Thanks Darren. Some good points. Two thoughts / responses of my own:

There is a view that head-to-head manufacturing competition with China, be it textiles or anything else, is likely to fail. This is only partly about currency dodginess. The rest is simply the scale that the Chinese now have. That scale can be a curse as well. Short runs, quick start-up times, quick delivery times to Africa are better achieved through a South African manufacturing base. Whether there really is a large market for nimble, niche players I don’t know, but there certainly is hope, rather than the hopeless situation of large productions runs with long lead times. This actually brings me to another point.

Small business and entrepreneurial growth is a huge engine for economic development, upliftment, social mobility and wealth creation. It’s also consistent with the niche, nimble way of competing with the Chinese that seems to have some merit. Stimulating this growth is hard. Easier, and arguably more effective in South Africa, is removing the hindrances. Removing the red tape, the CIPRO-disaster, making capital raising easier, decreasing regulatory complexity, decreasing the unattractiveness of labour, providing excellent education etc. With these things the natural skills and energies will be focussed on the capitalist profit incentive and should do wonders for our economy.

In the end consumers do end up paying for an inefficient and uncompetitive product.

One of our primary goals should be to find the most productive and efficient use of our resources rather than artifically stimulating it like this. Definitely not easy with such high unemployment, as you noted, because we already are clearly bad at doing this.

I believe regardless of how much we analyze it, stimulating entrepreneurial growth, by encouraging small businesses growth and making our products competitive globally, is the only feasible way forward.