[imagesource: Nic Bothma / EPA-EFE]

Being an intern can be a thankless task.

Running errands, making coffee, doing the more menial work tasks pawned off in your direction, and writing your country’s economic recovery plan.

We joke, but in the week leading up to yesterday’s announcement by President Ramaphosa, where he laid out the government’s plan to rescue the South African economy, one critic said it “looks like it was written by an intern”.

That was not meant as a compliment.

Yesterday, Ramaphosa broke down the crucial components of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, as it’s officially known.

There are four areas of priority, which MyBroadband breaks down as follows:

Infrastructure rollout

He said infrastructure projects would focus on social development such as schools, water, sanitation, housing, and critical road and rail systems.

Rapidly expand energy generation

The current regulatory framework will be adapted to facilitate new generation projects while protecting the integrity of the national grid, and the work of restructuring Eskom into three separate entities will continue.

Employment stimulus

He said traditional forms of public employment are being scaled up and new forms of public employment are being created to meet the immediate need for employment.

Industrial growth

The production of local goods has the potential to provide significant boosts to the economy, Ramaphosa said…

The government will soon publish localisation targets for goods in areas such as healthcare, basic consumer goods, construction materials, and transport rolling stock.

That above is just the basics from each of the four components – read about each in more detail here.

President Ramaphosa also took the opportunity to warn South Africans about the risk of a second COVID-19 wave, or surge.

It wasn’t long before economists began to pick the plan apart, with Casey Delport, an investment analyst at Anchor Capital, telling BusinessTech that “it appears to be more of a lofty wish list than a concrete policy plan”, and that “very little detail was provided as to how government plans to finance the ambitious goals”.

Naturally, opposition politicians weighed in with critiques of their own, reports the Daily Maverick:

DA finance spokesperson Geordin Hill-Lewis also emphasised the president’s failure to state what reform had to be done by when, and to assure South Africa that ministers and officials faced consequences when that was not done.

The EFF talked of “the dismal failure to put together a practical and believable economic plan”.

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald said much of the plan had been heard before, on infrastructure, energy and Buy Local.

The lack of freshness was a common theme among critics, who point out that these lofty ideals were the same things touted during the wasted nine years of Zuma leadership, which have just been dusted off and rolled out once more.

Now attention turns towards finance Minister Tito Mboweni and his Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), which will be delivered on October 28, following a week’s postponement.

Let’s hope it goes better than his Twitter dinner cooking escapades.

[sources:mybb&bustech&dailymav]