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Tough times lie ahead, and what’s needed is strong leadership with a well thought out game plan for turning South Africa’s ailing economy around.

Back in the real world, we have the ANC’s “economic recovery plan”, formally titled the “South African Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan”, presented last week, which hasn’t exactly been met with glowing reviews.

City Press spoke with analysts, who described it as “terrible, archaic, and disturbing”, and “a list of items with no strategic thinking”.

Finance minister Tito Mboweni has been sounding the alarm for some time, in between tweeting out his horrid attempts at cooking dinner and more successful growing of cannabis, and it’s not known what he thinks of the new plan.

Ask Centre for Economic Development and Transformation founding director Duma Gqubule, and he’s not mincing his words.

Below via BusinesTech:

“It looks like it was written by an intern,” Gqubule said. “At least 95% of the items mentioned in the economic recovery plan have not been costed.”

After a look at the plan, SA Communist Party spokesperson Alex Mashilo said, “I don’t want to come across as hard, but maybe we don’t know what a plan is and what a strategy is.”

I see – this is going well so far.

The Daily Maverick’s reporting also stuck the knife in:

“We see markets deeply sceptical of this plan …” Intellidex economist Peter Attard Montalto said about the draft in a note to clients.

“All the correct ideas are on the table” but the government is distracted and the draft looks like “a hodgepodge of ideas with no central agenda. Implementation credibility is all that matters.”

…Overall, the plan reflects a State which is called on to do a lot in a situation of crisis but which, in truth, doesn’t have the capacity to implement much at all.

On Thursday, President Ramaphosa will address Parliament to unveil the final draft plan, and the knives look to already have been sharpened.

While we’re talking about plans, strategies, and shoddy work, we should also address the stinker coming out of the Eastern Cape over the weekend.

Here’s the Citizen:

The Eastern Cape government is facing a plagiarism scandal after it was found some content from an ICT [Information and Communication Technology] strategy was copied and pasted from another document…

The Daily Dispatch reported on Saturday that the 33-page “Provincial Digital Transformation Framework and Strategy Plan 2020-2025” was almost a copy and paste of that which was signed by the former leader of Australia’s Labor Party, Brendan Howlin, five years ago.

The newspaper also reported the document had been signed by provincial cabinet director-general Mbulelo Sogoni and Premier Oscar Mabuyane.

Read the rest of that report here.

If it’s not the ‘interns’ cooking up a recovery plan, it’s somebody else nicking a five-year-old plan from Down Under.

Good times.

[sources:bustech&dailymav&citizen]