By Busi Mavuso

South Africa does not have the luxury of fiscal room to continue to absorb economic losses. We need economic growth to recover as fast as possible.

By Busi Mavuso

The country desperately needs positive movements as we head into the holiday season with the fourth wave of Covid infections rising alarmingly quickly and tourism and hospitality businesses already hard hit by the international travel bans.

President Cyril Ramaphosa got the year off to a good start in setting the right tone in his state of the nation address where he presented his four overriding priorities: defeat Covid; accelerate the economic recovery; accelerate economic reforms to drive inclusive growth; and fight corruption.

By Busi Mavuso

Make no mistake, this year has been the worst we’ve had in terms of energy availability. By November we had faced over 1,000 hours of load shedding for the first time since the crisis began.

By Busi Mavuso

BLSA supports the widespread calls for the travel bans to be immediately lifted to avert any further damage being done. But the bans have already had devastating consequences on our tourism industry as we head into the festive season

By Busi Mavuso

I would like to see every business in South Africa doing everything possible to encourage employees and the wider public to get vaccinated. This is in our own interest as business – we will never be able to confidently get past this pandemic if we do not get vaccination rates up across the whole country.

By Busi Mavuso

Thankfully, government didn’t hit the panic button in response to the sudden outbreak of the Omicron variant and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s commitment on Sunday to charting a course for mandatory vaccinations where appropriate is an important step in our war against the virus.

By Busi Mavuso

Clearly the fight against this pandemic is far from over. We need to fight it on the health front, but we also need to fight the economic consequences it inflicts.

By Busi Mavuso

The decision by the UK to remove SA from its red list of countries was late but welcome. The change will now also allow more normal business travel to resume with one of our biggest trading partners.

CEOs of the world’s largest companies are increasingly optimistic about the outlook for their businesses, KPMG South Africa’s 2021 CEO Outlook survey found.