By Nco Dube | 28 August 2026

There is something seductive about a country beginning to work again. The lights stay on for longer. Freight moves with fewer disruptions. Ports recover. Investment conversations sound less desperate. After years in which institutional failure became normal, even modest competence can feel revolutionary.

That is why the growing partnership between government and organised business has been received with understandable relief. South Africa needs capital, engineers and technical expertise wherever they can be found. If business possesses capabilities the state has lost, it would be foolish to refuse them out of ideological pride.

But there is a deeper political-economy question beneath this optimism. It is not whether business can help fix the state. Clearly it can. The harder question is which parts of South Africa business will have an incentive to fix, and which parts will remain dependent on a stretched state.

Business and democratic government operate according to fundamentally different maps. Business follows opportunity, risk and return. The state is supposed to follow need. Sometimes those maps overlap. Often they do not.

Capital gravitates towards places where economic activity already exists: cities, industrial corridors, ports, mining regions, tourism nodes and communities with purchasing power. Infrastructure lowers risk. Investment expands the economic base, strengthens municipal revenues and attracts more investment. Success compounds.

The reverse is equally powerful. A municipality with weak infrastructure, a poor revenue base and high unemployment becomes less attractive to investors precisely because it needs investment most. Revenue falls, services deteriorate and failure compounds.

This is where the market cannot be expected to perform the work of a developmental state. A business that repeatedly invests where there is no prospect of return will not survive. That is not moral failure. It is commercial logic. Government has a different obligation. It must sometimes spend the most money where the financial return is weakest: a road to a remote village, water for households that cannot afford cost-reflective tariffs, a clinic in a sparsely populated district.

The return on those investments does not sit neatly on a balance sheet. It appears in citizenship. That is why the state exists most urgently where there is no business case.

Home Affairs offers an unusually clear example of both the opportunity and the danger. Its partnership with banks has made Smart ID services dramatically easier for hundreds of thousands of South Africans. By 3 August, 372 bank branches were participating in the new digital model and more than half a million people had already used it. 

Home Affairs says the rollout will reach 750 branches by the end of 2026, with a focus on rural and underserved communities, while passport and first-time ID services are also being added.

This is real progress. But its geography is still consequential. A citizen near a participating branch can increasingly avoid the legendary Home Affairs queue and offline system. A citizen in a rural district with thin commercial infrastructure may still travel long distances to an ordinary Home Affairs office and hope the system works. The new model is being opened beyond existing bank clients, which is welcome, but convenience still follows banking infrastructure unless deliberate public intervention pushes it further. Home Affairs has begun addressing this through rural expansion and bank-operated mobile units, but the underlying tension remains.

Private infrastructure can extend the reach of the state, but it naturally begins where private infrastructure already exists. Public innovation can inherit the map of commercial viability.

This is notable because South Africa’s geography of opportunity is not accidental. Apartheid engineered where infrastructure, transport networks, industry and commercial opportunity would be concentrated, and where they would not. The laws disappeared. The geography did not.

Today that geography can reproduce itself without anyone making an explicitly racist decision. Capital follows infrastructure. Infrastructure follows historic investment. Property values rise where services work. Municipal revenue strengthens where residents earn more. Strong municipalities attract further investment while weak municipalities struggle to attract the capital necessary to escape weakness.

Nobody has to say, “Do not invest there.”

The spreadsheet can do it.

Commercial decisions can be perfectly rational individually while producing deeply unequal outcomes collectively. If South Africa simply allows investment to follow existing economic strength, we may modernise the geography apartheid left us rather than transform it.

We already see fragments of this future. When Eskom became unreliable, wealthier households bought solar panels and batteries. When municipal water systems deteriorated, those who could afford it installed tanks and boreholes. When policing weakened, suburbs expanded private security. Families with means escaped failing schools and overstretched public healthcare.

South Africans with money have become increasingly capable of buying distance from state failure. Poor South Africans cannot. The result is not merely inequality of income. It is inequality of exposure to government failure. 

The wealthy experience dysfunction as an inconvenience to be privately solved. The poor experience it as the architecture of daily life.

The same danger exists in national priority-setting. The problems business urgently needs government to solve are usually those affecting production: electricity, ports, freight rail, crime, visas and infrastructure serving productive sectors. These are important. Fixing them can generate growth, jobs and tax revenue.

But the national interest is larger than the collection of problems organised capital needs resolved.

A broken freight railway has mining companies, banks and exporters capable of calculating the loss and putting it before ministers. A broken borehole in a rural village has residents. A dysfunctional port can be translated into billions of rand in lost output. A clinic without medicine barely disturbs the national accounts.

Both are failures of government. They simply enter the political system with different volume.

That is why an increasingly intimate government-business relationship raises questions not only about delivery, but about agenda-setting power. When economically powerful actors become indispensable partners in solving national crises, the problems affecting them can more easily become national emergencies than those affecting citizens with no comparable institutional voice.

South Africa needs more private investment, not less, and the technical expertise sitting outside government. But private capital must never become an alibi for public retreat.

In fact, the greater the ability of business to finance commercially viable infrastructure, the stronger the redistributive obligation of the state should become. If commercial freight corridors attract investment, government must maintain the feeder roads connecting poorer communities to them. If affluent municipalities can raise private finance, poorer municipalities require stronger state support. If bank branches can deliver civic services efficiently, government must ensure that the citizen 100 kilometres from the nearest participating branch receives the same dignity through another channel.

Private investment should deepen the developmental obligation of government, not diminish it.

There is a version of South Africa’s future in which government-business partnership succeeds. Ports recover. Electricity stabilises. Commercial districts flourish. Mining expands. Tourism grows. Wealthier municipalities attract capital and become increasingly sophisticated.

And yet millions remain outside the recovery. The economy improves. Their country does not.

That becomes politically dangerous because people notice when national recovery has an address. They notice which roads are repaired, which railway lines become urgent and which failures suddenly acquire ministerial attention. They notice when the state appears extraordinarily responsive around capital and endlessly patient around poverty.

South Africa should embrace what business can contribute without confusing the role of business with the purpose of government. Business will go where opportunity exists and returns justify risk. That is what we need it to do.

Government has the harder responsibility. It must go where the people are. It must choose the distant citizen, the unemployed citizen, the village whose infrastructure will never deliver an attractive return and the community whose road carries too little traffic to justify a toll.

These people are not bad investments. They are citizens.

The measure of a developmental state is not whether it can make Sandton work, keep a smelter powered or move containers through Durban. The market already understands why those places and activities matter. The real test is whether government can make a forgotten village matter with the same urgency.

That is where the market stops.

And where the state must begin.