Cyril Ramaphosa living in another country
Award-winning economist Dawie Roodt says President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) showed that he is out of touch with South Africa’s challenges.
Ramaphosa delivered his address on 6 February 2025 at the Cape Town City Hall and painted the country as a thriving democracy.
Like previous years, he said the government wants to create a nation with a thriving economy that benefits all.
Ramaphosa told the nation they are steadily 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 taken by investors, which is leading to job creation.
“Working together with business, labour and other social partners, we must now finish this work,” he said.
“Over the coming year, we will initiate a second wave of reform to unleash more rapid and inclusive growth.”
The immediate focus is to enable Eskom, Transnet and other state-owned enterprises vital to the economy to function optimally.
“We are repositioning these entities to provide world-class infrastructure while enabling competition in operations,” he said.
“We continue with the fundamental reform of our state-owned enterprises to ensure that they can effectively fulfill 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 would create a virtuous cycle of investment, growth, and jobs, lifting economic growth to above 3%.
Cyril Ramaphosa living in another country
Renowned economist Dawie Roodt said Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address showed that he is out of touch with South Africa’s reality.
“Listening to the President and how well we are living in South Africa and all the things we have achieved, clearly he is living in another country,” Roodt said.
“He does not realise 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 for the past 15 years.
Roodt commended Ramaphosa for touching on the poorly run municipalities which 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 from it.
Incompetence and corruption are to blame for municipal mismanagement, and this is where the focus should be to fix them.
Ramaphosa also promised increased infrastructure spending, including unlocking R100 billion in infrastructure financing.
“The 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 that although this is positive news, it has been promised many times in the past and has not materialised.
One of the most concerning parts of Ramaphosa’s SONA was that he bragged about 60% of the budget going towards social expenditure.
It includes more than 28 million unemployed and vulnerable people who receive social grants from the state.
“That is not something to brag about. That is not something to be proud of. We need the economy to grow and to spend less on social expenditure,” Roodt said.
“Why the President got applauded by the members of parliament for people’s huge dependency on the state is something I do not understand.”
Loading ...