If you wish to be taken seriously about alleviating poverty, you have to be serious about promoting economic growth. ANC governments were committed to doing so under Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, a period in which unemployment fell to around twenty-five per cent,  against nearly forty per cent today.

This never was the case under Jacob Zuma, who concentrated instead on enabling the looting of state-owned enterprises, and nor, sadly, has it proved to be under Cyril Ramaphosa. South Africa currently is looking at growth rates of 1.4% per annum for the next three years, meaning for sure yet more impoverishment. Given the brief surge of optimism when he became President, how on earth did things come to this?

Is it really surprising that they have done so when, as President, he felt obliged to appoint as Minister not only of Energy, but also of Mineral Resources, the former head of the SACP and to this day fully committed Marxist, Gwede Mantashe? A Minister no less antagonistic to private business, Ebrahim Patel, was appointed Minister of Trade and Industry. Yet, given the failure of all the state-owned enterprises, the only possible engine of growth for South Africa is the far more efficient private business sector.

It is no use arguing with Mantashe about his principles, so let us rather consider the results. 

For the past 20 years, he has relentlessly opposed the licensing of independent power producers, which have offered the only possible solution to the crippling power deficit from which the country is suffering today. The absolute nadir came when he forced the resignation of Andre de Ruyter, called in to try to sort out the insuperable mess at Eskom, by accusing him of seeking to “overthrow the state”. 

This was a nadir, too for the President for failing to reject this absurd accusation. The new National State of Disaster now declared manifestly is entirely self-inflicted, engineered by Mantashe and his colleagues in the ruling party, rather than allowing the mining and other private companies to generate the power the state has proved unable to do. 

In July last year, the President had to over-rule Mantashe, having failed to do so for the prior four and a half years, to allow serious independent power production.

Which does not mean that Mantashe is finished yet. For he also has proved an implacable opponent of renewable energy and defender of coal, to the frustration of the Western countries offering low-cost loans to South Africa to facilitate the so-called Just Energy Transition. 

The budget now has offered some tax breaks for renewables, but Mantashe, who was expected to be moved, at least out of Energy, having rushed to protect the President over Phala Phala, remains in place. This despite the fact that, in the ANC voting, he only scraped into the ‘top seven’ thanks to the President’s fervent support.

A new Minister of Electricity instead is being appointed in the Presidency to avoid having to move Mantashe who, far from being demoted, now also is chairman of the party.

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As Minister of Energy, Mantashe also has continued policies which effectively have stymied nearly all offshore oil and gas exploration, which has developed apace off Mozambique and now is happening in Namibian, but not in South African waters.

As for mining, it is under his auspices that in the international mining rankings South Africa, despite its still vast mineral resources, has been judged to be in the ten least favourable destinations in the world for mining investment. South Africa currently is attracting just 1% of total mining expenditure worldwide.

This is not entirely his fault. The effect has been cumulative, his predecessors having been linked to the Guptas. Those having to deal with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy have experienced interminable delays, insistence on questionable empowerment giveaways, arrogance and corruption and do not wish to have to do so again.

The leading mining investment companies in Britain and the United States no longer attend the mining Indabas in South Africa. No other African countries insist on empowerment transactions as a condition of investment. The result is new overseas investment in Botswana and Namibia, but not in this country.

Mantashe’s contribution to this investment drought was to try to insist on re-empowerment in cases where the empowerment partners have sold their shares. This has now been struck down by the courts, but has left the world’s investment institutions wondering when rationality will ever return to the country’s mining regime. 

The result, together with the travails of Transnet, has been to reinforce the continuing decline in the South African mining industry, which is now down to 450,000 employees today.

It is safe, therefore, to conclude that Mantashe, through his opposition to IPPs and renewables, addiction to ever more expensively subsidised and failing state-owned enterprises and the chasing away of overseas investors in mining, has managed to help inflict incalculable damage on the South African economy, the power catastrophe alone being estimated to be costing the country at least a billion rand per day.

It is of little use blaming Mantashe for being himself. It is more interesting to wonder how the President hopes to do better in his second term, as we all must hope he will, so long as the de facto number two of the regime has views so clearly at odds to his stated, though not yet implemented, desire to work with private business to help solve South Africa’s problems. DM