Getting rid of all the state-owned companies in South Africa will unlock massive opportunity. At last count, there were 108 of them, but not all of them are fully operational, and some are in decline.
I was watching the weather forecast by Vox Weather this morning, which is an independent weather broadcasting service. Now, what’s amazing about this is you used to have weather reports—or maybe you still do, as I don’t watch TV anymore because it’s just so much rubbish—and you used to have these weather reports by some dour people.
I’ll tell you what, Vox Weather has really spiced it up. It’s much better coverage, and it gives you an excellent overview of the weather forecast for the whole country and includes Namibia.
Now this is private enterprise. It’s actually taken away the function from state broadcasting organizations.
Yesterday, I was at a small shopping mall, and I looked up and saw a South African Post Office sign on a very heavy metal pole, and I wondered about this because there’s no post office in this shopping center. Then I clicked that the post office is long gone. It’s been replaced by PostNet, which is now the de facto post office.
It just shows you what private enterprise can do, and there are so many, many examples of this. I really don’t know why the country has a state-owned airline. It seems like this airline is kept afloat for government officials to get free rides. That’s something that should have been privatized long ago, but because of political power, it hasn’t been.
And then if you look at the list of 108 state enterprises and you see some of them—even a small airline—is no longer operational, and most of the state-owned enterprises are in a parlous state, barely creeping along and begging for money and really draining the country of valuable money, actually. So, if all of them had to be privatized, there would be a gargantuan explosion of opportunities for all sorts of business and employment in South Africa.
