Members Only: BNC#8 Donald Mackay Q&A - The shocking truth about South Africa’s missing billions

Donald MacKay pulls back the curtain on 40 "slush funds" draining billions from South African taxpayers without oversight. From the opaque Black Industrialists Fund to the staggering R43 billion automotive subsidy, MacKay reveals why a Mercedes-Benz costs R300,000 more at home than in Manhattan. Discover how decentralisation, the BRICS alliance, and government-protected monopolies are stifling growth, inflating costs, and leaving the nation’s manufacturing sector vulnerable. It’s time to follow the money - if only we could find it..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Watch here.Listen here.Edited transcript of the Q&A.Alec Hogg 00:19:00 - 00:49:35This is not the first time I've heard Donald, but it's once again, quite a shocking story that you tell us because most of us haven't got a clue about. Can I call a bureaucrat theft? 40 transformation funds. How much money is going into those? Donald MackaySo it's actually really hard to to find out.00:49:39 - 01:13:32That's an incredibly painful process to try to get even the value in one fund. But but I can tell you the localisation support fund over a billion has gone in. We don't know where it's gone. If you take the Black Industrialists Fund, 40 something billion has been dispersed from the fund, and no one knows exactly what the return on that investment is.01:13:42 - 01:43:08The current transformation fund by the com kindly voluntarily of course. Donated 400 million to the fund. We it's even the automotive fund is 200 million a year going in today. So we don't know how much is going in, and it's not published in one place. Alec HoggDo we know where anything about where it's going to? You said 40 billion has been dispersed from the Black Industrialists.01:43:14 - 02:09:46I thought that was the one. Another 100 billion is going to be put in of our tax money. Donald MackayNo no no no. That's a different fund. Dont start that nonsense Alec .It's we we we know. So when Minister Patel was to lift the DTIC they published a very nice, very glossy brochure, of, of all sorts of very clever people wearing lab coats etc., and saying, you know, this is where all the money's gone.02:10:00 - 02:31:06And I'm not really averse to the idea of government providing funding at certain places in the market. The problem here is we don't really know what happened with the money. So we don't kind of know, did we did 20 million go to one person? What did they do with that money? And then not only what they did with it, but what is the return on investment?02:31:06 - 02:34:28How much of that money is being written off? How much has been productive?Alec Hogg 02:34:32 - 02:55:18Professor William Gumede made some pretty hectic statements and at the time I thought, you're exaggerating, but from what you're saying now, these. So these 40 slush funds, let's put it differently, that are being funded by government and by us taxpayers. And we don't know.02:55:22 - 03:18:35Nobody seems to know, excepting whom. And that's what I have to ask you. Who is making the disbursements and who knows where that money is going to? Donald MackayWell. So you should be sure to ask John Steenhuisen, because a huge chunk of them sit in Department of Agriculture. And, so I suggest all of us ask Mr. Steenhuisen where that money goes to.03:18:39 - 03:45:26But it's not it's certainly not early there. The problem is it's it's almost impossible to tell where the money goes because nothing is published about these funds. So we know they exist, but we don't know what happens inside of them at all. Alec HoggDonald This is really strange because the South African budgeting process I go every year with Dawie, not as many times as Dawie has been.03:45:30 - 04:06:30He's been 45. Whatever times through the budgets, he told me this year. But every year I go to the budget and they give you a fat document like a book like this, which you may or may not take. Plus they give you a budget review. There is so much detail in there and yet you can't find out from all of that.04:06:34 - 04:38:46With these funds, moneys are going to.Donald MackayNo. So I think this is my guess. But I think what is happening is Treasury are increasingly reluctant to fund many of the programs that the different ministers want to carry out. And so they've created an alternative stream of funding, much like Donald Trump did in the US with these tariffs. So the the problem with this sort of program is it it isn't obviously visible anyway.04:39:00 - 05:07:09And consequently the normal parliamentary oversight for whatever that's worth in South Africa is considerably more limited. And of course, you need to know it exists to even know that you need to look at it. Alec HoggHelen Zelle has for a long time being saying that the ANC is a criminal syndicate. I couldn't buy it. I couldn't understand it because we were the crimes being committed.05:07:13 - 05:36:41Yes. And I think what you've exposed in these transformation funds is that it's pretty clear whether crimes are being committed, and it's pretty clear where a