South Africa’s biggest pension manager is in freefall, and business has stopped believing Ramaphosa can fix it.
Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the seventeenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa.
This week’s focus is the Public Investment Corporation, which manages R3.7-trillion on behalf of government employees and is now without a functioning board. The CEO was suspended last week, several directors have since resigned in protest, and the finance minister has threatened to dissolve what’s left of the board entirely. Rob and Zuks trace the crisis back to an old, unresolved problem, a previous commission recommended that politicians be barred from chairing the PIC, and that one recommendation was never implemented. Patrick brings in the wider African picture, comparing the PIC to pension and sovereign wealth funds in Nigeria, Morocco, Namibia and Zimbabwe, and why so many of them end up captured by political interests in the same way.
The conversation turns to business’s fading faith in President Ramaphosa, with Rob and Zuks pointing to a pattern of replacing bad ministers with worse ones, and Patrick offering an outside view on how South Africa’s economic troubles compare with youth unemployment crises elsewhere in the world.
They also look ahead to a possible super El Niño, with hot, dry conditions expected across South Africa and much of the continent from October. Zuks speaks to the risk from personal farming experience, while Patrick outlines the scale of the humanitarian response already being planned by the United Nations.
The episode closes on Air Zimbabwe’s resumption of direct flights to London, and the more complicated ownership story behind what looks, on the surface, like a national airline’s comeback.
