Speech
Cyril Ramaphosa  ·  2026-08-13 12:46

President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers the Keynote Address at the SEIFSA Business Breakfast_2

We are putting into operation the South African National Water Resource Infrastructure Agency through national grants alone. Government is investing approximately 24 billion a year in municipal water and sanitation infrastructure and hundreds of projects underway across the country. Now this also affects your work because you work in municipalities and this is where your processes of manufacturing are affected negatively because the municipal uh entity in the area where you worked does not have the capability does not have the water and all that. So we are rebuilding all that. Further investment is being mobilized through public private partnerships and new financing mechanisms. Once again, this means demand for pipes, pumps, valves, treatment equipment, structural steel, engineering services and construction materials. And this is your forte. When we consider transmission, rail port, rail, ports and water, renewable energy, mining, social infrastructure and defense together, we begin to appreciate the scale of the opportunity. The opportunity is immense and it is just continuing to grow into a massive opportunity. Government's infrastructure program as you heard me say is around 1 trillion rand over the next three years. We should view this not simply as a construction program. We should view it as an industrial strategy. The central question is therefore how much of this productive capacity requires to deliver the infrastructure that we should put in place to build South Africa. This does not mean that every nut, bolt and component must necessarily be manufactured locally. However, nor should localization become a license for inefficiency. But localization must be competitive. It must meet the technical standards, it must also deliver quality. And this is where you come in. It must deliver on time. But where South African firms can produce competitively, public investment should help create the scale as well as the certainty that enables them to invest. Industry repeatedly tells government that manufacturers cannot invest in new factories without visibility of future demand. That is a reasonable concern, I must say. And this is precisely what your chairman Elas was also saying. We therefore need to improve the coordination and also the publication of the infrastructure pipeline so that companies can see can have line of sight of what government and stateowned enterprises and other public institutions intend to procure over the next 5, 10, and even 15 years. And we are told for instance that the the the the order book for a number of uh implements or equipment is is quite congested and unless you have a clear timeline of when you will need it, you will only get it much much later. So we do need to start populating your order book so that you have in your own plans clear sight of when things will start happening.