Disturbing fairytale quality to Western Cape SOPA address

There’s a fairytale quality to the Western Cape State of the Province address that is faintly disturbing.

Nice as it all might sound, the new jobs and the clean audits, when we wake up the next day we’re still in South Africa, still hostage to the far less salubrious State of the Nation. 

This week’s address by Premier Alan Winde was a case in point, coming – as it usually does – less than a week after President Cyril Ramaphosa downplayed the enduring string of national crises, from rampant corruption to ongoing load shedding.  Try as we might to imbibe the Premier’s optimism – it does taste good – there’s no escaping the reality of a unitary state that in many ways still has its jackboot firmly placed on the belly of the economy. It’s all very well to celebrate the province’s relative success, but it looks good because the much of the rest of the country looks so bad.

Viewed in isolation the province’s performance would still leave a lot to be desired.

However it would seem churlish to poke holes in a provincial administration that, by just about any measure, is way ahead of the others, with progress and innovation in several critical areas including logistics and energy. We agree with the Premier that the province has demonstrated what is possible when a government “does not take its residents for granted”. 

Of course a lot remains to be done, and we as the Cape Chamber continue to play our part. It is through the efforts of our members that the Western Cape economy continues to shine and create jobs.  As the Premier pointed out in his speech, of the 169 000 jobs created in the country in the fourth quarter of the 2022/23 financial year, 167 000 of them were created here in the Western Cape.

That’s a remarkable statistic that suggests a fairytale, while not necessarily the full picture, is still a story worth telling.

John Lawson
CEO of the Cape Chamber of Commerce & Industry