South Africa’s dismal growth performance during the first quarter of 2013 should serve as a serious wake-up call for all South Africans, but especially those who have leadership responsibilities in government, business and within the labour movement.

The quarter-on-quarter economic expansion of only 0.9% was the country’s slowest pace of growth since the 2009 recession, and the release of this figure by Statistics South Africa has resulted in much anxiety, as well as some formal downward revisions to the growth outlook for the year as a whole.

Some are warning that growth, which came in at 2.5% during 2012, could slow to around 2%, or even below – well short of the National Treasury’s 2.7% February forecast. Business Unity South Africa immediately revised its 2013 forecast from 2.5% to about 2.2%, and in its latest ‘South Africa Economic Update’, the World Bank lowered its growth outlook for the year to 2.5%, from the 3.2% it had forecast in July last year.

To be sure, the South Africa economy still faces some external risks, such as Europe’s stagnation, as well as the slowing and changing nature of growth in China – all risks that government leaders are at pains to highlight at every opportunity. However, what has become more and more apparent over the past six months to a year is that these external threats have become far less of an immediate constraint to growth than the domestic headwinds.

The most obvious domestic risk relates to the volatile labour relations environment on South Africa’s mines, and concerns that this year’s ‘wage season’ will deteriorate into a full-blown ‘winter of discontent’ across a range of sectors.

But there are other domestic factors that are equally disturbing: the slower-than-planned introduction of new electricity generation capacity; high levels of personal indebted- ness; poor municipal management and delivery; sluggish infrastructure implementation; a serious mismatch between the education and training systems and the skills required by business; surging administered prices; low levels of investment by the private sector, and ongoing bickering over the best macro- and microeconomic policies to pursue.

Should these issues be allowed to continue to fester, South Africa’s very stability will be placed at risk, as all of them have to be addressed if the triple scourge of unemployment, poverty and inequality is to be tackled comprehensively.

Surely, it is past time for the social partners to come together in a spirit of compromise to deal with these home-grown problems. The structures are already in place for such social dialogue to take place. What is required now is for government, business and labour leaders to use these effectively in the interests of placing South Africa back onto a growth path.

Failure to do so could result in South Africa adding a fourth curse to its list of scourges: economic stagnation.