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Thabo Mbeki

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South African Politician

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“You cannot just depend on the market, because the market will say: China needs oil; China needs coal; China needs whatever, and Africa has got all these things in abundance. And we go there and get them, and the more we develop the Chinese economy, the larger the manufacturing is, the more we need global markets - sell it to the Africans which indeed might very well destroy whatever infant industries are trying to develop on the continent. That is what the market would do.”

“There is a section of our population in South Africa that you can't expect to get integrated in the economy of its own. These are people without skills and that will include young people who might very well have matric certificates, but don't have the skills to be absorbed in the economy. So we need to target people like those in a special way, in a focused way so that they have the skills and the capacity to participate in the economy. That requires special programmes.”

“I think anybody who knows anything about South Africa and the South African economy would know that one of the big constraints to growth and development is skills shortages. So all of us, need to come at this thing as vigorously as is possible and, of course, the private sector has the capacity to take it on board.”

“I think the critical point, really, is that we need to focus black economic empowerment more on the creation of new wealth rather than on these big deals that have been characteristic of this process in the past, of people going to banks, borrowing a lot of money, buying this and when the shares don't perform very well, the shares go back to the banks, because there's other people who own this anyway. I think we need to re-focus it so that it really does impact on growth, new investment, new employment and a general, better spread of wealth in South Africa.”

“Clearly, there needs to be an increase in the capacity of the railway system. That's why there are these projections of increasing the capacity to carry freight on the railways by 30% over the next five years or so, because the volume of goods moved up and down, imports, exports, and within the country, has grown much larger than the capacity. And this is part of the higher costs to business, because charges, for instance, at the ports become too high and they put up the prices of these goods, whether they are imports or exports. You want to reduce that.”

“You can say to this unemployed family, people are indigent, that they must pay for water and this and that and refuse removal and so on. They have no money. We may very well say that, but does the municipality have the capacity to do it? So, that's why we said that we need to have a thorough look at the functioning of local government and that will include the financing. So that this poor person does indeed access that water.”

“That it is not enough to catch a criminal and get them convicted and so on, because the victim remains with the consequences of the crime. Something needs to be done. Let's complete that process, interact with civil society about this, so that we will specify what is it that we do in the context of that Charter that would then make this positive impact on people who might have been affected by crime.”

“There is a land problem in Zimbabwe, there is a need land for redistribution but it must be handled different, without violence, without conflict, within the context of the law, bearing in mind the interests of all Zimbabweans both black and white. It's necessary that the Zimbabwean government to respond positively to those sorts of messages.”