State Owned Enterprises in South Africa

Last week, during his budget speech in parliament, South Africa’s Finance Minister Tito Mboweni said that the country’s state owned enterprises are posing a very serious risk to the country’s fiscus. Mboweni highlighted that the deteriorating financial position of several large State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) pose a risk to the South African economy and public finances. Over the past year government guarantee use increased by 3.67 billion dollars. Mboweni further questioned whether these SOEs were still necessary; however, in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s previous remarks state owned enterprises were are the life blood of the economy. During his State of the Nation address, Ramaphosa announced the splitting of South Africa’s power utility Eskom, into three, namely generation, transmission and distribution.

Today, on the show we ask if State Owned Enterprises work for African countries.

To help us unpack this discussion we are joined on the line by:

• Professor Fiona Tregenna who is the South African Research Chair in Industrial Development, she is from the college of Business and Economics at the University of Johannesburg

• Dr Sean Gossel is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town

• Dawie Roodt is a Chief Economist at Efficient Group