lot of the Johnnie Walker Blue and cream soda drinking brigade is getting their funding from. Donald MackayYeah. So I'm I'm not going to take that step and say there's anything corrupt. What I would just like to have out of this is greater visibility on what happens.05:36:45 - 05:59:32And then we can also see if there is or isn't corruption. It's the secrecy around these things that are problematic in my mind rather than the reality, because we don't know what the reality is. Alec HoggOkay, now I want to ask you about something else that's really, as you've been hearing in this conference, really bugging me, and that is that the Chinese are subsidising their industry.05:59:35 - 06:31:17Yeah, 770 billion USD, virtually twice our GDP. And those products are then landing in South Africa subsidised on their side and we uncompetitive. Clearly you can't fight against against that kind of pressure. Dawie says no problem. Let the consumer enjoy it. What's your take on it? Donald MackayI lean towards Dawie, but with a little bit of nuance.06:31:19 - 006:33:41So.06:33:45 - 06:55:22Let me go back to a comment Rob made when he said, you know, China should never have been allowed into the WTO. So I think that's a that's an overly simplistic view because what was the alternative? So the idea that you're in the WTO and now you can trade. And if you're outside of the WTO you contract is simply a nonsense.06:55:23 - 07:18:45You can absolutely trade. And the reason China was invited in, I think it was Lyndon Johnson who said, I'd rather have them standing inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in in. And there was there was an element of that when China was admitted. China is an enormous economy. They have nuclear weapons. There were lots of reasons to admit them.07:18:49 - 07:50:29The reason the WTO doesn't function is almost exclusively because of the US in China. So those are the two culprits that broke the WTO. But that is understandable because the WTO greatest benefits go to small economies. The big economies could always sell their battleship up to your shores and impose their policy on you that way. What the WTO did was it, said the suit, who has the same say as the US?07:50:35 - 08:15:34So I, I think the bigger question is what replaces that now to the subsidy problem. When South Africa joined BRICS and if any of you have read what I've written, I think BRICS is just such a ridiculous idea that there's nothing there. But when we joined BRICS, what we did was we said, we're going to we're going to change our anti-dumping rules, in a way.08:15:34 - 08:35:29And we signed a document called The Record of Understanding with China. This is technical. So I'm going to skip the technical bits. But the bottom line is we do not treat China as almost every other country does. So we treat them like a market economy. No one thinks they are. So the result of that is much harder to impose anti-dumping duties.08:35:33 - 09:10:07We, Minister Rob Davies was still in charge in 2010 and he makes a public announcement and he says we will never challenge China's subsidies. And China is not the only big subsidise. So the US is currently running the world's biggest subsidy program in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. So the subsidies are a problem everywhere. And we took political decisions to deliberately disable the instruments that the WTO makes available to deal with this.09:10:11 - 09:40:02So I think subsidies are a really big problem because you take a company and they're kind of forced to compete against the country, and that's always going to be problematic. The challenge we have is we are part of BRICS. I don't see a benefit out of BRICS yet. Our membership of BRICS has caused us to disable these very important instruments.09:40:02 - 10:06:18So we're vulnerable in a way that many other countries are not. Alec HoggBut you're talking about the economic, yes, vulnerability. Forget about the political vulnerability, which is very clear for all of us. But on the economic side, are you saying that we've disadvantaged ourselves? We've been playing checkers where they're playing 3D chess to use what they say. Donald Trump doing to the rest of the world?Donald Mackay 10:06:22 - 10:31:20Yeah. So I, we look, I don't think at the time the decision was taken. Understanding where it would lead. But the reality of that decision is we have instruments that we're legally allowed to use. And we took a conscious decision to not use them. And I don't know why we took that decision. Alec HoggJacob Zuma was in charge at that time.10:31:20 - 10:54:00He took us into BRICS. He did. But he probably thought it through really carefully. Donald MackayThere's absolutely no doubt. Alec HoggAnd now we have the he's got the game plan. So when MK comes into power you'll be able to explain it to us.Donald Mackay100%. Sure he will.Alec HoggAnd what do you think he's going to tell us. Donald MackayWell we need to ask Melanie that she comes from his neck of the woods.Alec Hogg 10:54:04 - 11:21:24Permits. Permits? When you were talking about permits, yeah, I thought. Okay. I'd actually like to work