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Bigwigs and bucks
There’s been a lot of attention given to the salaries of state employees lately thanks to the drama around this year’s budget and the amount of debt the government has racked up. And, quite frankly, what some of the chief executives of state-owned enterprises get paid is gobsmackingly high. One of them gets an average of nearly R1.3-million a month.
We’ve collected the total remuneration packages of the CEOs of 122 state-owned enterprises so far from a series of questions posed to government ministers in parliament asking what the CEOs of the enterprises that report to each of them earn. The responses of 18 ministers are publicly available (although the electricity & energy minister’s one is incomplete because of a missing link, so we had to look at Eskom’s financial statements to get an estimate of what its CEO earns).
The chart below shows the highest-paid 15, who all get packages of R6-million a year or more – not including performance bonuses.
Not one of the 122 CEOs got less than R1-million a year. And, for people living in Joburg who have had to visit relatives to shower over the past few weeks, you may be interested to know that Rand Water’s group CEO’s package for the 2024/25 financial year was R5.4-million – enough to make one splutter weakly like the water coming out of the city’s taps.
African Highway
Historically, South Africa has been the continental leader in motor vehicle production, but that African dominance is under threat from Morocco. And fellow North African, Algeria, while still a small player, is starting to increase production.
Morocco produces more passenger vehicles than South Africa and is increasingly focusing on the electric vehicle (EV) sector. Earlier this week officials in Morocco said they plan to increase EV production by more than 50% this year, with a target of 107,000 EV vehicles produced by the end of 2025.
Morocco’s proximity to the EU market is a clear advantage, while South Africa faces a number of challenges including stricter EU emissions targets on traditional combustion vehicles, transport costs and often unstable infrastructure.
Back on track?
The number of people using South Africa’s trains is slowly recovering.
In March 2024, Statistics South Africa reported 4.7-million passenger journeys. A year later, that increased to 7.4-million. But this is nowhere near the highs of 2009, when there was an average of 52-million passenger journeys a month.
The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) said in March that 34 of its 40 commuter service lines are now running – up from just four in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The revival of the rail network is a critical step in restoring affordable public transport.
Money … must be funny
Who are the world’s richest people and what are they worth? Well, it’ll probably come as a surprise to no-one that the five richest people are tech bros who live in the United States, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
Number 1, as of close of business yesterday (5 June 2025), is Elon Musk (yes, he was born in South Africa, but he’s American now). His net worth was $368-billion. There are only two countries in Africa with economies bigger than that, South Africa (GDP $400-billion) and Egypt (GDP $383-billion).
The graphic below shows the net worth of the top-5 richest men compared with the five African countries with the biggest economies, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook for April 2025.
There are only three African countries ‘richer’ than Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. And four are richer than Bill Gates.
The net worth of the top 10 on yesterday’s billionaires index was $1.97-trillion, that’s more than the GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa region which was $1.88-trillion in 2024, according to IMF estimates.
Comrades 2025
For most of my childhood the Comrades marathon was a highlight of the year. My father and I used to get up early and spend the entire day glued to the TV watching thousands of people run the 90-odd kilometres.
I was still far too young to run the race myself when Piet Vorster won the 1979 ‘up’ run in a new record but I made my father take me to a local running shop to get Piet’s autograph when he appeared there shortly after.
In the 1979 race Vorster was followed by Johnny Halberstadt in second place and Bruce Fordyce in third.
Bruce Fordyce was a legend but it was Johnny Halberstadt who was my real hero. I would beg my parents drive me across town to his athletics shop on Louis Botha Avenue just in the hope that I could meet him. I did and he was all I’d hoped. The fact that he also famously turned down Springbok colours in 1979 to protest against the poor treatment of black runners like Matthews ‘Loop en Val’ Motshwarateu just reinforced my suspicion that Johnny was a good guy.
Despite my fascination with the race, I’ve never run it. Life got in the way. But based on the entry list I collected for this year’s Comrades Marathon, I still have a few years left to do this before I hit that rare but impressive 70+ age cohort of runners.
The chart above is based on the runners listed on the Comrades 2025 entry list. The final starting list may be slightly different from this but I present the data partly to encourage myself that being very much mid-life doesn’t mean the dream of running a Comrades Marathon has to be over.