During the week of January 20, the UK-Africa Investment Summit took place in London and the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. As I contemplated the two events from a South African perspective, a single word sprang to mind – ‘stop’.

As the word reverberated in my mind, I wondered about its origin. It strikes me as being curious that we use words whose origin is not known to us. As I researched the origin of ‘stop’ on www.word-detective.com offers, I discovered that many European and Scandinavian languages developed words that are similar to ‘stop’, all of which probably came from the Late Latin stuppare, which means ‘to stop up or stuff with tow or oakum’.

And what are ‘tow’ and ‘oakum’? Both are the coarser, shorter fibres of flax, hemp or jute, separated from the longer, finer strands used in spinning cloth. These bits were used to caulk ships, which means to make them tight against leakage – in other words, to stop up an opening, as if with a plug (‘stopper’) of oakum or tow. 
The word ‘stop’ came to be used to simply mean to ‘fill a hole’. According to www.word-detective.com, during the fourteenth century, ‘stop’ began to be used in its modern sense, which is to bring a person, animal, thing or process to a halt.

It is time for the South African government to stop – just stop; it needs to stop what it is doing. It must stop talking, and drafting and releasing economic plans. It is time to take a step back, scrap it all and start all over again. It is a time to ‘keep it simple, silly’ (kiss).

I am reminded of a time of a great family tragedy when I was not even double digits in age. That was when my maternal ­grandfather passed away. It was totally unexpected. My grandfather left what he believed to be his single most valued possession, his garage, which was filled to the rafters with every conceivable type of electrical machinery and hand tool.

My father had next to no interest in any of the electrical machinery or the hand tools. He also had no emotional attachment to them. My mother did not want any reminder. 
This left few options – three options, actually. The most drastic was to hire a skip and empty the garage’s contents. Another was for my father to rummage through the garage’s contents and retrieve the more valuable items and dispose of those less desired. The last was to invite interested people to tender for the valuable contents and for the successful bidder to then remove all the ­contents. My father, being the businessperson that he was, stipulated that the last option include the repainting of the garage to leave the next owner with a blank canvas, with the past confined to the past and the garage readied for a new start.

It is a given that South Africa will not have a different government any time soon, so the engine for change in the ruling party may well have to come from its own factions.

I fear that, like my grandfather’s garage, the South African government’s affinity for the drafting of economic plans has created too much clutter. As in my grandfather’s garage, there are many unfinished projects, ideologies and ideas that have been retained for when they might be required. Consequently, the clutter has become unmanageable.


The time has come for the South African government to stop, take a step back and wipe the slate clean. It is time to get back to basics. Government must get rid of all its economic plans and focus on articulating a brand-new, clear vision.

It is time to be realistic: South Africa is no longer the world’s darling; it must compete on the economic stage on an equal footing. The world is no longer interested in plans and vision – it is interested in decisive action.