for the government and then be corrupt, and then have permits that I can decide who gets them, because, boy, that's the easy way to make pretty quick money. Donald MackayYeah, but the permits, they they're damaging, I think, in two ways. The one is, they've become a secondary tax, yet another tax that doesn't go through Treasury.11:21:36 - 11:41:26So beforehand, if I we have legitimate reasons for permits, you don't want to import, a pathogen in the meat that comes in. And so you have to get a permit before you can bring it in. That's permits. Sometimes they carry an admin fee, but it was modest. The charges for applying for a permit is starting to shoot up.11:41:30 - 12:08:02Why is that? Well, Treasury doesn't want to allocate more money. And so the departments start to raise the cost. So the permits are not cheap and they will keep rising in price. The second thing is the the legislation is poorly structured to deal with permits. And so the administrator can end all sorts of conditions to the permit that have nothing to do with the primary purpose.12:08:06 - 12:25:03And touched on the agricultural permits into some markets, you now need to have a B rating, but it doesn't have to be that they could set. Well, you're not employing enough people, you know, whatever it might be. And so those conditions create a very unpredictable12:25:07 - 12:30:24environment. And that's not friendly to investment.Alec Hogg 12:30:28 - 12:36:24Yeah I was being sarcastic. I would have thought that permits are just a way of legalizing theft.Donald Mackay 12:36:24 - 13:03:39Again. Well, yeah, absolutely. I, I think we, we permit far too many things. And by the way, it's not stopping. It's on the one hand we have the DTIC saying we, we need to cut the red tape so that small businesses can thrive. Then we have the Department of Small Business Development and God knows what they do. But nevertheless they've published the bill now, which which again looks to put all sorts of permits in place.13:03:39 - 13:33:33So it we, we, we have a federal system, a kind of a federal country. It's just that each department is its own federation, rather than being set at a, at a provincial level. It's it's an insane situation with no coordination on any of these policies. Alec HoggYou really are making a case for capeXit. Donald MackayNo, I think I think this is an absolutely shocking idea.13:33:37 - 13:39:11But if the exit happens, I want to be on the cap side of the exit. To be clear.13:39:15 - 13:56:14And I was born here, so I think I've got, like, a birthright option. At least I know I think it's a terrible idea. You you know, these things have thrown around without that much thought. The reality is, just imagine the cost that gets incurred to now move goods between Cape Town and Johannesburg.13:56:23 - 14:20:00Now you're going to have a customs border crossing. You're you're going to have to put a different police force, etc., etc.. It we have to fix what we have. You I don't see any way that either the Cape or whatever's remaining of South Africa thrives in that environment. Alec HoggSo just remove the power from the center, which I think has been a quite a strong theme at this conference.Donald Mackay 14:20:02 - 14:42:21Yeah, I'm I'm a huge fan of the power being as close to the citizen as you can get it. So fix the municipalities or let it loose on the municipalities, whatever it might be. Get the municipalities to work, get the provinces to work, or get rid of the provinces. Maybe we don't need provinces. It's not obvious to me what provinces do at all.Alec Hogg 14:42:33 - 15:07:43Well, it's got a nice premier's residence. Well, sure is a good government. Lots of jobs...Donald MackayThis is true. I apologize.Alec HoggPaid for by taxpayer expert. So I in South Africa that if you look at China, for example..Donald MackayChina is really a country of municipalities. So be you know, the central control people talk about is incredibly decentralised.15:07:47 - 15:31:48It is a country of municipalities with a very interesting incentive system. So I you know, I'm not as as viciously critical of China as many others are. I think there are many problems. I certainly wouldn't want to live in China, but I think to to view China as central control is to not understand how powerful the municipalities are and how functional that by the way.Alec Hogg 15:31:48 - 16:07:05Donald, if you go back a thousand years to Europe and the city states because they they weren't that many countries, they were a lot of little organised, very decentralised. I don't know if it is good or bad, but are you advocating some kind of that kind of decentralisation? Donald MackayNo, no. So, in some of this, let me take my tongue out of my cheek, perhaps, but so some of it I, I, I think conceptually, city states are very difficult because you struggle to get scale.16:07:05 - 16:38:02And scale has real value in its own right. Trade requires other people to trade with. And so the more restrictive that is, I guess from my perspective, what I would find appealing is just governance to be more decentralised. I don't think you should have restrictions in