“Cyril Ramaphosa lives in another country”-WRITTEN BY RONELLE SNYDERS

[Nat Quinn]

“Cyril Ramaphosa lives in another country”-WRITTEN BY RONELLE SNYDERS

Award-winning economist Dawie Roodt says President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) has shown that he is out of touch with South Africa’s challenges.

Ramaphosa delivered his speech at Cape Town City Hall on 6 February 2025 and painted the country as a thriving democracy.

As in previous years, he said the government wants to create a nation with a thriving economy that benefits everyone.

Ramaphosa told the nation that they are constantly removing the obstacles to meaningful and faster growth.

“The economic reforms we are implementing through Operation Vulindlela have created a new sense of optimism and confidence in our economy,” he said.

He added that the government has made progress in rebuilding and restructuring several network industries and is seeing positive results.

These positive results include investment opportunities opening up and being seized by investors, leading to job creation.

“To work with business, labor and other social partners, we need to complete this work now,” he said.

“Over the coming year, we will begin a second wave of reform to unleash faster and inclusive growth.”

The immediate focus is to enable Eskom, Transnet and other state-owned enterprises that are essential to the economy to function optimally.

“We are repositioning these entities to provide world-class infrastructure while enabling competition in operations,” he said.

“We are continuing the fundamental reform of our state-owned enterprises to ensure that they can effectively meet their social and economic mandates,” he said.

This includes the work underway to implement a new model to strengthen governance and oversight of public entities.

Ramaphosa said these initiatives will create a good cycle of investment, growth and jobs, increasing economic growth above 3%.

“Listening to the president and how well we live in South Africa and all the things we’ve accomplished, it’s clear that he lives in a different country,” Roodt said.

“He does not realize the reality of the South African economy. We have massive levels of unemployment and poverty.”

He added that the South African economy is not growing and that people have been getting poorer over the past 15 years.

Roodt praised Ramaphosa for touching on the poorly managed municipalities that are crucial to South Africa’s economic growth. However, plans to fix the collapsing local authorities have been mentioned many times before without any good coming out of them.

Incompetence and corruption are to blame for municipal mismanagement, and that is where the focus should be to correct it.

Ramaphosa also pledged increased infrastructure spending, including unlocking R100 billion in infrastructure financing.

“Government will spend more than R940 billion on infrastructure over the next three years. This includes R375 billion in spending by state-owned companies,” he said.

Roodt said while this is positive news, it has been promised many times in the past and has not materialized.

One of the most worrying parts of Ramaphosa’s SONA was that he boasted that 60% of the budget goes to social spending.

This includes more than 28 million unemployed and vulnerable people who receive social grants from the state.

“It’s not something to brag about. It’s not something to be proud of. We need the economy to grow and to spend less on social spending,” Roodt said.

“Why the president was applauded by the members of parliament for people’s great dependence on the state is something I don’t understand.”

 

SOURCE:“Cyril Ramaphosa lives in another country” – Volkskrag News

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