President Cyril Ramaphosa hosts the South Africa-Kenya Business Forum. (3)
We've been working on a number of reforms. Reforms that have had to do with our electricity generation. And we've moved our country away from load shedding. The load the electricity generation has improved in increasingly over time. And we haven't let had blackouts for almost more than a year. And those are the efforts that government has been taking to make sure that we create a conducive environment for businesses to operate. And similarly, we've been looking at how we improve our logistics. How we improve our water. And how we improve a number of areas. When we visited Kenya in 2022, was it 2023? President Ruto was insistent that we should not leave Kenya without having agreed on a visa-free visit to South Africa by business people and by those Kenyans who want to come here on a 90-day basis. We immediately agreed on the spot. And today, we are pleased that Kenyans are now able to come to South Africa and the heavens have not fallen. Because it occurred to me that we were afraid to do something that is so practical, that is so doable, because we were befuddled in our heads about the regulations and this and that, what the law says and all that. And once we unlocked that, we've had a flood of people coming to South Africa on a visa-free basis. 58,000 have already traveled and many more will come. President Ruto says, well, President Ramaphosa, this has been to the greater benefit of uh South Africa. That uh your GDP has now been contributed greatly by the people who come here. Of course, he forgets that the people who come here are largely business people. They are coming to see uh not only what they can buy, what they can learn, and having seen the very wonderful things we do here, they go back to Kenya and implement those. So, your GDP, my dear President, rises maybe even 10 times more than what you we can both imagine. So, it's great. We were able to implement something that private sector people were talking about. So, on our side, we will then be able to implement some of the issues that we have raised. President Ruto and I, therefore, call upon you at the next business council to prepare yourself between now and then. Whether it is Standard Bank, whether it is Nicolae Nicolae's Stavros with the pharmaceutical company, whether it is my two brothers who are sitting here with talking about macadamia and sugar and whatever you, and many others, I would want to see you come forward and tell us what investments you're going to make in the two countries.