people moving anywhere near as much as we have. I think it's, you know, even within the continent, I think Africa would benefit from people being able to move more freely.16:38:06 - 16:58:46But the the governance needs to be closer to where the voters are. Or perhaps if the voting doesn't work close enough to where the people are, that will set the mayor's house on fire when he doesn't do the job. But the the idea that we have an election, we don't know who's going to run it. You kind of find out after the election who this person is that is imposed on you.16:58:46 - 17:22:34I mean, this is this is an insane system if you are.Alec HoggWhat's the logical conclusion of all of this, given that at the end of the day, it's your pocket that really matters. Donald MackayIt's the economy that finally is the arbiter. Yep. And you you'd think that would be obvious to all, but but it's not obvious to me at all that that is how government views that.17:22:41 - 17:25:22So there's a.17:25:26 - 18:01:01There's, there's a talk of how important it is to get economic growth. But every time you're confronted with a policy that, you'd look at and say, what is the effect of this policy on productivity? You know, the productivity inevitably loses out. So we I'd written an article a couple of years ago saying that, you know, if South Africa wants to become a manufacturing, powerhouse, we we first need to go through the sweatshop phase.18:01:01 - 18:24:41There's at some point, you can't be in a country where people can't get work, but can't price their own labor to find work. For example. And that is tongue in cheek. I'm not supporting what happened with people locked up in factories, etc., but just the idea that you're you're asking people to develop a set of skills by sitting at home seems outrageous to me.18:24:45 - 18:53:21Yet that is where we find ourselves.Alec HoggNow with the reality of that. When you talk to people in those areas. And I was very involved in a, in an NGO, in karting run by, a sister Catholic church, and the options for young woman were prostitution or sugar daddy. And that's the reality on the ground there is no job.18:53:29 - 19:15:48But but we got a lot of a lot of questions. Yes. Starting with Andrew Fund dummy wants to know where's the DA in all this malfeasance? You absolutely have to save that for Cilliers. Donald MackayI'm not a member of the DA. I have no idea what they are. I think the DA has, You know, I've mixed feelings on their participation in the GNU.19:15:48 - 19:48:44I think they could have done a lot better than they have. But I also understand your hands are tied to some degree. But in some cases, it feels very much like a continuation of what happened before, just under a different colored banner. Alec HoggAnd a lot of Nick Bindel from Gibbs, the founder of Gibbs, is what we see from the ANC is a continuation of what the nets did.Donald Mackay100% the economy, the structure of the economy has not altered.19:48:48 - 20:19:28We have a small number of oligarchs that still dominate, and I might add that those monopolies are there because they're they're the they're protected by government. So there was a was a recent newspaper article about PG glass. PG glass has been found guilty of price fixing. The Competition Tribunal is now going to find that PG glass is the second biggest use of the anti-dumping instrument in South Africa.20:19:32 - 20:54:27So in fact, three of the four biggest users of the anti-dumping instrument ArcelorMittal, Lasher tools, PG glass, all monopolies, all over 100 years old. So again, I don't wish ill on any business and have them fail. But the reality is that they they suck up capital as all monopolies do and use it very, very inefficiently. And that is not next to the monopolies struggle to survive any period without government support.20:54:31 - 21:25:49And we've supported those monopolies. And these monopolies all go back way before even apartheid was a word, Alec Hoggyou know, about EBITDA margins. Okay. I they probably people. Yeah. Who don't. But what that means is your profit margin for a rand that you get in, how much you keep as profit in the radio business, it was 50%. So for every rand that you spent on a radio station, you got $0.50 in profit, which is outrageous.21:25:49 - 22:00:01I mean, it it just doesn't happen like that. And when I challenged them, because I wanted a radio license, they said, no, no, no, no, we legislate for profitability. So it's almost like this. There's, there's a it's not that people are bad, but they, they don't kind of get it. They don't get how the system, how business really works and how competition can be so good for consumers. Donald MackayWe don't appear to care about competitiveness, which is why we end up with these bizarre situations.22:00:01 - 22:29:38And again, we you know, if you have a look at what has happened with Mattel, which is a horrible situation, there's no question about it. But we Mattel has been allowed to get very comfortable for a very, very long time. And the consumer has funded that. The downstream steel industry has halved in size in the last 15 years, and you that value has been extracted into 1 or 2 companies.22:29:42 - 22:56:11The consumer doesn't see a benefit. If we have a look, for example, at the automotive sector, which Dawie mentioned. Again, I want us to make cars yet, but we've got to be clear eyed about this. Producing cars here is extremely expensive and there is no way we will ever produce cars in South Africa if the subsidy disappears. 