After the Bell: All aboard for Premier Lesufi’s psychedelic Gautrain trip

“One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall…”

(White Rabbit, song by Jefferson Airplane, 1967)

Buckle up folks for Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s psychedelic Gautrain trip! The main beverage service features spiked Kool-Aid with an electric kick.  

It promises to be an epic hallucinatory journey predicated on the fantastical notion that South Africa’s economy is growing at the pace of a bullet train with state coffers overflowing with cash, which has sprouted like mushrooms after the recent Gauteng rains. 

Just mind those mushrooms, because if you ingest too many, you might also envision a speed train linking rural Limpopo with the shining City of Gold. 

Adding to this trippy and far out experience is a Gauteng provincial government famed for its competence and ability to get things done, such as managing sewage works so they don’t despoil World Heritage Sites, enforcing law and order with an army of highly trained anti-crime wardens and maintaining the road network so efficiently that it is the envy of Autobahn commuters. 

This, folks, is how Lesufi’s flights of fancy in his State of the Province Address (Sopa) delivered on Monday, 24 February 2025, came across: they evoked an unhinged LSD or mushroom trip that reduced the premier to speaking utter gibberish.

I mean, the plans for the Gautrain were not remotely based on the cold sober realities of Gauteng’s and the wider South African economy.

“The Gautrain rail expansion will be a gateway to opportunity, creating more than 125,000 construction jobs while igniting growth in property, retail, and logistics along its path,” read Lesufi’s prepared remarks. 

“The Gauteng government will invest R120-billion in the expansion of Gautrain to the following areas: Soweto via Fourways; Mamelodi; Atteridgeville; Lanseria; and Springs.”

Let’s begin with the more than 125,000 construction jobs.

At the launch of the Gautrain project back in the heady days of 2006, then Gauteng premier Sam Shilowa estimated it would create 148,000 jobs. This was subsequently revised down to 93,000 jobs during the construction period. 

Audited reports of the Bombela Concession Company — the consortium that built and operates the Gautrain — found the project had created 37,950 jobs for personnel based in South Africa between 2008 and 2012, of which 34,100 were local. 

If anything, since that time, engineering and automation have advanced at a pace. 

So, how does Lesufi get to more than 125,000 construction jobs alone? Will an army of workers attack the job by digging tunnels with spoons?

In his prepared remarks, Lesufi mentioned the word ‘jobs’ no less than 27 times, by my count. 

This is classic ANC “Big Guy” speak — the party’s cadres have for the past three decades been promising jobs, jobs, jobs as if they can be grown on trees. And the results are there for all to see. South Africa’s unemployment rate, for the record, currently stands at 31.9%.

Then there are the mind-boggling costs envisioned. We are told the Gauteng government will invest R120-billion in the Gautrain expansion project.

According to the Gauteng budget speech from 2024, the average annual budget over the past five years at that time amounted to R149-billion. So the investment that Lesufi says the Gauteng government plans to splurge is equivalent to about 80% of its recent annual budgets.

Who is going to provide loans or finance of that scale to the Gauteng government against the backdrop of a precarious national fiscal crisis?

It is simply preposterous. But Lesufi is a populist and that is a political brand known for making outlandish commitments that cannot possibly be met.  

In 2006, when the Gautrain project was initially launched, South Africa’s debt:GDP ratio was 34.6% and falling, and the economy was growing at an annual rate over 5%.

According to the latest estimates in the national Budget 2025 — which famously was not presented last week but was shared far and wide — Treasury is aiming for public debt levels to peak in the current 2025/26 financial year at 76.1% of GDP, while the economy is seen growing at only 1.9% this year after barely budging an estimated 0.8% in 2024. 

And of course Budget 2025 was not tabled in the end because of a massive row over a proposed 2 percentage point hike in VAT that would take it to 17% and was only designed to bring in R58-billion of additional revenue in 2025/26 — about half of what Lesufi says his province will magically spend on the Gautrain. 

VAT was clearly the last tree that National Treasury thought it could shake to squeeze R58-billion, and I suspect that the pickings for Gauteng are thinner than that.

Viewed through this prism, Lesufi’s psychedelic Gautrain trip comes into another focus: it resembles an acid flashback to the Thabo Mbeki era when public debt as a percentage of GDP was being cut and the economy was growing at a decent pace. 

But after the high, reality kicks in and you find what you were saying was pie in the sky. DM