Jan du Toit Photo

Cyril Ramaphosa's sudden, hand-wringing panic over the continued erosion of South Africa's industrial base is the absolute peak of political gaslighting. For the President to stand at a podium and declare manufacturing "fundamental to our economic sovereignty" while his own administration actively strangles the private sector is pure theater. The industrial base isn't eroding because of external bad luck. It is being systematically dismantled by the ANC's own ideological obsessions: BBBEE and cadre deployment. Ramaphosa laments a dying industrial base while forcing capital intensive, high risk manufacturing firms to navigate an oppressive maze of BBBEE compliance. Foreign and domestic investors are not looking for compliance lectures; they are looking for economic viability. When you prioritize skin color and political connections over global competitiveness, investors pack up and take their factories to Vietnam, India, or Mauritius. You cannot have a manufacturing sector without electricity, rail, and ports. Ramaphosa's sacred cow, cadre deployment, has stuffed the boards of Transnet, Eskom, and Prasa with incompetent party loyalists instead of technocrats. By turning state owned enterprises into patronage feeding troughs, his government has made it impossible for factories to reliably power their machinery or move their goods to port. It is laughably hypocritical to talk about economic sovereignty when your state's economic policy has rendered the country completely dependent on Chinese loans, IMF bailouts, and Western green-energy handouts. Local businesses are shutting down because the cost of doing business in South Africa, driven by rigid labor laws, state extortion, and broken infrastructure, is too high. The ANC has successfully colonized the economy with red tape, ensuring that only politically connected elites survive while real entrepreneurs go under. Ramaphosa has mastered the art of speaking like a concerned observer rather than the head of the executive. He laments the crisis as if he didn't spend the last decade chairing the committee that oversaw the deployment of the very cadres who broke the state. No amount of social compacting or high-level investment summits can undo the damage of a state policy framework designed to extract wealth rather than create it. Manufacturing requires cheap electricity, functional railways, and regulatory certainty. Ramaphosa's administration offers the exact opposite, erratic power, stalled trains, and aggressive racial engineering. If the President truly cares about South Africa's industrial base, he needs to stop diagnosing the disease and look at the ideological poison his own party keeps feeding the patient.