Margaret Thatcher once said that to win the politics, you first need to win the arguments. Many South Africans get that the wrong way around. They try to fix the politics without first fixing the arguments around the ideas of what South Africa needs to do to be successful.

If the new Growth Acceleration and Inclusion (GAIn) strategy, which this newspaper reported exclusively on earlier this week, is an indication of where the South African government’s reform arguments are heading, the country’s prospects are brightening.

The plan’s twin goals – lifting economic growth from under one percent to above 3.5% by 2030 and raising fixed investment from 14% to 25% of GDP – are exactly correct and perfectly achievable.

More important is that the thinking behind how to achieve both objectives reflects a decisive turn away from statist dogma toward economic realism. Many of the proposals in the plan read like the exact catalogue of reforms South Africa should have pursued over the past decade: opening rail and ports to private operators, restructuring Eskom into a competitive electricity market, creating a Water Partnerships Office to attract private capital, streamlining visas, liberating small business from red-tape, underwriting loans to emergent enterprises, pricing the poor into the economy through informal sector and labour market reforms, and linking welfare support to productive work.

The plan’s mention of more efficient procurement spending opens the way to a vast potential windfall for the government – easily R300 billion, which is enough, as this newspaper reported, to cut the deficit in half whilst raising grants spending by 50%.

Imagine how wonderful for the country it would be ifthe government could do that.

Of course, scepticism is warranted, especially around implementation, and the plan suffers from serious internal contradictions. But the more important point for now is that many of the ideas have shifted from wrong-headed to right-headed, meaning that somewhere in the labyrinth of government the right arguments are being made and heard.

Sort out the internal contradictions, which is easily done, and implement just half the key ideas in the plan, and we are confident that South Africa’s investment rate will lift to near 20% of GDP in short order and with it the growth rate to 3%, setting the country up for a very strong 2030s.

Well done to Cyril Ramaphosa and his Government of National Unity peers, you’ve given us a plan worth cheering, which is a delight because that is what this newspaper wants to do.