s proposed Job-Seekers’ Exemption Certificate (JSEC), which, if implemented, would enable the unemployed to voluntarily exempt themselves from legislation like the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Labour Relations Act, or the National Minimum Wage Act.

These and many other laws are ostensibly designed to create “decent” employment but end up consigning the poor to a thoroughly indecent lifetime of poverty and dependency on the state. A JSEC would act as a pressure release valve and give job seekers the choice to opt out without having to change so much as a punctuation mark in the existing labour legislation.

Squandered resources

South Africa is endowed with an abundance of natural resources including gold (a much sought-after commodity these days), a mountain of coal (good for firing power stations), plenty of uranium (good for nukes), and over 80% of the world’s known platinum reserves (good for making cars and other things).

Another annual event I didn’t follow too closely this week was the annual African Mining Indaba, which sees the world’s miners, commodity traders, financiers, and politicians descending on Cape Town to network and strike deals.

This year, our Communist Minister of Minerals and Energy, Gwede Mantashe, used his platform to berate his counterpart from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Louis Watum Kabamba, for reaching a deal with the United States on critical minerals.

Mantashe seemed a little miffed that Kabamba had been invited to attend a conference in Washington DC convened by US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, where 54 countries discussed how to co-operate on critical minerals. South Africa’s invitation got lost in the mail.

The DRC should act in the “continental interest” and not in its own narrow national interest, Mantashe moaned. I don’t blame the DRC for striking a deal with the Americans. We should be doing the same.

Mining should be the foundation of South Africa’s economy, but politicians love making life difficult for the industry through empowerment policies and resource nationalism. As a result, South Africa has slid down the rankings of global mining competitiveness, now ranking 68th out of 82 mining jurisdictions in the Canadian Fraser Institute’s Annual Survey of Mining Companies.

South Africa has some world-class conference venues, but it’s no longer a suitable place to sink a mine shaft.

Keep it simple

As policy analysts, we at the FMF spend countless hours researching public policy issues, analysing legislation and marshalling legal and economic arguments against laws that infringe on your basic freedoms. It’s our job to do so and we take our work seriously.

After the formation of the government of national unity (GNU) in 2024, we launched the Liberty First policy agenda, which readers of this column will be used to me mentioning. I had the privilege of authoring the final paper in the series which was launched last month, where I made the case for Bitcoin as state-proof money.

But really, the solution is quite simple, and it primarily involves getting the government out of the way and it doing less rather than more.

In the build-up to last night’s SONA, the FMF’s brilliant marketing team put out a succinct and to-the-point post on social media, which I share below:

“Tonight’s State of the Nation Address will outline government’s priorities for the year ahead. The real question is whether it will confront the structural reforms South Africa urgently needs.

We have heard promises before. What our economy truly requires are practical policy changes that unlock growth, jobs, and opportunity.

If government is serious about reform, here are the commitments we should see:

1. Reduce the size and cost of government so taxpayers are not funding a bloated state and endless bailouts.
2. Secure property rights and strengthen the rule of law to restore investor confidence and protect citizens.
3. Ensure sound money and financial freedom through a strong, independent central bank and clear frameworks for new financial technologies.
4. Open markets and free trade by lowering tariffs, removing exchange controls, and embracing global competition.
5. Reform burdensome regulations to make it easier to start and grow businesses, and to unlock jobs in labour, healthcare, and education.

These are practical reforms that expand economic freedom and empower South Africans.

SONA should be measured against whether it tackles these structural issues.

Read more about our practical reform agenda here: https://libertyfirst.co.za/reforms/

South Africa needs fewer promises and more policy that delivers.”

This is the TLDR version, but that’s really all you need to do to unlock the vast unrealised potential that exists in this country. The challenge – as always in South Africa – is how to navigate the politics. That is why mere policy analysis is not enough. You need to create the pressure for reform to happen and that is fundamentally a political exercise.

Ansara is CEO of the Free Market Foundation.