It is said that the English expression ‘same old, same old’, which means nothing has changed, evolved from the 1950s Japanese expression, samo, samo – but I am not certain that this is so. Then there is the English expression ‘much of a muchness’, which is a great way of saying that two things are so similar that there is no significant difference between them. In Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dormouse asks of Alice: “That begins with an M, such as . . . muchness – you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’ – did you ever see . . . a drawing of a muchness?”

If anything, these two expressions are most apt in describing the eighth iteration of the Industrial Policy Action Plan (Ipap 2016/17–2018/19), launched by Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies on May 9. As I am writing, on May 11, I am staring out of a window looking at a miserable day in central London. It is rainy, foggy and cold. This is not much different to what you would expect of London – much the same as Ipap. Without the ‘I’, it would be pap, which is Afrikaans for ‘flaccid’ or ‘flat’. Synonyms for ‘flaccid’ include ‘lacking vigour’ and ‘effectiveness’, and for ‘flat’ are ‘dull’ and ‘lifeless’.

On the day the eighth iteration of Ipap was released, data on South Africa’s unemployment rate for the first quarter of 2016 were also released – unemployment hit a 12-year high of 26.7%, while the ‘expanded’ unemploy- ment rate, which includes people who have stopped looking for work, reached 36.3%. Put differently, of South Africa’s 36.4-million people of working age, 5.7-million are unemployed. An obvious question is: Just how employable are these unemployed people? But that is a topic for another day. (The unemployment rate, expressed in percentage terms, tends to be fairly similar for all provinces – unemployment is a fairly evenly spread national scourge.)

Then, on this miserable day, May 11, KPMG announces that, according to statistics from the International Monetary Fund, Egypt has pushed South Africa into third place on the African continent in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) size. (Just in case you want to prepare for what might come, fourth is Algeria, fifth Morocco, sixth Angola, seventh Sudan, eighth Kenya, ninth Ethiopia and tenth Tanzania.) Egypt follows Nigeria, which overtook South Africa more than two years ago, on April 6, 2014. KPMG calculates that this should have occurred as far back as 2011, based on its own calculation and accounting for backward adjustments to GDP.

South Africa’s slide is largely due the rand’s slump, but bear in mind that Egypt’s nominal US dollar GDP expanded by an average of 7.5% a year from 2012 to 2015. Most shocking is that the rand’s persistent weakness is largely, and unsurprisingly, attributable to domestic issues, “largely political in nature”, according to KPMG. Forbes magazine reports that the CEO of the Public Investment Corporation, in response to questions in Parliament, indicated that the unexpected firing of former Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene on December 9, 2015, resulted in more than R100-billion being “wiped off government pensions”.

Back to the latest Ipap iteration. In his opening statement, Davies said that “there is now an even more pressing need for structural change in the economy”. On October 14, 2014, Business Day reported that the very same Minister “says the economy urgently needs ‘structural change’”. The dictionary definition of ‘urgent’ is ‘requiring immediate action or attention’, while ‘immediate’ means ‘occurring or done at once’ and ‘pressing’ is synonymous with ‘requiring quick or immediate action’. So, still urgent, or more so? What has changed in nearly two years? Arguably nothing, but the mere choice of words. It reminds me of Will Durant, who said: “We are what we repeatedly do.”

More disappointingly, Ipap8 perpetuates a prime fallacy, that we can leverage “the deva- luation of the rand to make South African-manufactured products more globally competitive and create opportunities for the expansion and further development of South Africa’s domestic manufacturing capabilities”. If anything, the rand is a volatile currency, which, in the last six months of 2015 alone, depreciated by 26%. What has this done for South Africa’s global competitiveness? Not unsurprisingly, Ipap8 does not offer much by way of commentary on the aim of Ipap7, launched in May 2015 to raise the impact of government interventions to support industrial development and reindustrialise South Africa. It is not so much about crea- tion anymore, but rather about retention.

According to the press release issued at the launch, Ipap 2016 envisages nothing less than a mas- sive, concerted and focused national industrial effort, intimately involving all the key stakeholders and economic partners. This must be built on four pillars: policy coherence and policy certainty across government; a close collaborative effort between government,business and labour; a commitment to ensure that the linkages between the primary and secondary productive sectors of the economy are maximised; and a combined and constructive drive to overcome the key constraints to manufac- turing-led, value-adding growth and labour- intensive manufacturing.

Ipap 2016/17–2108/19’s key focal areas are:

Public procurement – greatly enhanced and enforced compliance with localisation targets set for government departments and State-owned companies.

A strong focus on spillover and labour- intensive sectors – in particular, agro- processing; the CTLF sector, the components manufacturing and subassembly subectors in automotives, rail, light manu- facturing and engineering in the metals sector, plastics and associated subsectors, electrotechnical assembly, subassembly and components manufacturing, and downstream timber and pulp products, including furniture and boatbuilding.

Carefully targeted industrial financing and incentives – including much stronger export credit and export credit insurance support, in combination with a wide range of sector-specific incentives, and energetic implementation of the recently launched Black Industrialists Incentive.

Leveraging the devaluation of the rand to make South African-manufactured products more globally competitive and creating opportunities for the expansion and further development of South Africa’s domestic manufacturing capabilities.

Growing exports – there are four main pillars to the Ipap export strategy: Building partnerships with global original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) focused on transferring technologies and growing exports in OEM value chains; partnering with national export champions to catalyse increased national technology absorption for the development of high value-exports; strengthening existing industry associations and export councils, including establishing a dedicated new export council for Africa; and developing export-orientated production hubs in special economic zones and regional clusters and fostering industrial decentralisation.

Automotives – the Department of Trade and Industry has established a team of technical experts to develop a post-2020 Automotives Master Plan. The mandate of the team is to examine the entire automotive sector – not just the existing Automotive Production Development Plan. This means that it will now include light, medium and heavy vehicles and motorcycles. The purpose of this work will be to ensure that, in the con- text of long-term policy certainty, a post-2020 master plan will create a framework to secure even higher levels of investment and production, higher exports, deepening localisation and expanding employment.

Gas-based industrialisation – Ipap 2016 introduces a medium-term programme to ensure that gas-based industrialisation increasingly develops into one of the spines of South Africa’s industrial strategy, leverag- ing natural gas as both a source of power generation and a driver of industrial diversification.

Eliminating red tape in order to open up space for much more streamlined and business-friendly governance processes. These efforts will include the etablishment of an inter-Ministerial committee on investment to tighten up the intragovernmental coordination required to underpin South Africa’s new one-stop investment centres and a rapidly expanding partnership between the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission and all the major banks to pro- vide official company registration facilities within their branches and online.

Overcoming constraints – going forward Ipap 2016 will be renewing its efforts to overcome lingering structural obstacles to development and industrialisation, focusing on work to stabilise electricity supply, while creating an enabling environment for own and cogeneration and fuel cell technology development, efforts to secure port and rail network reforms in order to overcome inefficiencies and associated high costs and robustly support exports, and concerted intragovernmental efforts to address deep-seated and serious skills deficits and mismatches that impact on the capacity of the economy to grow faster and diversify more effectively.

Spot anything new? It arguably offers less than what superstition dictates that you need to have on your big day, so you can have a long and happy marriage: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue . . . And a silver sixpence for your shoe.”