South Africa pushes for $200B investment
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa launched a nearly $200 billion investment drive aimed at accelerating economic recovery and industrialization in the face of growing worry over the impact of the Iran war on the continent’s biggest economy.
For more than a decade, South Africa’s economy has barely grown, leaving it with crumbling infrastructure and the need to create jobs in a country where one in three people are unemployed. Ramaphosa’s pitch to investors in Johannesburg this week was that South Africa has fixed the worst bottlenecks: He said the country is opening key sectors to private capital and is ready for large scale investments.
Ramaphosa said the effort will run through 2030 with delegates at the South African Investment Conference pledging $53 billion across 31 projects spanning energy, logistics, manufacturing, and digital infrastructure. They include Coca-Cola’s $1 billion expansion plan, and a $3.6 billion commitment from Sasol — the world’s biggest maker of fuel from coal — to upgrade operations.