The South African government released a statement welcoming a World Bank assessment that the economy likely grew by 1.3% in 2025 and that growth may lift to 1.4% in 2026, and 1.5% in 2027. According to the statement, the outlook “reflects the positive impact of continued reform momentum” and that “sustained reforms are beginning to yield positive results”. That’s partly true. But much of the bump in growth came from rate cuts, the weakening dollar lifting the buying power of consumers, and reduced global oil prices.

At a global level, the actions of one man may have driven all three of those trends.

At rates of around one and a half percent, South Africa’s economy is expanding at around a third of the rate of its regional peers. There is little public interrogation by the government of why that might be so. The reason, of course, is that domestic policy is hostile to investment. That’s a fact easily read in South Africa’s low fixed investment rate, which is just half that of its emerging market peers.

But there is a contradiction in all of this. This year, the ANC’s secretary general has wasted no time in recommitting the party to EWC and nationalising the central bank (code for printing money and slashing rates), while ascribing South Africa’s weak economic performance to “anti-transformation forces” rather than to domestic policy design flaws.

Which is it? Is the growth rate up, as the government statement suggests, because policy reform is delivering results? Or is the growth rate pedestrian because of anti-transformation forces? The answer depends on the audience being addressed, it seems. The contradictory messaging does not help secure investor confidence.

Foot-and-mouth disease is not going to help lift the growth rate and, if not urgently addressed, may cause a domestic economic disaster as producers default on loans, retrench large numbers of rural staff, lose domestic market share, are cut off from export markets, and the rural poor (who own a third of the domestic beef herd) see much of their capital die off. What needs to be done, the best people are united in advising, is that the state allow private actors to source and administer vaccines. To his credit, John Steenhuisen, the agriculture minister, has now taken the first firm steps towards the private sourcing of vaccines. The state may insist that the epidemic remains a “state-controlled disease”, but in practice it is only an epidemic because the state lost control. It needs the ingenuity, resourcefulness, and skills of the private sector to set that right.

In celebrating the one and a half percent growth outlook, the government is quite out of touch with the conditions necessary for its own survival. The unemployment rate remains well above 30% (the global average is nearer 5%). At the forecast growth rate, the unemployment rate will essentially hold at the present level. To reduce the rate to 10% will take economic growth of around 5% maintained for 20 years. Cutting the joblessness rate is the surest thing the GNU can do to win the public confidence necessary to ensure its survival.

Getting to 5% is really not that hard. It just requires cutting taxes on capital, forced by BEE, being rock-solid on property rights, appointing people on merit, whether in the private sector or the state, pursuing a foreign policy equivalent to that of India (trade geo-strategic geography for trade and investment concessions), and allowing private ingenuity to supplant state intervention in running the economy. That’s why much of the emerging world maintains growth rates approaching 5%. The formula is well established and can simply be replicated.