Chatting to the media on Tuesday afternoon at the FNB Regional Head Office in Newton Park, Port Elizabeth, Firstrand CEO, Sizwe Nxasana talked about what he expected President Jacob Zuma to highlight in his State of the Nation address on Tuesday 17 June in Cape Town. (Scroll down for the video)
“Hopefully we are going to hear a lot about economic transformation in terms of the National Development Plan,” was Nxasana’s opening thought.
He went on to say that the areas of health and education would receive focus saying that South Africa had done a lot to improve access to education but more needed to be done to improve the quality.
Nxasana expected parastatals such as Eskom, Transnet and Telkom to receive attention citing the need for infrastructure projects, power and better broadband access for all saying that investment in a communications infrastructure leads to a stronger economy.
Social cohesion was cited as an important area to focus on especially between business, government and labour citing the long strike in the platinum industry. “We have a constitution that protects the interests of the employers and employees, but I think we need a different conversation to build more social cohesion to deal with the issues of unemployment, inequality as well as continuing to build the country around communities,” said Nxasana.
With regards to service delivery Nxasana said; “The capacity of, especially local government, to deliver social services is important.”
With the background of South Africa’s recent downgrade by Standard and Poor it has become even more urgent for the country to drive reforms in our economy that are going to reduce the current account deficit on the one hand but increase the investment for long term growth on the other hand. But, we do have a very robust and sound economic environment and, as a country we need to do our bit to focus on those areas of investment that will grow our economy for the long term” concluded Nxasana.
Sizwe Nxasana is the Chief Executive Officer of FirstRand Limited. Sizwe served as Chief Executive Officer of Telkom SA Limited from 1998 to 2005. He served as National President of Absa Group Limited from 1991 to 1994. He holds a Bachelor of Accounting Science and is a Chartered Accountant. Nxasana became a Non-Executive Director of FirstRand Limited in 2003 and was elected Chief Executive Officer in 2009.
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