After decades of underperformance, South Africa’s economic managers in the public and private sectors must now get to grips with a different problem – overperformance. “With gross domestic product growth of 5 per cent a year over the past three years, the economy is now growing above its trend rate of about 4.5 per cent,” says Kuban Naidoo at the treasury and the strains are there for all to see – industry at full capacity, overcrowded roads, an overstretched electricity network, a serious skills shortage, inflation nudging above 6 per cent and a current account balance-of-payments deficit of more than 6 per cent of GDP.

Most of these are familiar. South Africa has been here before, though not for 25 years, during which time the political and economic landscape has changed out of all recognition. A further similarity is that now – as then – consensus on the way ahead is confined to those in the centre. For the left – the labour unions and their political allies within the ruling tripartite alliance of Cosatu, the Communist party and the African National Congress – the white dominated business sector is to blame for under-investing and for failing to embrace “transformation”.