South Africa should form a Presidential national entrepreneurship council, similar to the pandemic council, comprised of leading, successful entrepreneurs to develop a practical plan to create a wave of entrepreneurship to create a true people's economy, scenario planner Clem Sunter suggests.

During the twentieth century, big business was the major creator of jobs, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in mining, manufacturing and other industries. With the development of automation and robotics, big business is no longer the major creator of jobs.

Currently, the most important sources of jobs worldwide are medium-sized and small enterprises; it is entrepreneurs who create the jobs, he says.

"South Africa is at an economic crossroads and the path it takes in the immediate future will define its future for decades to come. Economic freedom for all is a necessary complement to political freedom for all achieved in the watershed 1994 democratic revolution and we need an inclusive economy with a new generation of young entrepreneurs at the helm.

"This particular threat is bigger than the pandemic. We are not a sustainable society. The severity of the challenge should be addressed in a similar manner to the pandemic, such that President [Cyril Ramaphosa] goes on national television each month to detail progress made in supporting entrepreneurship. We need this kind of leadership from the top."

However, addressing the issue is about more than a national plan; it requires a ground-up revolution of people looking to create solutions to unemployment, especially in their areas, and every municipality should have an electronic stock exchange on which people can float their businesses, Sunter proposes.

"The funding models can take inspiration from other funding and trading platforms, for example to allow small companies to offer a percentage of their shares for investment and to use crowd-funding as a source of capital. Similarly, banks should look at forming microlending institutions, especially in rural areas, so that people can access small loans to start businesses."

Large businesses could allocate at least 20% of their supply chain to nurture small businesses. This approach has proven successful in the mining industry, and programmes in this industry looked at what could be produced by small businesses and then helped them to develop the capacity to produce the goods or services, says Sunter.

Further, there are many ways to merge the township economies with the mainstream economy, including removing the barriers entrepreneurs face currently when setting up a small business.

"I define economic freedom as granting ordinary people the economic freedom to create wealth, like what was achieved in the US, which has an unemployment rate lower than 5% owing to a general entrepreneurial spirit, and China. Entrepreneurs are the people who propel an economy and the most important thing we must focus on in terms of recovering from the pandemic is to have a real emphasis on entrepreneurs," Sunter says.

Additionally, franchises are important in the small business world. Many of the risks in small businesses arise because people do not have the skills to put in place the whole process to start their first business.

"The door is more easily opened if they are part of a team and part of a franchise. Franchises have an essential role to play in the people's economy, and the Franchise Association of South Africa has to think of new franchises in South Africa to complement the successful ones. This can also help to remove some of the risks for people starting their second or third businesses," Sunter notes.

Meanwhile, climate change is an existential threat to the world. South Africa must simultaneously work to reduce its contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions, including using local suppliers where possible to reduce emissions from transport and changing individuals' habits.

"We did the work to establish a political democracy, which people said was not possible. Our scenario that envisioned such an outcome during the mid-1980s was called the high road. We now need the economic equivalent to the high road to create the people's economy. There is no other way to have a stable, sustainable and happy society if we do not work towards that," he says.