How South Africa works

The fundamental claim of How South Africa Works is that the overwhelming challenge that South Africa faces, and has to date failed to address, is unemployment. The current unemployment statistics are appalling and fall especially on young African youths who were promised a better future in 1994. If the unemployment challenge is not addressed, it will be impossible to sustainably lift many millions of people out of poverty. How South Africa Works begins with a review of South Africa’s major economic challenges and then describes what it might be reasonable to expect after twenty years given the experience of other countries. It then focuses on specific sectors – agriculture, manufacturing, services, and mining – that are both critical to the country’s future and illustrative of the policy challenges that leaders face. The sector studies emphasise the incentives and choice sets that government, business, and labour actually face and why they make the decisions that they do. It examines the social grant and education to understand if South Africa has established mechanisms where people can not only escape destitution but be ready to be employed. Finally, it identifies steps that some of South Africa’s most exciting entrepreneurs have taken to build world-class enterprises to both highlight success in current circumstances and to learn from these efforts.

Greg Mills is director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst foundation. He is widely published on international affairs, development and security, an adviser to African governments, a regular columnist for local and international newspapers, and the author of the best-selling books Why Africa is poor – and what Africans can do about it (2010) and, with Jeffrey Herbst, Africa’s third liberation (2012). In addition, in 2014, he published Why states recover: Changing walking societies into winning nations – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Jeffrey Herbst is the 16th President of Colgate university, a leading liberal arts college in the United States, and has written extensively on political and international affairs. Dr Herbst started his career as a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton university where he taught for 18 years. His primary research interests are in the politics of sub-Saharan Africa, the politics of political and economic reform and the politics of boundaries. He has served on the Advisory board of the Brenthurst foundation since 2005.