Cape Town - President Cyril Ramaphosa has asked businesses and unions to stop moaning and work with the government to eliminate challenges faced by the state.
He told delegates at the three-day Mining Indaba held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre that the government needed the private sector and labour’s co-operation.
Citing freight and rail reforms, including partnering with private operators, he said these plans were forging ahead and acknowledged the importance of working with the private sector.
“We want the private sector not to feel shy, not to stand back and, more importantly, not to stand on the rooftops and just criticise,” Ramaphosa said.
“We want them to get into the ring so that we work together to solve our problems. We’re not saying don’t be critical, we’re saying, ‘stop moaning’.”
He said this applied to labour organisations as well. “Let us find solutions for the common good of our country,” Ramaphosa said.
The government had been accelerating economic and structural reforms through the Presidency and Treasury’s Operation Vulindlela initiative by streamlining regulatory processes, he said, reducing time-frames for environmental authorisations and speeding up the process of registering new projects, including in the energy sector.
Operation Vulindlela had added “impetus” and “agility” to their efforts, the president said.
“This is something that we would like the industry to appreciate. This is for the common good for all of us. This is something you should all applaud, if you never applaud anything at all,” Ramaphosa said.
He said in addition to the energy crisis, “problems” with ports and rail operations, safety and security concerns about illegal mining and the snail’s pace of the government’s structural reform programme, had “dampened” the economic outlook for the year.
This after a humming mining industry single-handedly pumped a record R1.18 trillion into the economy in 2022, shooting the gross domestic product upwards.
Ramaphosa said that was despite contracting by 9% year-on-year in November due to Eskom’s rolling power outages and “inefficiencies” in Transnet logistics.
“These are precisely the issues that the government is working on. The government pulls out all the stops to address these issues,” Ramaphosa said.
“We do so because we have a responsibility as the government, but acting together with our key players in labour and business and communities, we do need to ensure that our mining industry is able to grow and become more globally competitive and to be a pioneer in the global drive towards sustainable development,” he said.
Ramaphosa acknowledged that to realise those objectives, there was a need to secure a reliable electricity supply, fast-track economic reforms, arrest damage to infrastructure and improve the regulatory environment, among other factors.
He said investors were apprehensive in investing in an economy hamstrung by an onslaught of load shedding.
Ramaphosa also touched on the six-month-old National Energy Action Plan, aimed at improving Eskom’s power stations and adding new power to the grid.