On one of his last stops just before the 29 May election, President Cyril Ramaphosa took part in a Young Peoples’ Townhall Meeting at GIBS. Part of the GIBS Election Dialogue Series, which featured many of the country’s political leaders, Ramaphosa opened the session by reflecting and what had – and had not – been achieved since coming into office.
“When we got into office, we had expected to do a great deal more than we did, but there were headwinds. Some of those were of our own making and some were not, but no sooner had we got into office, and some of them hit us,” said Ramaphosa. He referred to state capture, “which we needed to address and to deal with…and then Covid hit us. Then we had the July unrest [in Kwa Zulu Natal] which wiped out about R50 billion from our GDP. The we had the beginning of massive load-shedding, the energy crisis.”
Added to the President’s list of woes, the devastating floods that hit South Africa’s three most economically important provinces and “then we had to face up to the breakdown of many of our state-owned enterprises” when the effects of state capture really started manifesting themselves.
“We stopped state capture in its tracks,” Ramaphosa went on. “Some of the institutions that had been captured – Sars, Eskom, Transnet, Prasa – we replaced quite a number of key people who had caused the destruction and weakening of those institutions.”
“But we responded,” said the President, enumerating a spend of 11% of GDP towards fighting Covid. His only regret there, he said, was that government had not been able to help Covid-hit businesses as much as he would have liked. The energy sector was being restructured and the generation of energy was being stabilised through the involvement of the private sector. As much as R170 billion had been poured into renewable energy processes and transmission was now in a separate company.
Ramaphosa said that his key priorities going forward were the economy and the creation of jobs, particularly for young people.
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