43 billion rand last year are cars are expensive, you know.22:56:23 - 23:25:27So we're the consumer funds that.Alec HoggHow , explain that. Donald MackayWell sure. So the subsidy works in the following way. The more cars I produce I earn up a set of certificates called production rebate credit certificates. Their varieties in, they don't worry about those too much. And the more I produce. But you earn on a curve, so the the more you produce, you kind of you're not getting one for one.23:25:31 - 23:53:08And it's designed to create a surplus of these certificates. I'm Mercedes Benz, I've produced all of these cars. And so the first thing I can do is I can use these certificates to import other models of my car without paying the tariff with a 25% tariff on cars, 18% if you bring it out of Europe. So Mercedes Benz, Toyota, all of them, we can import that, cause that and pay the tariff.23:53:18 - 24:21:24Then what happens is I still have surplus. And so what I do is I sell that surplus to Kia. And so SA collects nothing. Kia will pay about 90% of that tariff to Mercedes Benz in my example. And so now what is happening is a private company is effectively collecting the texts, not theoretically a tax anymore, but it's an effective tax.24:21:28 - 24:46:21The effect of that is it keeps the price of the cars high because everyone is paying the tariff apart from the local manufacturers, but because the tariff is there, they've got no reason to drop their price. And that is how. And remember, in South Africa, transport is an enormous portion of the cost for poor people, particularly people buy cars and finance them.24:46:25 - 25:07:25So you're financing that premium. The costs on non-trivial, for a product like that. Now, maybe we should do it. Maybe we shouldn't, but nobody wants to sit. Alec HoggSo how much more am I paying for my Peugeot then? I should be paying. Donald MackayWell, I mean, if you're driving the Peugeot, probably way more than you should be paying in my view.Alec Hogg 25:07:29 - 25:10:34Wrong answer. Donald Mackay 25:10:38 - 25:35:27But I would. So we did. We did a benchmark study a couple of years ago, and what I did was the C-Class Merc is made in South Africa, sold in the US. But it's also of course sold. Yeah. And so I, I looked at the price of the seat 200 at a dealership online in Boksburg, and we don't sell the seat 200 to the US.25:35:27 - 26:10:47We only sold the seats 300. And so I went to Manhattan thinking one of the most expensive real estates in America and that C-Class a couple of years ago was 300,000 rand cheaper in Manhattan than here.Alec HoggJust repeat thatDonald Mackay300,000 rand cheaper in Manhattan than here. But this but at that in those days, the tariff on cars into the US was zero from change now.Alec HoggSo we pay 300,000 rand more for vehicle that vehicle in particular because we live in South Africa.26:10:47 - 26:44:18Than someone buying it in the richest or the most expensive real estate in the world in Manhattan. Yes. That's absurd. Yes. And that's because we as the taxpayers, we as the buyers of cars, are subsidising the export to the US. Donald MackayThat's essentially it. So we traced the money...Alec HoggWhich brainy fool put this thing together. That's insane. Donald MackayWell, the the money appears to go to three places, about a third of it to foreign consumers, about a third of it to labor.26:44:18 - 27:08:08And that has interesting implications. Labor, of course, is all I mean, they should they would be aware of the subsidy that has interesting implications for labor mobility because people leave the sector. And the third part, of course, is to the shareholders abroad. Alec HoggThere are lots of questions for you from Hank. I thought that the auto industry has oversight over its transformation fund.Is that correct? Donald MackayYeah. I don't know the exact rules of that fund. It's possible. I maybe Simon asks, what steps would you recommend to reduce the economic vulnerability for South African manufacturing? You have to address the basics, which is the kind of infrastructural components have to work. You municipalities, I would argue, pose the biggest risk to every business in South Africa because every business is in a municipality, you have to fix things at that level.00:27:43:05 - 00:28:07:22Donald MackayYou have to address the monopoly that Transnet still holds on rail and ports, and it's starting to get broken nowhere near fast enough. We need ports which are internally competitive with each other. We have the worst performing ports in the world, and that is an astonishing thing. I mean, you go through Africa, there are ports in countries that are at war that perform better than our ports do.00:28:07:26 - 00:28:37:23Alec HoggYou're going