Addressing the Cape Town Air Access 2023 Annual Review function, Western Cape provincial Finance and Economic Opportunities Minister Mireille Wenger highlighted the province’s plan to achieve a R1-trillion economy by 2035. This plan was designated “Growth for Jobs”, abbreviated to G4J. As the name proclaimed, the plan was intended to create jobs as well as an inclusive, diverse, thriving and resilient provincial economy, with a real growth rate of between 4% and 6%, by the target year.

“[T]he only way we will effectively address the challenges we face, is by enabling what we call ‘breakout economic growth’ that will create the jobs,” she affirmed. “And what sets G4J apart is that it is sector agnostic, focussing on the factors of production to enable and grow the private sector. We have worked on this plan with the private sector, because, to put it simply: it is the private sector that creates jobs, and it is our role as government to make this as easy as possible.”

She stressed that the provincial government was seeking to create an enabling environment for the private sector. Their focus was on systemic solutions to the major constraints that were hobbling economic growth. Once enabled, it would be the private sector that drove economic growth.

One of the key elements of G4J was to triple the value of Western Cape goods and services exports (including tourism) by 2035. This included doubling the number of tourists visiting the City of Cape Town and the province.

“I firmly believe that this ambitious target is well within our reach if we work together to remove some key obstacles,” she stated. “And so, to reach our target of tripling our exports, we are focussed on fixing the broken visa regime, which is costing our economy and compromising job creation, and specifically pushing for the introduction of the long overdue remote working visa so we can get visitors to stay longer and spend their forex here.”

She praised the role of Cape Town Air Access (an interagency and public-private collaboration) in increasing the number of airlines, the number of flights, and the number of tourists, coming into Cape Town and the wider province. Wenger also highlighted the initiative’s importance in achieving the Western Cape’s ambition to double tourism numbers over the next 12 years. She also cited the importance, for the success of G4J, of the Western Cape trade, investment and tourism promotion agency Wesgro, which heads the Cape Town Air Access initiative.