While businesses in South Africa are taking strain owing to many structural challenges, from logistics to energy supply, as well as general ease of doing business, Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) CEO Busi Mavuso says in her latest newsletter that things do show some signs of improving.

BLSA has been working closely with government on several initiatives to improve the business environment, including the National Electricity Crisis Committee and Operation Vulindlela, which is focused on structural economic reform.

She has, however, spent a week visiting various large companies, with the general consensus of leaders being frustration.

Mavuso cites some of the complaints as being the failure of basic services and young people coming out of the education system without the necessary skills to work.

Meanwhile, Mavuso lists some of government’s achievements as concluding the long-delayed auction of spectrum, shifting the regulations around private generation of electricity, improving the ease of access to visas for tourists and workers and improving the process of accessing water-use rights.

She affirms that there is “much more” BLSA and government are working on to yield positive change with time.

The problem is that there are too few of these positive examples of change, she concedes.

Mavuso says a major concern among business leaders remains the state of State-owned enterprises such as Eskom and Transnet, and the inefficiencies these entities have brought about.

There are also many concerns about how industrial policy is being developed and the seemingly ad hoc nature of competition decisions.

Mavuso has also heard concerns about South Africa’s recent diplomatic advances to Russia and China, which is putting the country’s preferential access to the US market at risk.

Mavuso points out that there seems to have been a loss of focus by government on engaging with partners and working towards solutions. “Such engagements have often led to positive outcomes in the past, with one obvious example being how business and government worked together to source equipment and roll out the Covid-19 vaccine.

“Business continues to look for ways it can support government, often putting significant resources into researching and developing constructive proposals. But there is a growing feeling that we are not making headway in dealing with challenges, owing to a lack of government engagement,” she explains.

Mavuso highlights in her weekly newsletter that business is not an “armchair critic” but rather an active participant in rolling out solutions.

She adds that businesses continue to demonstrate a great deal of creative energy and passion for South Africa, and a persistent willingness to work with stakeholders to resolve frustrations. “But where business perceives engagement to be unlikely to result in productive outcomes, efforts will shift elsewhere,” Mavuso warns.