to be accused by the CEO of Transnet of saying vile things now. Well, as Melanie was, I'm sure I'm going to get caught up of all sorts of people in this. Elgin asks what is not good - talking about Cape exit - about a functional Western oriented enclave breaking away from a corrupt, incompetent, pariah oriented regime?00:28:37:23 - 00:29:02:44Donald MackayBut that's not all it is. There. There are other things there. Markets in the rest of South Africa. I mean, we're yes, all of those things are true. But we we have a connected geography. There are industries are tightly connected. I mean, you know, for example, where is the Western Cape going to get the power from Quebec? Well, in short wind at wind and then import it should be messy.00:29:02:44 - 00:29:33:45Donald MackayI think. Of course the corruption and everything else is a problem and it has to be addressed. I don't think the way to address it is to sort of create a kind of a Dane fern. In the Western Cape. Well, the solution is decentralization, as you say, a devolution of power. And maybe the Da is forgetting this because that was their base is now that they looked like they might even take over the main government, and they seem to forgotten that.00:29:33:45 - 00:29:58:13Donald MackayWe'll see if you get to tell us that, you can't you're going to you're not going to get between these people and their booze. How is it possible that there are no auditing or governance processes in place for those 40 transformation funds from Birgitte, you know, so I, I only became aware of these funds relatively recently, actually.00:29:58:17 - 00:30:23:38Donald MackayI don't I don't have any idea how many of these they how many how most of these things came about in the first place. And remember, nobody wants to really talk about them. So it's it's unbelievably difficult to get information. I, I don't think, I don't think you should have an alternative to Treasury. I think it's important that if you're going to collect a tax, it goes into the National revenue Fund and gets distributed.00:30:23:42 - 00:30:49:41Donald MackayI'm not fond of this sort of decentralization without oversight, how you would be able to get information on it. Ken Yen Cameron I mean, he's the parliamentary committee chairman for police. Can he get it? Well, so some of the information we've picked up has actually come through different parties asking, parliamentary questions, for example. But the answer is, I don't know.00:30:49:42 - 00:31:26:40Donald MackayI'm also worried that the footage is just what we're aware of. No reason to think they aren't more than 40. Alec HoggJust what industries do you think South Africa should focus on? That's from Sandy. Donald MackayI, I think we under emphasize services more generally, but I think there's no question that manufacturing has a greater job multiplier effect, etc.. The problem is we we have to focus on the the profile of our economy as it is, which is a country that is energy scarce, water scarce.00:31:26:44 - 00:31:50:26Donald MackayMost of it seems to be leaking into the ground at the moment, and we have a largely unskilled workforce. So in that environment, you've got to say, how do we create jobs for those people? And I don't think many of those people are going to find themselves in manufacturing. The risks of setting up a services type business is just much lower.00:31:50:26 - 00:32:13:09Donald MackayYou're consuming less energy. All of those things, you typically are not transporting all sorts of things on the road. So the, the, the ability to do more of that, you know, is just to my mind, a good idea. But of course, the effect is it doesn't pay as well. The problem is, sitting at home unemployed also doesn't pay that well.00:32:13:13 - 00:32:40:45Donald MackayAnd I think we under emphasized the role of services and overemphasized the role of manufacturing without wanting to fix the things that would allow us to have a competitive manufacturing sector. So. So then, don't mince your words. What do you think of the 100 billion rand Black Industrialists Fund? Now, I, I, I don't know what these funds are trying to accomplish.00:32:40:49 - 00:33:04:13Donald MackayWe know you don't know or you're not going to tell us what you think. Well, not really that I've asked the question. What are we trying to accomplish something? I've asked the question directly to the minister, and I can't get an answer that makes sense to me. We we were asked to do a very short study on funding alternatives which exist, and there's no shortage of money, including in these other funds.00:33:04:13 - 00:33:25:23Donald MackaySo the idea that you always have to create a new fund is just, you know, we're not understanding what is it that the National Empowerment Fund does with their money? You don't really know. So why create a new fund if we don't know why the others are performing poorly? But are you not being naive? Absolutely.00:33:25:27 - 00:33:27:05Alec HoggDonald Mackay thank you.

Members Only: BNC#8 Donald Mackay Q&A - The shocking truth about South Africa’s missing billions

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