Neelam Rahim |neelam@radioislam.co.za
3-minute read
08 September 2025 | 10:33 CAT

📸 Billions lost, little gained, three successive presidents, Mbeki, Zuma and Ramaphosa, have grappled with South Africa’s failing SOEs, leaving taxpayers with a half-trillion-rand bailout burden. Image: IOL Sunday Independent (AI)

Despite decades of investment and billions of rands in bailouts, South Africa’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remain unsustainable, draining the public purse without delivering meaningful returns.

In an interview with Radio Islam International, Wayne Duvenhage, CEO of OUTA, says the pattern of government intervention under three successive presidents, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, illustrates vastly different approaches, yet with the same costly outcomes.

Under Mbeki, Duvenhage explains, “there were strong views around ensuring that we don’t spend too much money on bailing out certain entities. In other words, they had to wash their own face, cover their costs.”

This changed dramatically under Zuma’s presidency. According to Duvenhage, Zuma viewed SOEs as job-creation vehicles but failed to enforce accountability. “He saw them as opportunities to create jobs and expenditure, but not control them to the extent that they should remain profitable. And this is where state capture came in quite heavily and cost us billions.”

Billions indeed. Transnet alone, Duvenhage notes, saw R54 billion “unnecessarily spent,” with Eskom bleeding even more. In total, “we’ve effectively paid out half a trillion rand just to bail out state-owned entities in the last 15 years.”

Yet critics argue Ramaphosa has not fared much better. While some controls are slowly being restored at Eskom and a handful of other SOEs, the systemic reliance on bailouts remains. “Unfortunately, Sir Ramaphosa has to be held accountable for this,” Duvenhage says. “He’s the one that’s allowed this continued sucking of funds out of the coffers of government to bail out entities and inefficient practices.”

Duvenhage insists the state must exit certain sectors entirely. “We shouldn’t be in the business of complex, highly competitive business-like entities. Airlines and mining, we don’t have to be in these organisations. We should have entered into a public-private partnership on the Post Office like we did with Telkom. If we didn’t do what we did with Telkom, it would have been dead or been sucking a lot of money out the system.”

At the heart of the problem, he argues, lies a damaging mindset within government: “Their attitude is, well, how do we make more money instead of how do we cut our expenses and reduce our waste? No one is held accountable. It’s really, really sad.”

With half a trillion rand already gone, the central question remains: what is Ramaphosa doing now, and what should he be doing, to stop the cycle?

Listen to the full interview on Sabahul Muslim with Moulana Sulaimaan Ravat and Wayne Duvenhage.