Adrian Gore sounds the alarm on South Africa’s global narrative
Key topics:
Adrian Gore warns narrative drives South Africa’s economic reality
US tensions, land expropriation, and politics fuel negative perceptions
B4SA pushes facts and data to build a virtuous growth cycle
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Discovery group chief executive Adrian Gore has warned that in emerging market countries like South Africa, narrative drives reality.
“There’s ignorance in capital markets and other markets about what happens in the developing market, and therefore what the narrative really drives economic growth or decline,” said Gore.
Therefore, despite South Africa’s challenges, it is essential to bring the facts and accurate data about the country’s progress into the global discourse.
Gore addressed journalists during a briefing by Business for South Africa (B4SA), a partnership of around 160 companies and CEOs who have banded together to tackle the country’s biggest challenges.
“Narrative is causal. It turns out that narrative drives economic growth. So, this flywheel has to turn, and if you get it wrong at any point, it’s problematic,” Gore said.
“The focus of the partnership really has been around trying to turn this flywheel and create a virtuous cycle in the process.”
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Gore explained that South Africa has seen the narrative surrounding the country swing wildly during the past year.
Leading up to the World Economic Forum in Davos, everything was looking up. Structural load-shedding had largely been eliminated, and there was positivity around the government of national unity (GNU).
“The message given early in the year was that the country was moving forward. At that point, we felt it was a virtuous cycle,” said Gore.
However, the narrative soon turned. There was bickering inside the GNU, and South Africa’s relationship with the United States soured.
Gore also highlighted U.S. tariffs and “legislation passed in certain areas” that culminated in the now-infamous White House meeting with a delegation led by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
During the live-streamed meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump called for a staffer to “turn down the lights” to play a video that juxtaposed Julius Malema singing “Kill the Boer” with people protesting farm murders.
The narrative turns negative
The “legislation passed in certain areas” that Gore mentioned likely refers to the Expropriation Act, also known as the Expropriation Without Compensation Act.
Trump signed an executive order in February referencing the new law. It created a refugee programme for Afrikaners “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
The Expropriation Act made headlines again recently when Sakeliga revealed that the Ekurhuleni metro was trying to expropriate a property worth at least R30 million for zero compensation.
The executive order also criticised the charges of genocide that South Africa brought against Israel, and not Hamas, at the International Court of Justice.
It also emphasised South Africa’s “reinvigorated” relations with Iran, stating that the countries were developing commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.
“Suddenly, the narrative turned very, very negative. And suddenly, you are in a potentially vicious cycle where narrative drives lack of capital flow and lack of growth,” said Gore.
“We know our country has tremendous problems and challenges. Poverty, joblessness, corruption. But on the other hand, it has unique resilience and potential, and the narrative is dramatically worse than reality.”
Gore said that they are committed to the partnership in B4SA because they strongly believe in South Africa’s potential.
“It’s important we get the facts out there in the right way. We really need to expose the progress being made.”
Corrosive narrative about South Africa
Asked how to address South Africa’s deteriorated relationship with the United States, Gore said it was a very complex issue for which he didn’t believe there was a simple “silver bullet” answer.
“Certainly, we should be continuously banging the drum about working for growth, jobs, and narrative, and not being caught in other issues,” he said.
“Just making that clear, certainly as a business community, that we see the U.S. as an incredibly important trading partner. We should just keep banging away at that drum.”
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Regarding driving a more positive narrative, Gore said he believes the country and business community should expose more data.
“A lot of the narrative — and the business leaders who are kind of muddying the water are using data that is not correct,” said Gore.
“The crime data, the stuff that we faced at the White House, it was not correct. In fact, we’re trying our best to get much more granularity on the data.”
As an example of how more granular data could help, Gore said they had seen a dramatic reduction in house break-ins, hijackings, and motor theft over the last number of years around the country.
“We’re not seeing that in violent crime necessarily and we need to do more digging of that. The issue of tourist safety we need to talk about, measure properly and get that out there,” said Gore.
“I think dealing with data properly, in a proper rational way, will help us create a narrative that’s much more safe, secure, et cetera.”
Gore said he feels that South Africa is dealing with a very corrosive narrative that is, in many cases, incorrect.
“I’m not sure we should be arguing with business leaders. We can’t muzzle people. But we need to be exposing data that’s accurate,” he said.
“There has been a workstream trying to get the data together. There are some elements of data that look very positive. So, we need to do more work on that then.”
This article was first published by MyBroadband and is republished with permission