As South Africa grapples with a multifaceted economic crisis, Business Leadership South Africa CEO Busi Mavuso highlights urgent concerns, including water scarcity affecting major cities and industrial operations. The nation’s economic hub, Johannesburg, faces a water shortage, compounding challenges from power-supply disruptions and collapsing infrastructure. Mavuso emphasizes the need for proactive crisis management to avoid derailing economic activity and calls attention to potential threats like the impending cut-off of gas supply, which could jeopardise hundreds of thousands of jobs. South Africa’s recent economic growth, though positive, raises alarming per-capita income disparities.
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By Ana Monteiro
South Africa needs to manage “new and emerging” threats to the economy such as breakdowns in parts of its national water system, with taps running dry from Mbombela in the east of the country to the south of Johannesburg, the head of a key business-lobby group said.
“Bulk water supply to large manufacturers and mining companies is an increasing concern, posing further risks to economic activity,” Business Leadership South Africa Chief Executive Officer Busi Mavuso said in her weekly newsletter.
Thousands of residents in Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub, face a second week without water as the utility struggles to return supply after a blast shuttered one of its key pump stations. Businesses are working with the government to end a national power-supply crisis and the collapse of state port and rail infrastructure.
“We cannot find ourselves in a situation where we have resolved the energy and logistics crises only to be confronted with a new crisis that ultimately means economic activity doesn’t happen,” Mavuso wrote. “So, while tackling immediate crises head on is important, we must maintain vigilance on what the next major constraint is.”
The BLSA chief also singled out the looming cut-off of gas supply to industrial users. With Sasol Ltd. set to curb production of the fuel from its fields in Mozambique between 2026 and 2027 as reserves dwindle and retain more output for its own operations, as many as 400,000 jobs at firms that use gas for industrial purposes are endangered, Energy Council of South Africa CEO James Mackay said in November.
Data out last week showed South Africa’s economy expanded 0.1% in the three months through December, compared with a contraction of 0.2% in the prior quarter, escaping a technical recession but undershooting the 0.2% median estimate of 12 economists in a Bloomberg survey.
The figure “is positive unless you consider it in terms of GDP per capita, in which case it is decidedly negative given that population growth is outpacing it,” Mavuso said. “South Africans now earn in real terms on average what they earned in 2006. We have been trending lower since 2013, so we have now crowned a decade of negative per-capita growth.”
Read also:
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- đź”’ Five years of economic, political uncertainty ahead for South Africa: Justice Malala
- What will it take to fix SA’s rapidly deteriorating water crisis?
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