SA going bust gradually, Rupert warns by Marc Hasenfuss, November 26 2014, 06:53 Johann Rupert. Picture: SUNDAY TIMES REMGRO executive chairman Johann Rupert launched a downbeat diatribe against the government at the company’s annual general meeting on Tuesday. Mr Rupert also criticised the government at last year’s meeting, telling his audience that he wondered how people did business in SA where red tape and corruption were pervasive. Addressing local stockbrokers at a packed venue in Somerset West near Cape Town, he contrasted SA’s economic malaise, which included no reliable electricity supply, with rapid technological developments in the rest of the world that had the potential to change business and society. He told of a recent dinner with Shoprite CEO Whitey Basson, at which they discussed how local retailers with 2,000 truck drivers paled in comparison to Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which had 1-million trucks and 200 distribution centres. You want to compete against that? Mr Rupert asked his audience. Not me. He criticised the government’s spending priorities, particularly on education. We are so far behind in the digital world that we will be paying for other people’s intellectual capital. This happens in a country blessed with natural resources. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, now we will have to rely on human capital. Mr Rupert said apartheid precluded the majority of South Africans from a proper education, but he believed that in 10 or 20 years SA would have sufficient numbers of well-educated people. But at the moment we are negotiating for nuclear power plants with people who are clearly not capable of doing so, he said. He recalled author Ernest Hemingway’s quote that man goes bust gradually … and then suddenly. He believed SA was in the gradual stage, but the sudden stage could come. Mr Rupert said the leadership of SA had become increasingly difficult to defend abroad due to the high levels of corruption.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 08:32:56 +0000
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